Legacies of Love™ Pet Loss Workshop

A Workshop of gentle healing for those
who have lost their animal loved ones

Grief is indifferent to the species lost™

CONTENT AND PURPOSE

The overall objective of this pet loss workshop is to help heal the heart and use the crisis of loss to grow. For some of us, losing an animal means losing a family member. The hole it can leave in our emotional hearts and our physical lives can feel harsh and devastating. We all need comfort and support to journey through such loss. This facilitated group process gently and lovingly provides participants with an opportunity to express their grief, understand their grief, and explore many strategies to heal their grief hands-on, with ample opportunity for active discussion and sharing.

In this pet loss workshop of healing, tribute, and celebration of your animals there is an opportunity to:

• Honor your animals by sharing their stories, their photos and the story of your love. Share the fullness and truth of your love of animals and your experience of loss in the comforting and presence of others who understand
• Feel relief from sorrow and suffering
• Embrace the lessons emerging from the loss itself
• Learn practical grief recovery skills
• Explore the legacies that transcend physical death — the mutual gifts and lessons of the relationship — and ways to integrate them into your way of being. This is perhaps the finest tribute we can make to our animal loved ones.

Specific content of this pet loss workshop includes:

• INTRODUCTION Telling our Stories in pictures and words
• UNDERSTANDING GRIEF
  • Why Animal Loss is Different
  • Pictures of the Heart
  • Choices to Deny, Cope or Heal
  • Complicated Grief
  • Factors Influencing Grief
• HEALING GRIEF:
  1. COPING & COMFORT: Taking Supportive Action In Honor of Yourself
     Surviving the Present — Self in relation to being in loss
     You are just as important as the one who has died.
     You do not dishonor another, or another's memory, by honoring yourself.
     • Self Assessment
     • Flower Essences for Grief
     • Feeling and Expressing our Deepest Feelings: Coping
     • Transforming Feelings: Healing
     • Sensory Rejuvenation Exercise
  2. LOOKING BACK: Completing the Emotional Relationship with the Truth
     Healing the Past — Self in relation to the beloved you have lost
     The physical relationship is completed. The spiritual one continues forever.
     The emotional relationship must be completed for you to heal and move on.
     • What is still unfinished or unexpressed for me?
     • What is the energy of anger, grief, guilt, and gratitude?
     • What is needed to heal these states?
     • Loss History Graph
     • Defining Anger and Guilt; Processing Anger and Guilt
  3. MOVING ON: Transforming Grief into Growth
     Choosing Growth for the Future — Self in the world without one who has died
     The mutual gifts and lessons learned in a relationship
     are what allow us to leave it with meaning.
     These are our priceless legacies.
     • Letting go of roles, not the relationship or the gifts
     • The Circle of Love: gifts received and gifts given
     • The Story of Soho: What have I lost? What do I still have? What am I creating?
     • How do I integrate the legacies of love into my my life, into my way of being?

More Workshop Photos

Personal Note from Teresa:

When I experienced my first loss of an animal loved one as an adult, it felt like the end of the world. And it was in a way—the end of my world as I knew it with him in it. I loved this cat profoundly, and felt a love from him like no other love I had ever experienced with a human or an animal. And I had never before felt such searing pain as I did when he died. I was shattered by my grief and I didn't have any paradigms or theories to understand it. Even being trained as a therapist, there was very little written or voiced in 1985 about the unique grief of losing beloved animals.

On the contrary, what did exist spoke condescendingly of pet loss as practice for the "real thing of losing a human," treating it very clearly as a not-as-important loss. Reading this, and noticing how others around me saw me as odd for loving and grieving so deeply for an animal, I began to think something must be wrong with me. After a time, however, I got impatient with the prevailing narrow and prejudicial view of the human-animal relationship, and returned to the truth and wisdom of my own soul: that the love between this cat and myself was real, that my grief was real, and that both were as legitimate as human-human love and grief.

After finding my way through the pain of this loss and learning some powerful spiritual lessons in the process, I wanted to offer help to others who also might feel alienated and in pain from the loss of their animals. So I studied with legends Kubler Ross, Stephen Levine, John James of the Grief Recovery Institute and others and integrated this work into the learnings of my own heart about the uniqueness of losing animals who are family members. Beginning in 1987 I offered pet loss support groups and workshops, and later created the Legacies of Love audio book, the pet loss memorial candle and free web site sections on pet loss - Comfort & Support in Your Time of Grief and Supporting Others Who Grieve. Since then I've worked with thousands of grievers in bereavement support groups, workshops, in individual counseling and in my animal communication practice. If you have lost an animal loved one, I hope you may find comfort and support from these resources and I invite you to join me for this upcoming teleclass.

To all of you who have ever lost a beloved animal , may your heart be filled and uplifted by the love you created together—which never ends. May you be at peace.

Read more about Teresa