Sign up to receive (free) my Thriving Forward Guide delivered by email as a 5-part series.
My bi-weekly newsletter: Find Your Forward: The newsletter to move you forward when you are stuck, facing a crossroads, or adapting to a fast-changing world. No matter where you are, there is always a way forward.
Although living through grief may not be an easy endeavor, we can use our creativity to help us deal with grief. My guest today is someone who has mastered the art of using creative skills to thrive through grief. Morgan Tanner is an internationally collected artist and a grief coach. She uses artistic skills to help people make their lives purposeful and joyful after a loss. In today’s episode, we have a fascinating conversation about how to use artistic expression to deal with grief without regret.
Show Notes
Path to Grief Coaching – Morgan’s path to grief coaching as a career was influenced by her own experiences of thriving through grief from losing a close family member. Morgan shares with us how she dealt with her grief and the way it shaped her career later in life.
Stop Complaining – Getting into a habit of complaining about a loss makes us relive the same emotional state that hurt us in the first place. Morgan shares how we can avoid this behavior.
Making Emotions Tangible – Morgan talks about some of the small things we can do to better deal with grief by associating our emotions with tangible things.
Artistic Expression – Morgan uses her skills as an artist to help her clients get through grief in a unique way. She shares How to utilize artistic expression for healing our emotional wounds.
Dos and Don’ts – Things to avoid while going through grief and some of the best practices that help us deal with grief in a positive way.
Transforming Life – Morgan recently went through a set of transformations in her life after she went through lots of introspective thinking while in quarantine. Morgan talks about the questions she asked herself and how the answers she found herself improved her life.
Contact Morgan Tanner
Website: morgantannerart.com
Instagram: instagram.com/morgantannerart
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/morgantannerart
YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCsjED7AK9yAiQRWG8dQI54Q?view_as=subscriber
Bobbi's Takeaways
Hope you found a lot of nuggets in that conversation. Here are my 3 insights for thriving:
Don’t wait to grieve and begin healing. We hear all the time that “time heals all wounds,” but time actually doesn’t heal the wound; it distances us from the pain or the grief but it doesn’t heal it. We have to do the grief work in order to heal.
I loved the question that Morgan asked herself while she was doing her energy inventory and noticing how she spent her days over the course of a month. The question was this: If I repeated this month for the next year, how will I feel about that?
If we are just picking up the pieces and putting them back together again, then we may just be reminding ourselves of what’s missing. It seems like healing is more about finding a new way forward or an enhanced way of being. This has been on my mind quite a bit lately as we first experienced the loss associated with the massive East Troublesome wildfire that, as we’ve learned more over the last few months, was dangerously close to us by the time we were evacuated. It turns out that we were mere minutes ahead of the fire. And, by that I mean, less than 10 minutes ahead of it. As the snow is beginning to melt, more and more of the blackened earth is being revealed. Of course, we’ve seen the blackened trees all winter – where before they were lush and green, but now we are seeing that the very earth – the dirt and boulders – are blackened. Scorched. The smell of soot is becoming strong again – all reminders of that scary night. Then, of course, we had to say good bye to our beloved Riley, our wonderful dog. As Rick and I have gone through the process of grieving these things, I’ve found myself thinking about things I want to do differently in the future or different ways that I want to be in the future. It’s easy for these to become regrets. I have found myself crying at times and thinking, “Why didn’t I make even more time for Riley? What was so important?” I understand that this is a normal part of the grieving process and I’m working towards healing and hopefully being able to embrace the things that I want to change for the future without feeling the gnaw of regret.
