"Comforting and quite touching. I felt oddly close to my own dead parents as I read along."

Autorentext

Theresa Caputo

Klappentext

New York Times bestselling author Theresa Caputo, star of Long Island Medium and Raising Spirits provides a guide to overcoming grief, filled with inspiring lessons from Spirit and astonishing stories from the clients who have been empowered and healed by her spiritual readings.

After more than a decade of being a practicing medium, Theresa Caputo shares the powerful lessons she has learned about grief, healing, and finding happiness in the wake of tragedy. In almost every reading she gives, Spirit insists that people begin to embrace their lives again. But not everyone knows where to start, and putting back together the pieces of a life marked by loss is never easy. Sometimes, you need spiritual guidance—and that’s where Theresa comes in.

With her energetic, positive, and encouraging tone, Theresa uses the lessons from Spirit to guide you through grief toward a place of solace and healing. Each lesson is grounded in her clients’ experiences of losing loved ones, their encounters with Spirit during readings, and the ways in which they’ve been able to heal and grow.

Each chapter is filled with activities to help you find your “new normal”—including journaling, individual and group exercises, meditations, and moments of reflection—based on the truths that Theresa has gathered from Spirit. Good Grief—“an excellent resource for those who wish to be in communication with deceased loved ones” (Library Journal)—will help you to feel stronger and more optimistic about what the future has in store for you.

Leseprobe
Good Grief

1

Learning from the Best

You know that famous book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? It’s about simple yet life-changing advice that the author remembers from his childhood, like “don’t hit people,” “share everything,” and of course, “flush.” I mention the book here because its premise reminds me of how I’ve come to deliver simple yet life-changing messages to my clients—except all I really need to know I learned from channeling God and your loved ones’ souls! They’re the most amazing teachers and have taught me so much about grief that can help you embrace life after a loved one passes.

I feel it’s important to credit God and Spirit right off the bat, because it helps explain why I say and recommend what I do. I’m not a therapist or bereavement counselor, and there’s probably some etiquette about handling grief that I’ve never been taught. As a medium, however, my duty is to tell you what Spirit feels will help you carry on without your late aunt, child, or spouse, and this can be very different from what a trained grief counselor might suggest. For example, Spirit needs you to know there’s more to life than what’s here in the physical world, and that your loved ones are still with you, just in a different way. Now, that’s not something most books about grief would drive home, fair enough? Yet this and other guiding principles from Spirit are what truly help my clients repair and rebuild their lives.

And while Spirit and I have helped bring hundreds of thousands of clients peace during their grief process, I don’t have a ton of heavy, personal experience with this topic in my own life. It’s kind of crazy—the first time I lost a close loved one was when my Nanny Brigandi passed away; I was sixteen years old at the time, and then seven years later, her husband, my Pop, died. It was really hard to lose my father’s parents. But after that, life gave me a major sabbatical from grief. For almost twenty years I didn’t experience a death-related heartache again. What did happen, however, was that I accepted and honed my ability to communicate with all kinds of souls in Heaven, including God, angels, spirit guides, and your departed loved ones who’ve taught me everything I know. In other words, I learned about healing through the universe’s lens, not my own. I was never distracted by my own drama and was forced to stay focused on Spirit’s messages. Having nearly two decades of constant, objective, spiritual training was part of God’s plan for me—and clearly for you too.

Getting the Gist of Grief

Since the beginning of my career, I’ve channeled a theme that runs throughout all of Spirit’s messages: “You will grieve your loss for the rest of your life, but healing is something different.” What Spirit means here is that you must find ways for your grief and healing to coexist, because no matter how a person dies, you will always have to live without someone you love and that sucks. I think one of the scariest things about death is that it introduces you to ugly emotions you’ve never felt before—devastation, jealousy, fear, betrayal, abandonment—and they hit you like a ton of bricks. To experience a death that’s so close to you might even force you to confront your own mortality for the first time. Grief is especially hard because it’s not every day that a situation demands you walk the line between feeling your heaviest feelings so you can heal and trying to protect yourself from getting stuck in a negative place. So instead of doing what’s best from the start—processing the loss, honoring your loved one, and carrying on in a positive way—you may end up on a dark and twisted path even when you crave light, direction, and calm.

What I love about Spirit’s guidance is that their goal is to help heal your soul. From there, they say, everything else will fall into place. For soulful healing to occur, you must realize that your loved ones give you permission to feel the pain, but also ask that you learn and grow from it. They explain that God and your loved ones want you to be happy. As you begin to internalize this, you see the importance of loving yourself and others, functioning with a positive outlook, and staying busy at a pace that feels good. This makes it easier to appreciate the signs your loved ones send and value the rapport you still share, since you trust that the soul bond is never broken. Having an ongoing relationship with the departed then makes it easier to value the living. You increasingly feel supported by souls on this plane and on the Other Side as you figure out your new normal. Grief gradually begins to define less of your day, because while death can be a painful reality for the living, you realize that your loved ones are at peace and their passing was never meant to stop your journey outright. You shed anger and practice forgiveness, and eventually you are able to appreciate the universe’s big picture: that everyone’s soul is created from God’s perfect love, and our purpose is to use that love to enrich your life and that of others.

At first, healing is about surviving heartache; in time, it’s about feeling joy despite it.

Listen, I’m not saying that any of this is easy. In fact, Spirit says healing from grief is one of the hardest obstacles we face on earth, but it’s important work that we must all do in this lifetime. Try as you might, nobody escapes this lesson—grief transcends cultures, social classes, education, genetics, and more—because navigating grief is essential to maturing every one of our souls. We gain new understanding, acceptance, compassion, and a better ability to communicate with the Other Side when we grieve. We are here on earth to learn and grow, and unfortunately grief is a means to that end. It is a rite of passage for the soul.

Practicing What I P…