Deep within each one of us is a vast intelligence that moves us toward wholeness. I am continually in awe of how effectively this guides our healing and awakening process. By learning to listen to our dreams, feelings, body sensations, and circumstances, we discover the clues as to where our healing wants to go next.
My work as a therapist is to create a safe, supportive space for clients to open up, experience life as it is right now, and explore whatever is calling out for attention from with
in ourselves or from outer challenges. Often we may need to make detours into past traumas that prevent a full surrender into the present. As old grief, traumas, hurts, and losses are embraced and healed, inevitably clients drop into the deepest grief of all—the abandonment of oneself. As this is grieved, then the unique expression of the essence of that person can be freed up to participate fully in life, to blossom like a flower.
This work is empowering to my clients as they connect with a flow of healing and transformation from within themselves and learn new tools for living more fully—tools that they can carry into their lives long after our time together has passed.
Alexandra Kennedy, MA is a psychotherapist in private practice since 1976 and author of Losing a Parent (HarperCollins, 1991) and The Infinite Thread: Healing Relationships Beyond Loss (Beyond Words, April 2001), Offerings at the Edge (iUniverse 2007), and How Did I Miss All This Before? Waking Up to the Magic of Our Ordinary Lives (iUniverse, 2010).
She was stunned by the power of her grief when her father was diagnosed with cancer in November 1988—even though she had been a psychotherapist for fourteen years and had attended death and dying workshops with Stephen Levine. Her father died three months later. She wrote Losing a Parent in the year following his death, sharing not only the story of her father’s dying and her grieving but also the resources and strategies that helped her move through her grief while raising a family. Since then, she has devoted much of her therapy practice, teaching, and writing to grief. In 2001 The Infinite Thread was published, with an emphasis on healing relationships beyond loss, along with issues not commonly explored, such as the grief handed down through generations. Her most recent book How Did I Miss All This Before?, an intimate account of courageous spiritual transformation in the midst of life’s common challenges, is written for everyone wishing to find greater openness to life in each precious moment.
Alexandra lectures at universities, professional organizations and major conferences. Weaving together inspiring case histories, practical advice, and experiential exercises, she provides a unique perspective to grieving through her work with the imagination. She also offers lectures, workshops and seminars on facing loss as an opening to the sacred, the loss of a parent, healing relationships beyond loss, dreams as messengers of the night, women’s spirituality, mid-life renewal, the power of the imagination, the empty nest, and related issues.
Alexandra has been interviewed in USA Today, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Examiner, New Woman and the Boston Herald as well as on NPR's "Talk of the Nation," CNN's "Sonja Live", KQED's "Family Talk," and "New Dimensions Radio." She is an adjunct faculty member of John F Kennedy University, has been a faculty member of University of California Santa Cruz Extension, and taught a popular graduate level course on dying and grieving at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology for six years. Her articles have appeared in Yoga Journal, Mothering Magazine, Magical Blend and the California Therapist. Her articles have been published online at innerself.com, groups.msm.com, learnwhatsup.com, beyondindigo.com, care-givers.com, wisdomseekers.org, among many others.
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