My journey to here
I am a writer, teacher, chaplain, and grief tender.
When I retired from my 35-year career as a nonprofit professional, I knew exactly what I wanted to do next. I wanted to support people who were grieving. That’s why I founded Sweet Spot Soul Care.
Over the years of my work helping families in crisis tell their stories of meeting life’s hardest challenges, I felt honored. They showed me that those who meet grief are the wise among us. Yet, witnessing such suffering and loss left me broken-hearted. I didn’t know how to grieve—or that I needed to. Long before that, my childhood experiences of loss, change, and disappointment also went unmet and ungrieved. Unfortunately, none of this is unusual or special.
That’s because we live in a culture that denies death and devalues grief, illness, and difference. I am dedicated to welcoming and valuing grief as a natural gateway to personal growth, connection, and belonging.
I’m lucky that my inner wisdom saved me. Since I was 12, I have kept a journal daily. Through the years, my writing helped me understand what happened. I became my own witness by writing my story—revising until I found clarity and freedom. (A lot of therapy helped, too!) More recently, I started quilting, returning to a love of fiber art I knew as a teenager.
I am dedicated to helping people meet their grief as a normal part of human life and discover its gifts of connection and transformation. I believe when we slow down, our mammal bodies, our creative curiosity, and our inner wisdom can show us the way to wholeness.
I am a graduate of the Upaya Buddhist Chaplaincy program in Santa Fe, with training in interfaith spiritual care, being with dying, and bearing witness. I have also studied with Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. For a decade I led weekend meditation and writing retreats and have co-led community grief rituals. A longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, I am also a trained yoga teacher. I am humbly on a life-long journey of unlearning racism. Currently, my main creative practices are quilt-making, fiber art, and community singing—and writing.
I am passionate about helping people slow down to feel their grief, create tiny beautiful things, and love this planet as themselves.
About Sweet Spot Soul Care
We all know the “sweet spot.”
In sports it’s when the racquet or bat meets the ball just so. In life, it’s when you feel connected, in the right place at the right time, and able to just be yourself.
I created Sweet Spot Soul Care because sometimes we need help finding the “sweet spot” of our grief. Here’s a fact: the human brain keeps us safe by quickly determining if things we encounter are “good” or “bad.” That’s why we grab hold of good feelings and avoid pain.
Yet, the pain of loss requires our attention. When we avoid experiencing our grief, we tend to numb out with work, disordered eating, alcohol consumption, or media.
The thing is, when we numb out grief—we numb out joy.
In the “sweet spot” of grief, all of our emotions—sadness, anger, confusion and joy—are welcome. And that feels, well, really, really sweet.
I would like to acknowledge
My teachers: Flint Sparks, Peg Syverson, Joan Halifax, Frank Ostaseski, and Francis Weller.
I also acknowledge that I live and work on the Indigenous lands of Turtle Island, the ancestral name for what now is called North America. More specifically, I acknowledge the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and all Indigenous People who have been and are part of the land now called Austin and Central Texas.