Book Review: Grief 2 Growth

By Joanna BartlettJanuary 13, 2020January 13, 2020 Grief recovery book review, books, grief, healing from loss

Grief is a tricky beast. We all grieve, it’s one of the realities of life. We all weather emotional wounds. Yet we’re not very good at sitting with our grief and loss or working through it. Grief 2 Growth by Brian D. Smith is a short, practical, compassionate book on grief and how it can…

8 signs you’re not actually over your last relationship

By Joanna BartlettJanuary 6, 2020January 2, 2020 Grief recovery divorce, grief recovery, relationships

When you say, “I do,” there’s a lot packed into those two words. There are your vows, of course, whether they’re the traditional “to have and to hold,” or you wrote your own, or they come from a different lineage. You usually make a whole lot of promises in wedding vows. And (hopefully) you mean…

Book review: How to Understand Your Gender

By Joanna BartlettJanuary 2, 2020January 2, 2020 Personal growth

Gender identity is one of the things that we just didn’t talk about when I was growing up. We barely talked about sexual orientation. Partly it’s because it wasn’t on my radar. I can think of all of three LGBTQIA+ people in my Mum’s social circle: a gay male friend who was a fashion designer…

How to have an emotionally healthy surgery

By Joanna BartlettDecember 9, 2019December 3, 2019 Grief recovery, Personal growth grief recovery, healing, health issues

My reproductive system had been causing me significant pain for months. It was time to deal with the cause and not just the symptoms. It was time for a hysterectomy. We’d had a lot of ups and downs in our relationship together, my reproductive system and me. Periods so painful as a teenager that I…

Book review: Developing Intuition by Shakti Gawain

By Joanna BartlettDecember 3, 2019December 3, 2019 Intuition book review, intuition, intuition development

Developing your intuition isn’t a linear process. It often happens in fits and starts, with spurts ahead and seeming delays. Developing your intuition is a lot like living life. Developing Intuition: Practical guidance for daily life by Shakti Gawain, is one of the first books I read about developing your intuition, and I recently re-read…

Why you need to stop taking on other people’s emotions

By Joanna BartlettNovember 26, 2019November 26, 2019 Personal growth, Spiritual development empath

You’re sensitive. You feel the world around you. The vibe in the room, the moods of the people in the grocery store, the heartache of the person waiting at the bus stop as you drive by. I know. I’m sensitive too. You also need to stop absorbing all this information. It’s not good for you….

Are you tired of trying to distract yourself from your pain?

By Joanna BartlettOctober 14, 2019October 12, 2019 Grief recovery, Personal growth avoiding pain, childhood pain, pain

Almost 20 years ago, I heard a speaker at my church talk about the ways we try to distract ourselves from pain. These often end up developing addictive or maladaptive behaviors that not only don’t help, but actively get in the way of having a happy life. I was in my early 20s and it…

What to do when self-care becomes a burden

By Joanna BartlettSeptember 30, 2019September 30, 2019 Healing, Personal growth personal development, personal growth, self-care

Two years ago, I decided to embark on a year of self-love and radical self-care. I made a New Year’s resolution: to be kind to my body and to make friends with it. The plan was to chronicle my efforts and self-care journey all year long. It seemed like a good idea. I lasted until…

Want to heal from your past? Learn the 5 myths of forgiveness

By Joanna BartlettSeptember 16, 2019September 16, 2019 Grief recovery, Healing, Personal growth

Forgiveness. It’s a loaded word and often a misunderstood one. Forgiveness is also an incredible gift. It’s one you give to yourself, not to the person who hurt you. That’s one of the myths of forgiveness, the widely believed falsehoods that might be keeping you from doing this important work to free yourself from the…

Depth-journaling, releasing the steam valve on repressed emotions

By Joanna BartlettJuly 3, 2019July 3, 2019 Personal growth depth journaling, healing from loss, personal development, personal growth

It’s taken me a while to write publicly about my healing journey and the processes I’ve used to accomplish it. Telling your story is hard when you’re still in the middle of it. You don’t know the ending, or how it’s going to go, and that puts you in a vulnerable place. It’s also tricky…