taking care of each other
I wanted to take a moment to tell you why I'm teaching a class about grieving.
I'm not a therapist or a grief expert. I'm not even someone who's gone through exceedingly difficult periods of grief (which makes me very fortunate, I know.) But I feel very strongly about intentionally showing up for each other as we go through the joys & trials of life.
We need to take care of each other.
Life gets hard. And when it's hard, we need both emotional support and material support. We need help. We need pastoral care.
When I say “pastoral care,” I mean things like this: visiting folks in the hospital. Checking up on people after family members die. Stopping by to visit people who haven’t come around in a while. Making sure someone is helping the elderly to shovel snow or get groceries during a storm. Arranging meal trains after someone has a baby. These are simple acts of humans caring for each other.
Religious centers and various community spaces used to be the center of social and community life: the place for gathering, sharing food, celebrating life events, and taking care of one another.
These days, we don’t have as many community groups that are organizing care for its members. We are all suffering from the lack. I don’t need to describe to you the isolation that many people feel. It’s become old news at this point.
I think about pastoral care often.
Trust me, I wholly understand why people aren’t attending formal religious services. Many people have deep trauma from their religious upbringings. I’m not personally bemoaning low church attendance.
But I do bemoan the lack of pastoral care, because we need each other. We need to show up with support when folks around us are going through hard times. When community groups are organizing folks to do the caring, the caring happens more. It happens quickly, and support arrives when it’s needed.
We, as loving humans, need to be intentional about providing care for those around us.
It’s easy to think that someone else will do it, someone else will show up with encouragement or a meal or a loving note, but in our current society, that’s not the case. We need to step into the role of the loving community member who can offer support to those around us.
When I say “those around us,” I don’t mean random humans who live near you that you don’t know. I mean people who are already in your life: cousins, distant friends, close friends, people you know just well enough to know what’s going on in their lives.
I created “Herbs for Grieving & Sadness” to give you the tools to provide one specific type of care to those around you: support during grieving.
I realize that it can be hard to know what to do in tough situations. But we, as herbalists, have a unique set of truly helpful tools (tools that are also delicious, lovely, and fragrant).
I created this class to help you put together your own tool kit to show up for people you love when they're going through hard times.
If you want to learn just what to do when someone you love is sad, here are two options:
Get "Herbs for Grieving" as a standalone class
P.S. This is one of the best books I've read about how to grieve -- and how to grieving friends. John has been listening to Anderson Cooper's grief podcast and keeps telling me I'd love it.
