CallingHours

Alachua County cuts ribbon after former Gainesville motels converted into permanent supportive housing. See link below ⬇️

📸 Alan Youngblood/Gainesville Sun

Nicole Kidman just did something unexpected: she stepped into the death doula conversation.

Now the spotlight is shifting to a role many families didn’t even know existed, but increasingly want.

This isn’t celebrity trivia. It’s a signal.

The public is getting more comfortable talking about death. The question is whether funeral professionals are keeping up.

One of the most critical aspects of my work is that I reveal the unvarnished truth, and I do so because, despite what people may think of me, I regard the sacred space of witnessing people as a profoundly important part of peer-led healing.

Over the course of my life, I have been a confident to remarkable amount of people and it is a very special role that I have always enjoyed and done. It also comes with a lot of responsibility because sometimes it means I become a messenger and the messenger usually get shot (metaphorically speaking.)

I found myself at North Florida last year doing a peer support group  program that I definitely had some very important takeaways, which is here, but there is counseling or incredibly important sometimes even more important than people with licenses. Does that mean there’s no responsibility it just means whoa I’ve seen some really  dehumanizing practices, which really could use a major education in grief and in trauma

It became very clear to me that peer support needs to be more nuanced; it was barely a peer support group,  there are certainly rules that need to be an honored, but I’m I felt like we had to sneak to talk to each other honestly that we were so overly rotten handled that it was really constrictive and prevented people from certain levels of embodiment. 

I frequently receive frustration from people who want to protect old systems and also I advocate to you, this isn’t for you if you’d like the old system.  It’s all yours all the messiness of Freud and Stanford experiments and dark history of soft sciences pretending imperialism, I mean empirical doctrine. Kisses 😘