Martha Jo Atkins PhD, End-of-Life Counselling

Pushing Boundaries with Dr. Thomas R Verny

My guest today is Martha Jo Atkins PhD, end-of-life counselor, counselor supervisor, (LPC-S), coach, speaker and author of Signposts of Dying: What You Need to Know (2015). For almost thirty years, you Martha has worked with grieving and bereaved children and families and people at end-of-life and the ones who love them. I asked what that kind of counselling entails.
In the very early 90s, Martha worked at a children's hospital in the intensive care unit. She worked with children who were dying and their siblings. She found that the siblings were often left out not invited in to say goodbye. And so she started to do that and enjoyed it.
Her brother died in 93 and her personal and professional lives collided. Martha learned about grief in a whole new way. She returned to university and got her master's degree. Now she is in West Virginia in private practice. As an example of what she does she spoke of the person she most recently lived with and helped to navigate his last days. And it was powerful and good work.
Martha likes dropping into a family system or a friend system and helping them help the person who's dying. And this community comes around the person. People engage in their own grief processes, they help each other, they learn. In this case, there was a lot of learning about dying and what dying is and how to care for somebody. It is work that calls to her.
We discuss shamanism. Martha saw it was very magical. And through practicing it she realized how it's a support for being human, a different kind of support than sitting in a pew in a church. As a result, her practices are different, she thinks of the spirits of the land. She used to make altars and mandalas, that would give her a sense of rootedness and and connection to the place, which feels important.
Next week my guest will be Laurence Freeman OSB, a Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Monte Olivetto Maggiore in Italy. He is the Director of the World
Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) an inclusive contemplative
community based in Bonnevaux. Fr Laurence is a prolific author. He has collaborated with the Dalai Lama on many dialogues and on the ground breaking book The Good Heart. He was awarded the Order of Canada in recognition of his work for interfaith dialogue and the promotion of world peace.
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