Coaching For An Extraordinary Life!
Sight is everything. What am I supposed to do now is always the question. Why did this happen? Widowhood forever? Why is grief a disease needing to be cured rather than processed? Soothing grief with habitual sex? How do we pause the busyness of the death business to heal? Daily we’re met with perspectives? What will you choose? Cracked Perspectives: The Truth About Sight…..coming July 2014. Pre-order begins June 2014
Last night, December 5, we held the last Seasons of Grief Seminar for 2013! What an awesome time we had in Fayetteville, Georgia. One thing that I have discovered about doing this work, is that no matter what the loss category is, no loss is the same and people decide to handle their loss differently.
It is amazing to know that the common thread among humanity is the love that we hold in our hearts towards the ones we love and the power we have within us to learn how to move forward with the our loved ones in our hearts forever.
Special thanks to Mrs. Christeen Snell, the Director of the Fayette County Public Library in Fayetteville, Georgia and her awesome staff for welcoming me in with open arms and ensuring with excellence that the audio equipment and facilities were accommodating to our guests. We certainly appreciate everything you have done.
My arms wrap ten times around the attendees at last night’s Part II Seminar called :The Art of Grief. After providing an overview of the stages and steps of grief, I lead the group through an understanding for what art therapy is and why it is used as a form of expression: spontaneous and experiential. There is no mistake in the art of expression and I was amazed at the outcome.
The evening told stories of:
No matter what the stories are, they are all powerful in nature and showed us the power of unconditional love. I was so honored to have been in the room and listen to the countless stories of love, pain, loss, and the hope for a brighter future after having been equipped with the protective space to voice their feelings, pain, love, and loss.
Check out the highlights:
To respect the privacy of the attendees, this picture features a picture of a giraffe indicating the blanket that their twin son used to have with him in the NIC-Unit at the hospital before he died. What an awesome remembrance. In addition, the red object is the sun, which is an indicator of hope. What an amazing expression.
Two attendees chose to capture two forms of expression: written and visual. The picture on the left was done to remember her mother who recently passed. It was great to see how she cherished the memory of her mother by creating a beautiful drawing for her. The words on the right provide an awesome and powerful expression of the conversation that the participant wanted to hold with her deceased brother-in -law. She never got to say goodbye so to be given an opportunity to provide communication to express herself was amazing.
Words to your child are powerful and this was an example of a mother’s communication with her child and establishing acceptance with his passing.
Saying goodbye to a good friend is never easy. This participant decided to make a Christmas bell to ring in the promise for a season of healing after understanding how to process her grief.
His father worked for a phone company and taking the time to express himself was done with the memory of his father’s memories of working where he loved. Each initial represents a state he worked in. Such as beautiful expression.
I am grateful for the opportunity to conduct the Seasons of Grief Seminar in Fayetteville, Georgia and to work with an awesome group of people. To read the highlights from our first Seasons of Grief Seminar Part I on Learning to Relax, Relate, and Release After Loss click here.
People are not born broken but something in their life set the framework for the perspective they currently have.
For many years, I felt a huge tug in my heart concerning the “orphan spirit”. For a long while, I would ask God to enlighten me and give me wisdom on the topic. One day, I remember God vividly sharing with me that the orphan spirit was a spirit, much like any demonic stronghold that we faced in life that needed to be understood and deliverance received from it.
The orphan spirit, although may generally be associated with the demonic strongholds, is also the result of being isolated from the security that you once had in people, places, or things. Connectivity and relationships are the staples of our human existence and once those things have been compromised, it is essential for the removal of security and trust to dissipate and the onset of insecurity and inferiority to increase.
It may be that you, like me, had experienced the death of both parents and relied on them for everything. Once their voice ceased, a search into the streets and religion developed into a hunger for belonging and association with someone or something that could make you feel equal to the feeling that you’d once experienced with your parents.
You may have been at a company for years and worked your way to the top, only to be demoted and given a pink slip before you could even bow to say your grace at your desk while consuming your breakfast sandwich in between calls. You may have a hallow void inside because you have given your all and your all was stolen in a matter of minutes and the sum total of your efforts and contributions to your company were stuffed into a cardboard box.
The orphan spirit is rampant in the Earth because we are in the end-times where the knowledge of God’s love is intensely being shared and rejected by many. People are exhausted and often unwilling to try God because they have been hurt by the religious rules and regulations that reduce people to a parking space or a pew warmer rather than a beloved child of God, longed- wanted- and pursued by him.
The abandonment experienced by a parent, relationship that was built on love, marriage, friendship, job, or home can hurt you to your core; yet at the core of many to ease the healing is not God but their own sense of expectation. As a result, when the people or things that we would think should take care of us cease, this causes our hearts to become hardened and we shut down and become one with the orphan spirit, promoting the agenda of the forsaking of the assembly to protect one’s self.
You and I both know that God loves us way more than that to keep us in that miserable state of non-touch and non-fellowship. He loves us and Daddy God wants us to understand the pursuit that He has and is consistently on for those He loves.
The ministry of the Holy Spirit is running rampant in the land to bring us back into the Sonship as sons and daughters of God who are on fire for God and willing to receive the lofty inheritance that He has given us as His children.
In a world longing for a place where adults are longing to return back to the womb and children racing to age themselves to the grave due to consistent patterns of hurt, abuse, and neglect, it is high time that we come back to the embrace of Daddy God.
The orphan spirit must be broken from the root where pain and hurt reside. Romans 8:15 says that we did not receive the spirit of slavery and bondage but one of sonship and adoption where we can cry out to Abba Father, our Daddy God and He will rescue us and take us to a safe place in His arms.
Danita Ogandaga, MSW 