Life Transition Support 

Major turning points in life can precipitate the need to achieve a new goal or attend to one that has been neglected in the course of routine. That ambition sometimes takes the shape of a written product: memoir, family history, travel chronicle. Other times it takes the form of documents required to meet an objective: graduate school applications, new business documents or website, an updated resume, cover letters or essay.

Many people who have sought the writing support of TEALarbor stories are facing such a life transition. Sometimes clients' search for help with a writing task is the catalyst that helps them face the very real emotional and spiritual challenges associated with life passages. Sometimes clients want short-term support while they traverse the journey of grief after a significant loss (e.g., death of a beloved human or animal, retirement, job layoff, divorce, geographic relocation, chronic or dire illness). Often transitions bring up “old stuff” – those life lessons through which we tend to cycle when things get difficult.

Whatever the specifics and cause of the transition, these significant changes can be potent opportunities to explore renewed meaning, purpose and direction in life.

TEALarbor stories offers guidance for coping with significant change, grief, or loss through:

• deep listening and storying
• reprioritizing life tasks
• engaging writing practices
• exploring creative and nature-based forms for insight

Through my work at TEALarbor stories I emphasize the transformative power of moving through the dark shadows of transition (rather than bypassing them); honoring the changes that arise in this liminal landscape; and claiming the intention of restoration to wholeness, vitality and presence.

The people who come to me seeking such life transition support often report back later that they have learned how to thrive again. By working with multidisciplinary practices that support the emotional and spiritual wellbeing of one’s significant change, the logistics and details of actually living life in its new form fall into place; what results is an experience of peace.

The time that clients and I share as we engage the process of their life transition is not therapy, but it is therapeutic. I have over twenty years of experience working with grief and loss in hospice, crisis clinics, in the recovery community, with communities in strife abroad, in wilderness work, and in professional ecological pursuits amidst losses associated with global climate change. Bringing a compassionate spirit and my personal experience with transformative journeys, I offer life transition support clients a breadth of insights.