From the office of a seasoned grief counselor, this book is an essential guide to grief. It shines a light into the darkness and illuminates the lifelong journey of integrating loss into life. It is a spiritual companion to higher healing that offers a shift, a redirection from pain and suffering to the sacred qualities of compassion, love, connection, gratitude, and transformation.

This book takes Ashley Davis Bush’s seminal Transcending Loss grief model and elevates it to a new level by providing a light-filled lens with which to process and metabolize loss. Bush describes a dimension of higher healing which provides an essential balm to the shattered heart. She will lead you to a broad experience of support, to a source of light within and beyond the self that is essential to a healthy grieving process.

A guide on your journey from shock to transcendence, this book shows you how Love, Connection, Compassion, Faith, and Transcendenceorient and soothe a broken spirit. At the end of each chapter, you will be introduced to five specific “Light-Shift Practices” that integrate the chapter’s concepts and facilitate the healing process.

Grieving is a universal yet disorienting and devastating experience. But like the ancient Japanese art form of kintsugi which repairs broken pottery with golden lacquer, grief is healed by filling the cracks in your life with light, creating beauty from brokenness. Embracing a higher perspective makes the journey more bearable, the experience more meaningful, and the future more expansive.

Ashley Davis Bush, LICSW, is a psychotherapist with over thirty years of experience working with grieving individuals. She is the author of ten books, including the classic Transcending Loss and The Little Book of Inner Peace. She is also a Reiki master and a trained spiritual director. Ashley and her husband have five grown children and divide their time between Guatemala and New Hampshire