Healing the Well

Healing the Well: A Journey Through Grief After Stillbirth

When Tanja's son was born still, she found herself in a place no parent is ever prepared for - a grief so profound it felt impossible to bear, let alone heal.

This is not a book about loss. It is a book about learning to love.

Healing the Well is a deeply personal and spiritually rich account of one mother's journey through the aftermath of stillbirth. Written for bereaved parents - those who know what it means to love someone they never got to hold for long - it offers not platitudes or prescriptions, but honest companionship through the darkest terrain of human experience.

At its heart, the book is structured around the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle also known as the Book of Changes, which became the author's unexpected spiritual companion in grief. Each chapter draws on a hexagram - as translated by Hilary Barrett - that came as an answer to a question asked in the depths of pain. Together, they trace a path from the initial shock of loss through the slow, nonlinear process of healing: stripping away the old self, retreating inward, releasing the grip of the mind, repairing the well of the subconscious, and gradually, tenderly, returning to life.

The book moves through grief's many landscapes - the paralysis of fresh loss, the torment of unanswerable questions, the unexpected gifts hidden within pain, the challenge of letting go without abandoning love - with a voice that is at once unflinching and compassionate. It does not promise that grief will disappear. It offers something more truthful: that within the pain lies a doorway to a deeper self, and that our children, though gone from our arms, are never truly gone.

Drawing on the I Ching, Lao Tzu, Jungian psychology, neuroscience of the subconscious mind, and the author's own raw experience, Healing the Well weaves together the personal and the universal, the ancient and the contemporary. It speaks to anyone navigating the loss of a child - at any stage of pregnancy or infancy - and to anyone who has ever stood at the edge of unbearable grief and wondered how to go on.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.-Richard Bach

This book is an invitation to find the butterfly.