Heather Stang

Honored to present Mindfulness & Grief: Innovative Tools for Living with Death & Non-Death Loss at the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) Annual Conference, March 2026.

Grief touches every part of our lives: body, mind, relationships, and meaning.

In this session, I shared my 8-step mindfulness-based framework designed to help clinicians support clients in:

• regulating intense emotional and physical responses
• navigating both death and non-death losses
• maintaining continuing bonds
• and making meaning without minimizing pain

This work integrates mindfulness, movement, journaling, and contemporary grief theory to offer:

➡️ structure without rigidity
➡️ compassion without fixing
➡️ practical tools clients can use right away

We also explored something essential to this work:
Before clients can regulate, they co-regulate with us.

Grateful to be part of a community committed to thoughtful, ethical, and compassionate grief care.

Tossed in some local Baltimore music as the background track here, because music heals.

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I want to share something that fills me with joy: I’ve been honored with the 2025 Clinical Practice Award from ADEC, the professional organization that’s been my home for over a decade.

This award recognizes innovation in grief support—but truly, this work has always come from lived experience. My own, and yours. Everything I offer has been shaped by the real, raw moments we’ve all faced. We are equally human in this space, and I’ve learned just as much from you as you have from me—if not more.

Your honesty, your grief, your resilience, and your willingness to show up have been my greatest teachers. Thank you for letting me walk beside you.

And I’m also deeply grateful to the visionaries in this field—mentors like Dr. Darcy Harris, Dr. Robert Neimeyer, Dr. Ken Doka, and Dr. William Worden—who helped me merge our lived experience with practical, evidence-based wisdom. They’ve helped me believe that connection is the work.

Thank you for letting me share this moment with you. You are an integral part of this journey, and always will be.

Spoke to an incredible group of elder law attorneys today at the PAELA Winter Conference, and I’m so grateful for the conversations that followed. So many attendees shared how my talk was helpful not just for their clients, but for their own lives, too.

Elder law is absolutely a grief-adjacent profession. These attorneys are in the trenches, helping families navigate end-of-life planning, loss, and all the complexities that come with it. It was an honor to offer insights rooted in thanatology and self-care—because supporting others through grief doesn’t mean ignoring your own.

Thank you, PAELA, for welcoming me into this space! Let’s keep the conversation going.