Dena Clayton

Dena’s whole life has been in preparation for publishing the Love Revealed Stories series. For over six decades, she has been experiencing and investigating love, one way and another. “Learning to see myself more clearly and cultivating self-compassion are lifelong pursuits,” Dena commented. In her psychotherapy practice, she has offered grief support, dance/movement therapy, cancer guidance, Samyama mindfulness meditation, and inner exploration. During her childhood in the countryside and through her discovery of modern dance in high school, she was being guided to one day become a bridge for helping people heal their troubled hearts. Dena’s formal education in bereavement support has been combined with life lessons through many personal losses. Most notably, she has lived through her mother’s decline and death, followed all too quickly by nine and a half months of her husband, Ron’s, illness and subsequent death in March, 2002. “I experienced from deep inside a grief I could never have imagined possible. Over time, and with diligent grief work of my own, I discovered how to interweave grief and life and to reinvent myself.” Two years later, she followed Guidance to enter training in another thread of healing the soul, and Dena added “cancer guide” to the list of services she offered. A specialty of that work evolved into working with couples when one partner has a life-limiting illness. In the Preface of Mother-Daughter Memories: Love Revealed, there is a description of how, in July, 2011, Dena was led to ask women to write stories about their mothers or daughters. The book was published on December 1st of that year. Dena realized this would be the first of many collaborative anthologies.

Articles:

How to Live Through Intense Grief

Loss has been a prevalent theme intersecting with my life over the past six weeks. In this time, there have been four deaths of people whose lives have touched me […]

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