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Elizabeth Straka, Ph.D., CCC-SLPElizabeth is a Center for Compassion, Altruism, Research & Education (CCARES) compassion ambassador, grief care educator, author of Joy at the Edges of Grief, reiki master, and end-of-life doula. She guides others to be fully present, heighten awareness, and cultivate compassion while teaching the importance of facing and caring for loss and grief.
Her intention is to cultivate compassion and expand awareness, with hope to help others awaken to their surroundings, inner sensations, thoughts/feelings, interconnections, and their relationship with loss and grief. She believes her compassion-focused loss-grief activities that are often infused with nature can help the world grow love, learn how to care for loss and grief, support healing, and build connections. GROWLOVE offerings were born from her professional experience as a social-language-speech therapist, her lived experience with caregiving her late husband through cancer, her grief journey after the death of her husband, and her year-long training with the Center for Compassion, Altruism, Research, and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. Pausing in stillness to marinate and integrate her professional and lived experiences, during and after CCARE, gave rise to GROWLOVE: Compassion. Awareness. Nature., and her compassion-focused model for grief: griefCARE: Compassion. Awareness. Relationship. Embodiment. She felt called to weave her knowledge, insight, and intuition with David Allen’s land sculpture, Portal, and Daniel Seigel’s Wheel of Awareness tool, to create Portaling Awareness Nature programs, GROWLOVE Challenges, and GriefCARE programs. One of life’s lessons that Elizabeth deeply values is the importance of our interconnectedness and the need to care for each other. Through her dedication in years of study and service, she mastered the capacity to hold compassionate space and seamlessly infuse evidence-based practice with lived experience. Elizabeth has presented nationally, conducted research, consulted, mentored, published, and provided clinical care. She feels called to help others understand how compassion, awareness, and nature are invaluable resources ... how to face grief, emerge from the suffering, and be available for transformation. She has chosen to resonate the vibration of: Awareness is compassion—Compassion is love—Love is light—and Light heals. |
