Hello! I’m Michaela, a writer, grief tending facilitator, wife and mother of four children. Life makes sense in the garden, so on a good day, my fingers are covered in dirt and I’ve collected things to hang and dry in a dark corner.
My writing has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, The Good Life Review, InHabit Magazine, Five Minutes and elsewhere.
For more information about working with Michaela in grief tending and mentorship, please email or visit her website Tender Realm.
Grief turned me into a common mystic. Someone who sees the world and senses the sacredness of our rich emotional climates and moving environments.
I believe in the importance of tending the temple of our lives. To see beyond ourselves and look toward a Creator who cultivates our inner worlds.
Often life can feel mundane, but each day, there’s a moment, however small, to behold: beauty, grief, awe, sacredness. I love noticing these moments, leaning into the sensorial experiences all around us.
If you came over, and the house was still, I’d make you a cup of tea, and while the kettle is blowing raspberries, I’d probably light a candle just to mark this gathering. You may ask what that rich, ancient smell is wafting from the windowsill. In my books, a well scented house is a sacred thing.
My home is my sanctuary, and I’m on a path to finding that same sanctuary inside myself, where my humanity meets the Divine. The God of all seasons and sounds, from keening to clapping is always surprising me.
I’ve been in companionship with grief for over two decades now.
First in my own body when I needed a massive spinal fusion. This left me with chronic pain and a fear that I was not immune to suffering. I had to stop dancing as my body healed, and from then on, was unable to practice anything high impact.
Years later as a new, young mother, I was swept away by anticipatory grief after a terminal diagnosis of Spinal Muscular Atrophy type 1 for our baby, Florence Marigold. Grief greeted me at every hospital admission, when she suffered, when she lost her abilities, when others seemed to treat the diagnosis as a disability not a progressive disease that would kill her, when people spiritually bypassed the diagnosis and grief, when clinicians failed to properly handle the conversations and left me traumatized. And when I myself siphoned off small sips of the pain in order to survive. It all felt like too much. And it was. It was costly and has taken me over a decade to unravel it all.
Following her peaceful death at three years of age, I came to know acute grief, which I was not prepared for even after knowing anticipatory grief so well. They are not the same. I struggled to tend to my grief after having three other children. This is what mother’s do, I thought. They count their blessings and seek the good, even as I trembled under the weight of postpartum anxiety. It felt like life was moving too fast to go backwards. The grief I had attended to through writing, bereavement support and weeping, was just skimming the surface. The buried grief remained hidden, waiting for a moment when I finally felt like I’d caught my breath. It manifested somatically, as anxiety, sudden bursts of anger, and disassociation.
I spent over four years lovingly tending to my grief with a companion. It was deep, scary at times and consistent work (truly physical work) and it moved me and rewired me. I found conscious dance and that became the balm that sealed the open wounds. Psychedelic assisted therapy was monumental is moving the marker for me.
I’m deeply moved that I get to stand here and look back, knowing in my bones that I have metabolized so many of the stories and painful memories that were lodged inside of me for many years. I don’t wrestle with acute or unprocessed grief anymore, but grief is a lens that colours the way I see the world. I hope to share this view with you as a source of encouragement and nourishment, causing you to pause, slow down and lean into the depths.
What you can expect from Tender Realm:
reflections on grief, motherhood, pain and salves, learning from the natural world
sensorial guidance through the seasons
small ways to incorporate rituals into our lives so we remember the potency of this precious life
I invite you and your precious time to come along with me.
Michaela
xx
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