Open to Hope Articles

Do you want to read stories of others who have been where you are? Are you looking for bereavement help, and advice? Look no further. We offer over 7,000 articles written by our Open to Hope authors.

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Writing Helps Bereaved Find Gratitude

Posted on November 9, 2023 - by Beth Marshall

Writing Helps Bereaved Whenever you set out to write a book, an important first step is clearly defining your audience. When I started dreaming about Uncrushed, I assumed it would be primarily to help people navigate the loss of a loved one. That was and still is a big part of the reason for my new book. But something unexpected happened as feedback came in from the Launch Team (35-40 amazing superheroes who read through the book before release day). The comment that surprised me most came from a dear friend who has, thankfully, never lost a super close person, […]

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Violent Deaths Leave Haunted Souls

Posted on October 31, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Violent Deaths Leave Haunted Souls After death and before birth, consciousness (or soul-energy, if you prefer) is so intact that even when the physical body is abruptly destroyed, through accident or murder, for example, the remaining self-awareness often doesn’t realize what has happened. One example of this is the souls of those killed in the airplane crash for which Jana and Candace considered attempting a soul rescue. An undetected wind shear slammed a jumbo jet violently to the ground just north of the airport runway it was approaching to land. Though the physical bodies were removed from the crash site, […]

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Resolving an Abortion Decision

Posted on October 30, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Resolving an Abortion Decision In addition to resolving grief and helping parents-to-be, the afterlife healing circle can be helpful in other difficult circumstances such as miscarriage, abortion, or suicide. Many of us regard such events as the end of a budding life, and even murder. What miscarriage and abortion really mean is delay. In both situations, the soul will opt not to return to a physical body, find another mother and father, or wait until the time is better for the woman who was pregnant. The third option is what happened for a woman we will call Lori Dell. At […]

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Circle Up for Healing

Posted on October 29, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Circle Up for Healing According to the well-known Western European myth of Camelot, King Arthur gathered his knights at a circular table. He chose that particular table configuration to foster a sense of equality among his knights. He wanted to eliminate the head and foot of the more common rectangular table shape. This inevitably produced tension between the ideal of social equality, as embodied in the round table, and the reality of the decidedly nonegalitarian political hierarchy that Arthur led as monarch. Unlike the circle, Camelot did not endure. Today, we love to circle up for healing for the same […]

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‘Soul Senses’ Can Help with Grief

Posted on October 28, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

‘Soul Senses’ Can Help with Grief The soul senses are the primary means by which we are able to apply the principles of love, connection, and trust. We need the soul senses to invoke and feel the presence of love-energy. We also require these nonphysical senses to detect the presence of the soul(s) to whom we wish to speak, as that consciousness does not come attached to a physical body. And we need to learn to trust the information we receive through our soul senses, no matter how illogical or strange it may seem. These are the challenges inherent in […]

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Can a Séance be Healing?

Posted on October 27, 2023 - by Candace Lynn Talmadge

Can a Séance be Healing? The séance is probably the most misunderstood and thus abused and debased of all spiritual practices. The very word immediately brings to mind what most of us consider the unreal and therefore absurd notion of “conjuring up spirits.” The séance stereotype certainly was the foundation for that outrageous scene in the film, “The Changling.” A more recent séance-related movie even has that word in the title: “The Conjuring.” Brian Dunning, who writes the Skeptoid blog, sums up the skeptic’s view of séances. “Contacting the dead has never passed any kind of controlled test, has no […]

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Widowed Parent Has Extra Struggles

Posted on October 23, 2023 - by Jenny Lisk

Widowed Parents If you’d spotted us — four women in our 40s, laughing, chatting, and drinking wine — you’d be forgiven for assuming we were merely busy parents, stressed-out professionals, or middle-aged girlfriends enjoying a quick getaway from the demands of everyday life. We were, in fact, all of those things. We were also widows. In that charming tasting room in the Bavarian-inspired village of Leavenworth, Washington, I think we shocked the sommelier when, by way of making conversation, she inquired how we knew one another. The only answer we could muster was an unthinkable one: that each of our […]

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Preparing for Your Winter of Grief

Posted on October 16, 2023 - by Bradie Hansen

Preparing for Your Winter of Grief In Vermont where I live, the change of seasons brings a significant shift of feeling and sensation. The sounds change as birds migrate, cicadas’ drones ease, and leaves on trees begin their mighty transformation through colors, ultimately falling to the ground. As nature readies herself for winter, so do we. And for many of us, it is a time that resonates on a same frequency as grief. It’s not a coincidence that the transition to winter can feel like grief. For thousands of years, humans have connected the process of harvesting crops and the […]

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Memory Boxes Help Daughter Let Go

Posted on October 16, 2023 - by Sara Striefel

On Labor Day, I spent the afternoon going through memory boxes in my father’s basement. Six white cardboard containers with my name written in Sharpie. As I opened each one, the locks to hidden boxes in my head unhinged as well. I was surprised at the hollow pull when I found remnants of my mother’s delicate cursive on the backs of watercolor pastels and frayed grammar books where she’d written my name and the date. The permanence and the impermanence of ink on paper. Her presence in the midst of her absence. Her whisper in the sweep of an “S” […]

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Sharing the Experience of being a ‘Twinless Twin’

Posted on October 10, 2023 - by Linda Pountney

Being a Twinless Twin As a twinless twin, the emotions I felt were mirrored in other twinless twins I met.  Just listening, for the first time, to other twins tell their story of loss and what it meant for them to lose their twin had an impact I will never forget. It was a huge gift in my life. It has been my personal experience that twin-loss was echoed in my other losses.  As I experienced the death of my mother, I longed for my twin Paula and what we shared.  It always came back to an unfinished grief, one I […]

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