Finding Your Way Through Grief:
A Self-Paced Digital Course

Grief is rarely spoken about, but it’s so deeply felt.

An earthshaking loss—whether a loved one’s death, a scary diagnosis, a relationship’s end, losing a job, leaving a home—can leave you struggling to find your footing, knocked over by wave after wave of emotion.

While it’s a universal experience, grief is uncharted territory—the world stops making sense and you may feel profoundly lonely. Too often, people withdraw support after only a few weeks, say well-meaning but insensitive comments, and can’t comprehend that “getting back to normal” is impossible.

Grief is experienced physically as well as emotionally—changes in appetite/digestion, sleeplessness, tension headaches, heart palpitations, fatigue, brain fog are not unusual. And it’s exhausting to suppress emotions and pretend to be OK—swallowing anger, sadness, guilt, shame, and other uncomfortable feelings can worsen your suffering. It’s understandable to numb out with food, alcohol, TV, overwork, and a thousand other distractions from the pain—and yet going numb to the difficult emotions can make you numb to joy and love and enthusiasm as well, making it hard to feel truly alive.

Your grief is worthy of tender attention and care.

Something I discovered after the devastating loss of my parents was that I needed to learn to mother myself, following the loving example they set for me. Drawing upon my studies in acupuncture, sound healing, Qigong, energy medicine, herbal medicine, and other wisdom traditions, I gathered a tool kit of gentle self-care practices that continue to help me find my way through the wilderness of grief.

It’s my heartfelt wish that this digital course may be of service to you in showing small, manageable steps to soothe yourself, deepen your understanding of the many facets of grief so you know you’re not alone, and gradually nourish your strength to put the pieces of your life back together in a new way.

When you’re feeling lost at sea, it’s extra challenging to focus and absorb information, so all the video lessons are short and to the point. Because grief isn’t linear, the course is designed with individual modules on emotional and physical topics such as anxiety, anger, insomnia, and focus that you can watch or read as you need them, respecting your own pace. Modules include a variety of simple yet powerful tools, such as:

* Breath, sound, and stretching exercises to physically express your grief, giving an outlet to untangle and release emotional tension in a slow, gentle way

* Practical tools to help relieve insomnia, anxiety, and trouble focusing

* Acupressure combined with flower essences and essential oils to help emotions get unstuck and flow smoothly

* Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT, aka Tapping) exercises to help shift negative thought patterns and lighten the burden of heavy emotions

* Herbal tea suggestions to support the healing process

* Guided sound meditations to relax the mind and connect to inner peace

* Ritual suggestions to help honor your grief and resources of music, movies, books, poems, and more for inspiration and further exploration

[Digital Course Testimonials to come]

Grief is unfixable—as long as love endures, some grief will remain—but when you’re willing to explore grief rather than turn away, it’s possible to find greater meaning in the experience. With the nourishment of these practices, may you reconnect with the timeless love at the core of your pain, feel grounded and more at home in the world, and open to expansive moments of joy.

You’ll have lifetime access to the course and will be notified as new materials are added.

Grief can be more bearable with support from a companion on the journey who understands.

We’re not meant to carry the heavy burden of grief alone. As someone with experience in weaving together brokenness and reconnecting to joy, I listen nonjudgmentally and help nurture the energy needed to discover what’s good about life on the other side of change. If you’re feeling a need for one-on-one support, you have the option to add on one or more private virtual Wellspring sessions with me.

With a Wellspring acu-sound session, you can share your story and be witnessed with compassion and understanding, then rest and receive a soothing treatment designed to restore harmony to body/mind/spirit. We’ll go through some energy practices together, leading into a personalized sound bath meditation. How much comfort could be possible if you surrendered to softness and stillness for even an hour? Grieving is a sacred process, and a series of Wellspring sessions can support you in integrating and composting thorny emotions, cultivating resilience, and blossoming into a new season of life.

[testimonial:]

One Wellspring participant described the experience this way:

“Annie is immediately so likable and trustable. She is also highly intelligent with a great sense of humor. The fact that our session transpired over Zoom did not reduce the quality of the work in any perceivable way. Annie explained everything she was planning to do in the session and generously followed up with resources afterward. 

The Qigong portion of the session was very powerful. It paved the way for me to go in deep during the sound bath. The combination of Annie’s gifted and gentle narration during her guided visualization and the musical toning took me into another world where extensive healing occurred. Following the session my heart felt a great deal lighter, and I had enough energy to go out dancing! The stone of pain at my core that was weighing down each moment dissolved after my first session with Annie, and over a month later, it is still gone….

During our second powerful session one week later, I received information during the sound bath that was very healing and inspiring for me. That info helped greatly to ease the depression that was haunting me that week. Annie’s sessions reminded me of the huge power we have for our own self-healing. As a result, I felt empowered around shifting some chronic and stagnant medical and spiritual issues. After the session, I began to take steps that have since led me down a healing path of significance.

I opted to book the third session one week after the second, and just knowing that I would be working with Annie brought me a sense of hope and grounding. I loved every aspect of the session and was able to go in so deep. We had been focused on root-chakra healing, and in the next nights my dreams reflected this work. Since then, my heart has been lighter around the grief and health issues that I am addressing. The hard stone at my core is gone. I feel much more at peace with the loss of my father, and my sadness over my friends’ deaths is experienced as sadness when it arises rather than the internalized despair of depression or exhaustion.

Annie is a magician. She is greatly gifted and absolutely brilliant at what she does. Her technical knowledge is matched by her intuition, and her strength as a healer is remarkable. Her generosity and heart-centered approach would be gifts to any client. Her sessions built upon each other over three weeks, as they supported me to strengthen, heal and lighten my heart after a winter of grief. I highly recommend Annie McDonnell to anyone seeking healing of any kind.”
--MN

Annie McDonnell is an acupuncturist and sound healing practitioner who blends her studies in trauma with Acupuncturists Without Borders, breathwork, Donna Eden energy medicine, Qigong, Western herbalism, and other holistic practices to nurture tender hearts and alchemize pain through the power of gentleness. An experienced traveler through the emotional terrain of grief after several personal heartbreaks and losses, she is currently training with David Kessler to become a Certified Grief Educator and leads a monthly free virtual Collective Grief Circle. She invites you to learn more at joyalchemyhealing.com or @acupunctureannie on Instagram.