Sherry Walling
Dr. Sherry Walling helps high achieving people navigate painful and complex experiences. She is a clinical psychologist, podcaster, author, yoga teacher, and mental health advocate. Her book, Touching Two Worlds (Sounds True, 2022) is part memoir, part reflection on her years as a trauma psychologist. Dr. Walling explores grief in the aftermath of losing her father to cancer and brother to suicide. Her Tedx talk, Why a Grieving Psychologist Joined the Circus, advocates for the role of expressive movement in working through grief. Dr. Walling is an expert in trauma, stress and burnout and her research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Traumatic Stress. Dr. Walling is graduate of the University of California, Davis and Fuller School of Psychology. She has a PhD in clinical psychology and master’s degrees in both psychology and theology. She completed research fellowships at Yale University School of Medicine and the National Center for PTSD in Boston. She’s held teaching appointments 5 academic institutions including the University of California, San Francisco, and Boston University School of Medicine. Sherry and her husband, Rob, reside in Minneapolis with their children. She teaches yoga classes, loves to paddleboard, and has been known to occasionally perform as a circus aerialist.
Articles:
What We Say to The Dying
“I thought: maybe death isn’t darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us— as soft as feathers— that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow— that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light— in which we are washed and washed out of our bones. — from “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field ”, by Mary Oliver Can Death be About Light? In her poem “White […]
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How to Survive a Memorial Service by Eating All the Cookies
Dad Helped Plan His Memorial Service We had a memorial service for my dad. He helped plan the shindig. He picked the songs for the video slideshow, asked me to speak, and requested that his older sister, Kathy, co-lead the service. Dad requested that his grandsons play music. And he did not want a viewing. He wanted to be cremated. He had a hand in the whole thing. It was one of the strange gifts of cancer, the time to talk about the ending. Honestly, I’m sad that he wasn’t able to attend. I think he would have had a […]
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I’m Joining the Circus: Movement is Healing
Movement is Healing Four months after brother died, I had a six-pack. Not the beverage kind, the abdominal kind. My dad and my brother both had died that year I turned 40. It was a year of heavy things. In addition to the crash course in death, I was running my own business and caring for three intense children. I was trying to show up for my husband, to be a friend to my friends, and also grapple with my own mortality. I did what every reasonable, middle-aged, working professional and mother of three would do in this situation: joined […]
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