Here are some kind words about Mending Invisible Wings… please feel free to post your own thoughts to the journal.
What moved you? What helped you? Was there anything in particular that spoke to you? Would you recommend this journal to a friend? What is something new you learned about yourself? Your strengths?
Oh, my heart is singing! To open up the latest edition (Winter 2009/10 Number 92) and see a wonderful review of Mending Invisible Wings by Midwifery Today founder, Jan Tritten. Here it is:
Mending Invisible Wings: Healing From the Loss of Your Baby, by Mary Burgess. 2009. (Healdsburg, California: Palm of Her Hand, $29.50, 175 pages, spiralbound.)
From the beginning of this sensitive journal and spiced throughout are lovely black and white drawings. Even if a mama is too grief-stricken to read or write words at the beginning of her grief journay, she can still take in the insightful drawings. Phyllis Klaus provides a gently loving Foreword. The journal moves parents along through the healing process with poems, tender words and places for the reader to write her own affirmations and to tell her story. This is an interactive journal and remembrance of the baby with many places to tell the baby’s story.
This book adds just what is needed to the healing realm of birth loss. Our resources in this area are so much richer because Mary Burgess took the time to help us through this difficult area of life and death.
This book can be purchased through www.palmofherhand.com.
Jan Tritten is the publisher and editor in chief of MIdwifery Today magazine.
Thank you, Jan!
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For any woman who suffers this loss, her baby is unique and that lost baby is the whole world for that mother. Much about working through grief is validating the reality of that baby. In this journal, one is guided to write, to draw, to dream, to imagine, and to express each avenue of one’s life that has been affected by the life and loss of this baby. – Phyllis Klaus, MFT, MLCSW, from the Foreword.
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Until Mending Invisible Wings, I had not come across anything focused on the self-healing after the loss of a baby. So many books contained stories of similar experiences all with the same message about the grief cycle and how time is the great healer, but this journal really focuses on healing from within. For mothers, that is exactly where the healing must begin. The trauma of birth followed by death incorporates everything that occurs between conception and the eventual loss of a child. It wounds from the inside out. Thank you so much for offering up this gentle guide. – Kara Swayne, Healing Mother
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What a precious gift! Mending Invisible Wings is a gentle companion that should be made available to all women who’ve lost their babies. – Miriam Maslin, Perinatal Loss Workshop Facilitator
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Life is constantly in motion. It moves in waves, cycles and patterns. When faced with death, we face an end to a wave or cycle. There can be great peace in this stillness. But, if the movement of our own life ceases with another’s death, there is stagnation. Mary’s book helps a grieving mother fully experience the current motion of her life and the loss of her baby. With this movement comes an awareness of wholeness and the possibility for peace. – Jenny Macke, MA, Certified 5 Rhythms Instructor, Advocate for being compassionately human.
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A note to Penny Simkin from Laura Simpkins: “I haven’t had the chance to thank you for lending me your book, Mending Invisible Wings, it is outstanding, and I am so grateful to you. I worked through the early sections before Sebastian’s birth, and I’m going to buy a copy of my own so that I can see it to completion. I was surprised that I was familiar with some of the contributors to the book from my online reading, and tidbits of helpful advice that I had gleaned from bulletin boards here and there, but there was so much more, beautiful ways to honor lost babies…. so many resources rolled into one… when I think of all the searching I did for support… and here it is all in one book! It is a wonderful book. I’m looking forward to sharing it with others… I know it will be a great help.. it will spark many tears… but in a way that helps healing.”
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A recent post by Emily at Pregnancy Loss Ribbons:
http://pregnancylossribbons.blogspot.com/2009/11/book-review-and-giveaway.html
A while back the author Mary Burgess contacted me about reviewing her book Mending Invisible Wings: a Healing Journal for Mothers. Part of the deal was I would offer it as a giveaway to one of my readers.
I’m sorry I agreed to it. To give it away, I mean. I want to keep it for myself.
This beautiful book is a journal- meant to be interactive as you fill it out and write, draw or paint to express your emotions and (as it says on the back cover) “reclaim your body, your heart and your life”. The pages are these lovely thick paper which begs to be filled. Throughout the book are little treasures of images, illustrations, sketches, affirmations, poetry and ceremonies.
This book has a definite earth mother/goddess feel to it so if you are looking for a Christian type of journal this is not it.
So, after holding onto it as long as I possibly could get away with I am ready to send it out in the world to one of you, lucky readers. I’ve decided to do it in tandem with my other giveaway.
To enter:
Leave a comment either in this post or the other giveaway post, AND send an email to me at nickwilberg @ hotmail.com. When you enter you will automatically be entered to win one of these prizes- either this gorgeous book or the other chocolate/ornament/giftcard. It will run through the end of next Friday when I will pick 2 winners (one for each giveaway).
Good luck!
emily
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I have been reading and re-reading my copy of Mending Invisible Wings – I find I can apply the Healing Expressions and Ceremonies for so many losses in my life. Thank you, thank you for this special journal. – a midwife
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Thank you, Mary. I am very inspired by you and your work. – Monique, Advanced Mentor, Birthing From Within
Please feel free to leave your comments about Mending Invisible Wings below…
