Lyn Prashant
Lyn Prashant, PhD., FT., IGT., IGC, is the Founder and Training Director of the process called Degriefing®. Lyn is an internationally recognized professional grief counselor, engaging lecturer, published author, and therapeutic massage therapist/teacher specializing in transforming grief by using grief as “the most available untapped, emotional resource for personal transformation”. She teaches at the Mayo Clinic, U.C. Berkeley, California Pacific Medical Center; training health care professionals, hospice workers, hospital staffs, community leaders and it’s members. Lyn, fluent in Spanish, has offices in the San Francisco Bay Area. She can be reached at www.degriefing.com and 415.457.2272 Lyn presents this work internationally in honor of her late sister Donna and her late husband Mark. Lyn’s parents, Harriet and Nathan Smith, live in Boynton Beach, Florida, and a younger sibling, Karen Miro, and her two children live in South Salem, New York. To Listen to Lyn on Open to Hope Lyn was featured on the Open to Hope Foundation radio show program “Healing the Grieving Heart” on October 22, 2009. To listen to Lyn being interviewed, go to the following link: https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/41818/grieving-the-loss-of-a-spouse
Articles:
Degriefing: The Art of Transforming Grief
The Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) features Dr. Lyn Prashant in a special episode where she talks about the loss of her husband. She used integrative therapeutic processes that aim to normalize the mind and body after a trauma. With a medical background herself, Dr. Prashant was eager to find her own best way of healing after her husband’s death. She’s a clinician, healer, author, and also public speaker who specializes in the somatic approach to grief and helping others to heal along their own grief journey. How the barometer of your feelings registers and stores your grief […]
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Spousal Loss: Spiritual and Physical Aspects of Loss
In this episode of The Grief Relief show, Drs. Gloria and Heidi Horsley talk with Reverend Robert Gieselmann as well as physical therapist Lyn Prashant about the physical symptoms of grief. Reverend Gieselmann has worked with numerous people who were surprised by the physical manifestation of grief after losing someone close to them. Prashant has taught yoga teachers as well as numerous non-yogis about the importance of physical and spiritual self-care when you lose someone. Many times, self-care goes out the window when you’re grieving, which can lead to a downward spiral for several years. One of the things people […]
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Spousal Loss: Spiritual and Physical Aspects of Loss
Body work expert Dr. Lyn Prashant joins Drs. Gloria and Heidi Horsley on this special episode of The Grief Relief show. Prashant lost her husband at a young age—they were both in their mid-30s when he passed away. She had worked in the grief field for years, and says that “talk therapy” was the standard place for grieving people to handle their grief. When she lost her husband in 1984, she found that she really needed physical ways to relieve the grief. “Talking alone does not allow the body to release the accumulation of grief,” she says. Physical symptoms of […]
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Integrative Grief Therapy
Lyn Prashant talks with Dr. Gloria Horsley at the 2015 Association for Death Education and Counseling conference. She lost her husband, and knows exactly how grief symptoms can show up in the body. Grieving is an emotional and physical process, she explains. If you care for your body as a barometer of truth, it can be a great tool to address what you’re dealing with. Listen to the body, and this way you can attend to your needs which are unique to who you are and your loss. One of the most common body messages is to have it contract. […]
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Lyn Prashant: Body Work After Loss
As a bereaved spouse herself, Lyn Prashant specializes in “body work” after loss. She recently talked with Dr. Gloria Horsley from the Open to Hope Foundation about options for those in various stages of grieving when it comes to using the body as part of the healing process. “After my husband died, I found that talking did not deal with the pain in my body.” A few months after her husband passed, Prashant’s friend recommended seeing a masseur to address the physical pain. She explains that having your body touched with love and care can encourage emotions to surface that […]
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Holidays and Loss in a Fractured Family
Not all holiday memories are fond. In fact, many people proclaim that they’re hiding out or finding an escape route during this season of forced festivity. Emotional distress looms largely for the lonely and bereaved. Extreme challenges and additional difficulties are presented from cultural pressures to be jolly rather than being authentic especially for the newly bereaved. Offering a mixed bag of memories, emotions, familiar smells, nostalgic songs holiday rituals usually stimulate memories of people and holidays past, provoking painful unresolved issues from longstanding difficulties. “Loss and Grief are as universal as a smile.” Bereavement is a natural process that […]
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Helping Others Means Deeply Listening to the Words
I often hear grieving individuals express profound feelings and significant emotions using uniquely distinct phrases found in English. The stories of loss can live in our bodies. When we receive information of loss, our ears hear the news, our minds process the data, our brain reacts by sending information to our bodies in the form of chemicals. Our bodies, the barometers of our feelings, register the emotional impact of the losses held in our soma (our physical self). Fresh grief re-stimulates the grief we are somatically carrying from prior losses; and when losses combine the effect that occurs is exponential. […]
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Remembering ‘My Sister and My Best Friend’
My beloved sister Donna was a gentle, loving, caring soul. She was my trusted confidant, my witness, my cheerleader, and my best friend. She died September 6, 2002, at age 49. Donna was was born three-and-a-half years after me. She was there for me, I for her. We were giddy and vulnerable with each other. I remember walking down the street with her, holding her hand, thinking about how lucky I was to have her as my very own sister. Our commitment and our sense of knowing one another was astounding. A glance into her eyes affirmed my joyous reality: […]
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Grief and Degrief: When Theory Meets Reality
On the eleventh day of September 2001, I awoke to a crisp northern New York state morning, the best of blue skies and an audible fall crunch in the air. I am New York City-born, so I remember those fall days well. I was in Rochester, N.Y., to present my work on the “somatic aspects of grief”. It was 9:01 a.m. as I stood in front of my class. It was my first presentation representing the University of Arizona and I was in front of 75 health care professionals. I began to introduce myself and the contents of my Degriefing […]
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