While I was at a retreat last year someone shared an idea that has been gaining attention – that love is grief of the future and grief is love from the past. These two intense experiences turn out to be partners and collaborators – both sweet and painful – in a journey towards healing. The further I get into my role as a foster parent the more acutely I experience a call into relationship with love and grief. It occurred to me a month or so ago that foster parenting brings this nature right up to the surface and intensifies it all of the time. Any parent may lose their child at any time, and foster parents, especially non-kinship families – will most likely lose a child that they love and have a parenting attachment relationship with at some point. In fact, we signed up knowing that this is the case! It’s very complex – we want children’s bio families to get well. And if that’s not possible, we want the children we’re raising to grow up with their people. Simultaneously, in intimate caregiving relationships especially with babies who come home to us from the hospital we’ve become their people, too. We’ve fallen in love…and grief at the same time. What I’ve learned from Dr. Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz (our most recent Sacred guest) and the wisdom of her own teachers, is that love and surrender are good medicine for staying present. I experience surrender as a threshold to both love and grief, and feel like I pulse in and out of it as I have capacity to do that work. A mantra that has emerged for me since about a month after the baby came home – all wrapped up in flashbacks from last year’s pilgrimage to India – is “I’ve been preparing for this my whole life”. The “this” is open for determination, but the mantra helps me to surrender to something bigger than myself.
So, I’m working to be present not only in my attachment relationship with the little one but also with my own experience of love and grief. I’m not doing this by myself, and I don’t recommend anyone try that! I have dear ones and a therapist to process with. Also, I had the opportunity to share Angela’s and my teachings on transitions as healing spaces with my local foster parent community. Whenever we teach about this we ask participants to reflect on where they feel transitions in their bodies. Many people report their chest, throat, and head. I feel it in my chest, particularly my lungs. To me this indicates that transitions activate the core of our beings! What do we do with that? It can easily send us into survival mode – one of the other parents said about the foster parenting journey, “…and things can change at any moment”. Inside that truth my default is hypervigilance – constantly checking email and texts for updates and/or attempting to plan for something that hasn’t happened yet, and may never. When a transition begins in foster care we may not even know where it’s going, only that it’s begun. I’m working on using this context to leverage my desire to practice presence. After all, as Angela Carolina wisely said in the last season of Sacred, “Presence is the ancient technology of care”…and as Rev angel kyodo williams teaches, it’s at the heart of healing, too.
Angela sends her love from abroad! She’ll be back online for our next blog. And please check out our summer offerings below, where you’ll be able to find the details we promised on the Healing Centered Leadership Intensive.
With love and gratitude,
Lauren
Summer 2025 Engage Offerings:
June: Lauren will be facilitating a Tiny Humans, Big Emotions book club for teachers which meets June 9, 23, and 30 in Zoom, 4:00-5:00pm. It’s free! All you need to provide for yourself is the book and a means of journaling/drawing during each session. Find out more and register here.
July: As always we’ll log off for the month of July to rest our work at the computer and immerse ourselves in dear ones and gardening. We will take turns tapping in to answer your questions about the Healing Centered Leadership Intensive and help with registration.
August: So far, Engage has been offering compensated workshops and consulting as centers and event planners hire us to do so. We’re excited and proud to announce that we’ll be offering a half day Healing Centered Leadership Intensive for program administrators, ECE and EDU faculty, pedagogical leaders, and teacher coaches and mentors. The intensive will be co-facilitated by Angela Carolina and Lauren in Zoom on Wednesday, August 6, 12:30-4:30pm ET/10:30am-2:30pm MT/9:30am-12:30pm PDT. Apply here!