Heidi Gessner, MDiv, BCC, is an ordained United Church of Christ Minister, sacred mindset coach, and former palliative care and bereavement chaplain. Her credits include developing the University of North Carolina Hospitals Bereavement Support Services, a program dedicated to promoting healthy grieving through educational resources and follow up to families for a year after the death of a loved one. Heidi created and co-facilitated Writing for Resilience, a weekly reflective prompt-writing group, for patients, caregivers, and community, as a coping tool and to initiate healing shifts in perspective.
Heidi is the founder of Indigo Grief Flow: Path to a New Beginning, which provides online grief support for people mourning all different kinds of loss. Heidi guides you to tap into the transformative aspect of grief in her program that weaves 3 secret, life-transforming gifts of grief through four flows: creative, nature, sacred, and soul. Her signature system invites you into a sacred, internal, “indigo” space where you’ll intentionally process what’s happening, learn new skills, and gain resilient tools, whatever stage of life. The threads of grief’s gifts are woven and strengthened through reading, writing, reflecting, and accessing deep memories. This deeply nourishing and cathartic space will naturally excavate new or remembered things about being in the world and clears the way for a new path to emerge.
Heidi is the author of Pockets of Grace: Lessons from Darkness, Lessons from Light, her memoir about her journey during her father’s terminal lung cancer while simultaneously divorcing her first husband. At the threshold of death, she found connectedness, meaning, and depth, which led her to work with dying and bereaved people. Reflective questions and practices are included at the end of each chapter for readers to dive deeper into their emotional and spiritual lives and encourage healing. This book is a result of working as an end-of-life chaplain for nearly 20 years. It’s for anyone wrestling with spirituality and/or grief and addresses issues about what it means to be human, to grieve, and to grow.
Here’s what one reader said, “Pockets of Grief contains beautiful teaching passages, meaningful stories, inspiring quotes, and valuable questions to ponder. Part memoir, this book provides sensitive insights into life, grief, and death. A master at conducting grief groups, Gessner beautifully interweaves a lifetime of exploring, discerning, growing and caregiving. We readers are most fortunate that she has chosen to share this wisdom that will appeal to those of many faiths or no faith. The book is a keeper and I plan to purchase it as a gift for several friends.”