Practicing What We Preach

How my own experience of grief shaped the way I accompany others through theirs

Photo credit: Hazel Volk

Before I began accompanying others through grief, I spent years exploring what it means to support people through difficult times.

My master’s research focused on practitioner process in wilderness therapy. Together with my colleagues, I explored the question: what does it mean to thrive in our work and lives? The title of my thesis emerged from that inquiry: Practicing What We Preach.

At the time, I was interested in what allows people doing demanding, relational work to sustain themselves—what helps us continue showing up, not only in our work, but in our lives.

I was completing my master’s degree while working what I would have called my dream job. I spent my days outside, supporting young people through challenging experiences, and doing work that felt deeply aligned with who I was and how I wanted to contribute in the world. I didn’t know that I would soon be asked to explore those questions through my own life.

Shortly after defending my thesis, I rode my bicycle to Mexico.

That journey changed something in me. When I returned, I knew I was entering a significant period of transformation. Something had shifted, and I was being called into something profoundly different, even though I had no idea what that would become.

The challenge was that the life I was returning to was one I loved. The work mattered. The people mattered. My identity as a wilderness therapy practitioner had been built over years and was connected to something real and meaningful.

And yet, I was no longer the same person who had left. Returning to that work became increasingly difficult. Eventually, my body brought me to a complete stop.

I burned out.

I couldn’t work. I couldn’t function in the ways I had before. Some days I could hardly get out of bed. The identity I had built my life around was suddenly unavailable to me, and without it, I didn’t know who I was anymore.

I entered into a deep depression. A dark night of the soul.

At the time, I understood that something significant was happening. I had been actively exploring rites of passage and initiation for many years. I had participated in programs, including a solo quest, that gave me a framework for understanding the threshold I was moving through. But knowing I was in an initiation did not mean I could move through it alone.

I was never a stranger to big feelings. I have always felt things deeply. But this was a different kind of grief. I was grieving a life that had been meaningful to me: work I loved, a community I belonged to, an identity that had shaped me, and the future I thought I was moving toward.

During that time, I was living on a small inlet. Many days, I would walk down to the water and sit. Sometimes I would climb into the little dinghy and row across the small body of water into the tidal estuary beyond. It was a quiet, almost eerie place. The landscape felt wild and still. And yet, it was one of the places where I felt safest.

There was something about being on the water that changed my relationship with what I was experiencing. The grief that felt so overwhelming in other moments seemed to soften. It was as though it could gently move with the water, shifting and flowing rather than filling every part of me.

I didn’t have to figure it out. I didn’t have to find my way through it. I could simply be with it. The water gave my grief somewhere to move.

But I was still carrying so much alone.

Eventually, I reached out to my mentor. I didn’t have a clear request or a solution I was looking for. I just knew I was struggling and didn’t know where else to turn. The subject line of my email was: Sacred Grief.

Those words felt important to me because I already knew that what I was experiencing was grief. I wasn’t trying to get rid of it or find a way around it. I knew there was something important about allowing myself to be with it. What I didn’t have was the support to move through such an intense and disorienting time.

In his response, he shared a link to a website called Sacred Grief.

That email became the beginning of a new chapter. It brought me to Shauna Janz, who became my grief companion during this season of my life. What Shauna offered me was not a way out of grief. She did not fix what had fallen apart or give me a way to bypass the uncertainty I was living through.

She walked beside me.

During a time when I felt like I was drowning, she created a container strong enough that I could stay with what I was experiencing without being consumed by it. Having someone alongside me became a lifeline.

Through that relationship, I experienced something I had spent years studying and exploring from the perspective of a practitioner: the importance of accompaniment.

When I came through my own process, I knew how important that kind of support was. Not because grief disappeared, but because I had experienced the difference it made to not meet it alone.

That experience became one of the roots of my grief work.

The work I now offer began in a time when I was the one who needed to be accompanied. I know what it feels like to lose a life you loved, to stand at the edge of uncertainty, and to need someone beside you as you find your way through.

My own experience of grief changed the way I understand this work. I came to understand that grief is not something we move through by finding the right answers or returning to who we were before. Sometimes, what we need most is someone who can sit beside us while we find our way.

I know the difference that makes because I have lived it.

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If you’re navigating a significant transition or carrying grief that needs tending, I’d be honoured to walk alongside you. Learn more →  1:1 Grief Support.