“Face down on the floor in a ladies loo might seem an unlikely place for personal transformation, but that’s where mine began,” Donna Lancaster reveals in her new e book, The Bridge.
Lancaster, a former social employee, has been working with individuals for greater than 30 years to assist them stay their most genuine lives. Her new e book relies on her retreat of the identical title, and presents “a nine-step crossing into authentic and wholehearted living”.
I used to be one of many fortunate 12 to attend the last-ever Bridge Retreat, which at its core was a radical six-day private growth expertise run by Donna and fellow therapist Gabi Krueger. Previous attendees included journalist Bryony Gordon and singer Jordan Stephens, the latter of whom credit the retreat with saving his life.
Despite the retreat being held on Zoom – it was in the course of the pandemic, in spite of everything – my expertise of it was nonetheless utterly transformational. It fast-tracked me onto a journey of therapeutic my queue of heartbreaks, beginning with grieving the ache of being given up as a child for adoption. Grief and heartbreak was labored by with letter writing, being witnessed, and ritual and physique work.
Those six days utterly modified the way in which I see the world and set me on a path to select up that wounded baby and carry her with me as I started to work by the subsequent 30 years of my story.
Two years on and Lancaster’s retreats have moved to a shorter format like her “online gym for the soul” Deepening Into Life, or her two day workshop referred to as The Grief Space.
“Essentially, ‘The Bridge’ is a metaphor for this idea of moving across from the negative past to a future of our own choosing,” Lancaster tells The Independent.
The e book has been endorsed by the likes of Fearne Cotton and Thandiwe Newton, the latter who says one in every of her “…biggest regrets is that I didn’t traverse The Bridge Retreat before the pandemic. At least God in her wisdom divined this book”.
Lancaster continues: “This book is for anybody who is curious about their past, about how their past impacts their present, anybody who is curious about embarking on a healing journey and anybody that is ready to live a life that is deeper than the shallows that we are sold.
“You don’t have to burn your bridges, you don’t have to leave your past behind but you do have to make your peace with it so you can live unencumbered by what I call the ‘ghosts of Christmas past’, which is all those negative aspects from your history still holding you back.”
The 9 steps outlined within the e book embrace how and why we get damage, how we tackle masks and roles, how grief and loss are important elements of the human situation and the therapeutic energy of an apology. It strikes on to true self-love, growing resilience, returning to pleasure and marvel earlier than wholehearted dwelling and methods to deepen into life.
Throughout, Lancaster generously shares her personal story, from rising up with an alcoholic abusive father to her personal melancholy, and presents sensible suggestions, workout routines, reflections, rituals and poems to assist individuals transfer from a life dictated by previous challenges and struggles, to 1 the place we are able to use the wealthy presents of our life expertise to stay authentically.
Lancaster says that some questions that will come up for readers embrace: “Where in my life am I still hurting? Where in my life am I still facing repetitive negative patterns?” She provides: “It’s about being willing to ask those challenging really difficult questions and how it relates to my past. And then it’s about making a map of our losses and heartbreaks and asking questions like where does this hurt live in my body?”
This, Lancaster says, is when readers of The Bridge will “really start to see how you’ve been shaped by your history”.
“It’s about remembering how I felt when I was four and my dad left, as an example. Then letting myself feel that in my body because grieving is an embodied process. Have I suffered enough with this old way of living to really do the necessary inner work so that I can cross the bridge to a new way of being in the world?” she explains.
Lancaster says that she hopes readers will take consolation and hope from The Bridge. “I hope it supports them to believe that healing is possible and necessary for all of us and I hope that people realise that healing is for the collective.”
The 4 most typical misconceptions of grief, in response to Donna Lancaster
Grief is just to do with loss of life and bereavement
“People associate grief, which is a natural emotional reaction to any kind of loss, only with death and bereavement. When I say I do grief work, people think I’m a bereavement counsellor. In fact if I’m honest, bereavement is the least grief experience that I have, my experience of grief is much more broader as part of the human condition, which includes bereavement but mainly focuses on grieving the lost parts of ourselves.
“The misconception is that grief is only about death, whereas grief and grieving are about so much more than that. The truth is that grieving is actually more about life than death in many ways because the process of grieving brings us back to being fully alive.”
Grief is expounded to large tragedies
“People associate grief as only about massive tragedy so you can only be grieving, you can only be feeling so-called negative or deeper emotions – sadness, anger, fear etc about big events and that’s not true.
“You can grieve, as my grandson teaches me every day, for example he cried at the death of a bee and that’s so beautiful to be so innocent and wholehearted - and with the bridge we are getting back to that innocent joy and wonder. To be able to grieve and not be embarrassed that you cry at the loss of a bee, because how amazing is that? How wholehearted is that?
“It doesn’t have to be massive tragedies; you can just feel ‘everyday’ grief as part of the richness of the human experience.”
Grief is a person expertise
“There’s individual and collective grief and a lot of people don’t know about that. They have a misconception that it’s just about the individual, but we all feel collective grief. Like the war in the Ukraine, we feel it, we are carrying it on our backs and in our hearts, of course not as intensely as those people that are going through it but we carry some of their pain make no mistake.”
Grief is the worth you pay for love
“Grief is love; if you love something or someone, including yourself, then we need to grieve the loss of those parts of ourselves, we need to grieve the people we lose through ends of relationships, or through ends of friendships, through ends of life, whatever that might be and allow space for that.
“I always say grief is love bleeding, it can be the painful dimension to love for sure but we can’t have the beauty and the bliss of love without the pain and the heartache of it too - that’s all wrapped up in it, so grief is not the price you pay for love, it is love.”
The Bridge: A 9 step crossing into genuine and wholehearted dwelling by Donna Lancaster is printed by Penguin on Thursday, 7 July 2022 (Penguin Life: £16.99). Find out extra about Donna Lancaster through Instagram and her web site Deepening Into Life.
Source: www.impartial.co.uk