We recently connected with Cathy Brooks Edwards and have shared our conversation below.
Cathy Brooks, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Is there a heartwarming story from your career that you look back on?
I joined the movement of conscious dying back in 2015. As a licensed bodyworker, clinical counselor and musician, I began offering weekly hands-on-healing work to a man who was dying from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). It evolved into family support work; bringing the children into the dying process through creative endeavors; providing gentle guidance; then bringing support and ritual into Chris’s bedroom with his family and extended community. My experience with Chris and his family during his sacred rite of passage affected me deeply. I studied to become a death doula and created a non-profit heart2heart (heart2heartnc.com) to provide hands-on-healing, sound healing and compassionate witnessing to individuals, their families, and their communities.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Cathy Brooks Edwards has been a licensed clinical counselor and licensed massage and bodyworker for over 25 years. Following a B.A. in Music she graduated with a masters from SUNY Plattsburgh in community counseling. I moved to North Carolina to study at The Body Therapy Institute. Listening, listening, listening, Holding. Clarifying. Helping. I started listening, and watching for the stories that people carried in their bodies, drawing the connections between our spoken stories and our unspoken stories. As the work continued, I would weave the spoken stories with the body stories for deeper insight. I helped explore the logic of the stories, the truths, the distortions of the truth, the choice of stories we tell ourselves, the possibilities of changing our story.
In the fall of 2018 Cathy completed her death doula certification from Doorway into Light (doorwayintolight.org), and founded heart2heart (heart2heartnc.com) a non-profit program in partnership with Abundance NC (abundancenc.org), a group of cultural alchemists. Heart2heart provides holistic services for death, dying and beyond. Heart2heart is committed to helping individuals, families and communities navigate the living path of dying time – to death – and to those who are living the grief journey. Cathy also works with her musical partner, Amy Durso, offering one-on-one sessions with hands-on-healing to people in their dying time and people in their acute grieving time. They also offer community events such as Songs of Devotion, which is prayerful singing and chanting to help facilitate deep healing; Death and Cupcakes, a community event to invite open and honest dialogue around these important conversation of death and dying; and Tending to the Heart, community events which help people tend to their precious hearts through the powerful combination of sound, gentle guidance. movement, body awareness and inner reflection.
As a Kundalini Yoga teacher, Cathy has developed a model, Grief in Motion, to support the grief process using movement, breath-work, meditation and sound healing. Cathy continues to be a collector of stories and her first anthology Heartspace: Real Life Stories in Death and Dying was published in November 2019. Her second anthology Heartspace II: Real Life Stories on Loss and Renewal will be released in December, 2022.
Cathy is a steward for The Sanctuary at the Burrow (sanctuaryattheburrow.com) a green burial cemetery in Moncure, North Carolina where she helps prepare the grave sites, the land, creates ritual around the burial process, guides families and communities into the grieving process. My work is to be present for the grieving family; to hold a steady and conscious space for them; to be a quiet guide; to lead the way for others to grieve and to mourn.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
The idea for my second anthology bubbled up several months into the COVID shutdown. The resilience of people in the face-of death fascinated and intrigued me. What is grief and how does the healing of loss occur? How does resiliency get nurtured. My own experience of grief is inside my bones, and it has taken me a lifetime to uncover and expose it. Is there a secret to carrying grief in one hand and happiness in the other. I wanted to know more.
In the last five years, I have watched my beloved friends navigate their own grief with courage and vulnerability. These woman had an authenticity to their experience that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Their losses were as deep and tragic as mine had been. I needed to understand how people could rise up from such losses. I became fixated on the concept that there had to be gifts that came from grief.
Over the last year, I have dedicated daily time to the search for a deeper understanding of grief. Through my practice of Kundalini yoga, which includes breath work, meditation, and daily mantras, I have come to understand that grief is not the gift. The gift comes from living inside the grief. Resiliency happens when we don’t turn away from the overwhelming emotions – which takes incredible courage.
By slowly going in every day and cleaning out the residue of the stored grief, I have begun to see rays of light coming in through the windows. They shine down on the gifts that were there all along: the bright, crisp, early green leaves of spring; the multitude of bird songs that greet me each morning; the honest laughter that comes from my children when they feel free. And, the kindness of strangers, and the devotion of the people who love me deeply.
Have you ever had to pivot?
The first dying time work for me was the spouse of a friend diagnosed with ALS. Then, a beloved son of a friend, who overdosed. A year later, another spouse. Then, a father and a grandfather. Later still, a treasured friend. I can’t tell you the moment it happened, but as the days went by it became increasingly clear that my work with the dying was not random, not just chance, not a casual change in direction. I could see and feel and know that working with the dying is my work, Work I have spent my whole life preparing for,
Contact Info:
- Website: www.heart2heartnc.com
- Facebook: heart2heart
Image Credits
Adrian Moreno Carey McKelvey