The Grief and Happiness Handbook is available now on Amazon.
Also available at
How The Grief and Happiness Handbook Can Help You
Whatever your circumstance may be, this book offers you resourceful support and helpful practices through tips, strategies, and ideas, along with personal stories of individuals going through grief like you. It is written to encourage you to step forward in a positive way and discover how life is going to be as you proceed. Each chapter contains ways for you to look at your life from a new perspective and has practices that will help put what you are learning into action. Throughout the chapters, you will find personal stories designed to give you caring perspectives from fellow grievers. Reading their stories will help you understand you are not alone in the experiences you are having. By sharing these real-life stories, I hope you will discover new ways to foster joy in living once again. You can move from feeling stuck and alone to feeling optimistic and supported as you enter a new experience of who you can become.
As you read the book from start to finish, use it like a Handbook where you pick and choose a topic that pertains to an issue that most needs your attention. Wherever you are in the process of grief, or if you have been living with it for years, within these pages you will find inspiration to support you, along with practices to comfort you on your healing journey. I encourage you to do the practices that most resonate with you and will enable you to feel supported as you actively seek a new way of being in the world. Let each chapter stimulate and encourage you to use the tools you need to establish the new life you are ready to enjoy.
My goal is that as you go through the many suggestions included here, you will be motivated to move forward, using the grief you feel for your loved ones to inspire you to become the person you are meant to be. I want you to always remember I am here for you and will be with you every step of the way. I know firsthand the grieving process and believe if we do it together, you will come out stronger on the other side.
Foreword by Marci Shimoff for Grief and Happiness Handbook
As surprising as it sounds, you can be happy and grieve simultaneously. While our society doesn’t teach that, there is a way to have a state of inner peace and well-being that doesn’t depend on our circumstances—I call that being “happy for no reason.”
In this beautiful and profound Grief and Happiness Handbook, Emily Thiroux Threatt details how grief is a natural and important process when we’ve experienced loss. It's not something that can or should be bypassed but we can experience without losing our inner well-being. She goes on to offer clear and brilliant guidance about how you can grieve with greater grace and peace while also honoring your own feelings of grief and the life of the loved one you’ve lost.
That’s a life-changing concept.
I’d always wanted to experience a lasting and unshakeable happiness, even amid the most challenging situations, and so I did extensive study in the field of happiness, searching for answers. I spoke with top researchers and experts in the field and interviewed 100 of the happiest people in the world to learn their secrets. I tried out what they were doing, and it worked! These discoveries became the basis for my book, Happy for No Reason.
A few years after the book was published, my father and mother, both of whom I was very close with, passed away. After spending most of my life in utter fear of losing them, I was amazed to experience a deep sense of peace alongside my grief. I felt so fortunate to embrace the natural process of grieving in a way that made the journey very rich. I experienced firsthand how grief and happiness can go side by side.
More than a decade ago, I began training other people to teach what I’d learned about happiness so they could share it in their work. I'm thrilled that Emily, the author of this book, is one of my star graduates. She became certified as a Happy For No Reason Trainer so she could help people move through their grieving process.
Emily now uses happiness practices to complement how she guides people in dealing with grief. And the results speak for themselves. Her clients and students are finding deeper peace and well-being amidst their loss. Emily's important work continues to grow through The Grief and Happiness Alliance, a weekly online gathering offering tools, practices, and community connection for people grieving around the world.
The Grief and Happiness Handbook is a great follow-up to the wisdom and tools Emily shared in her book, Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief. Both of these books are a gift to anyone facing grief or loss.
I know that no matter your specific situation, you’ll find what’s shared in this handbook to be extraordinarily helpful. Find a cozy place to curl up with this book and discover the comfort, support, love, and happiness waiting for you on every page. My heart and my love are with you in your grief.
- Marci Shimoff, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Happy for No Reason, Love for No Reason and co-author of six titles in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.
Endorsements for Living and Living Your Way Through Grief
Emily Thiroux Threatt has written what I consider to be a really important book, one of most profoundly helpful books I have read on the subject. The book is practical with things people can do to help them deal with grief and loss.
Jack Canfield is the originator of the Chicken Soup for the SoulⓇ series and is an award-winning speaker and internationally recognized leader in personal development.
The Grief and Happiness Handbook is a brilliant work by Emily Thiroux Threatt who writes from the heart and shoots straight from the hip to deliver the way to live a more awakened life. She charts the course for how to walk through the shadows of grief into the light of the Sun. With Emily as your guide, you are in good hands.
-- Rickie Byars
Acclaimed singer-songwriter in the genre of inspirational/New Thought music and ia a social activist
In this beautiful and profound Grief and Happiness Handbook, Emily Thiroux Threatt shows how grief is a natural and essential process when we’ve experienced loss. Its not something that can or should be bypassed, but is something we can experience without losing our inner well-being. She goes on to offer clear and brilliant guidance about how you can grieve with greater grace and peace while also honoring your own feelings of grief and the life of the loved one you’ve lost. That’s a life-changing concept.
-- Marci Shimoff, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Happy for No Reason, Love for No Reason and co-author of six titles in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.
"As the tears of grief fill your eyes, Emily Threatt serves you The Grief and Happiness Handbook—a treasured heart-centered home for your tears to land on the pages. Your understanding, empathy, creativity, autonomy, and safety needs are met with hope, healing, and happiness.
--Dr Valerie Simonsen
drvaleriesimonsen.com
youknowmore.org
The gift of Emily's work is useful, practical, authentic, and healing. We all deal with grief. Having a way to navigate it through writing and self-discovery allows us to experience more light on our journey.
-- Reverend Rachel Hollander
Minister, https://www.revrachelhollander.com/
Emily's words are not only powerful, but they are also raw, truthful, and inspiring. As someone who has experienced profound loss and grief, she is able to speak those truths in a way that will touch your heart while also leaving you feeling inspired that hope and happiness is possible once more.
-- John Polo
Coach. Author. Speaker
www.johnpolocoaching.com
Carrying on in the face of grief and reclaiming your joy - What a concept. And it is possible by using Emily Thiroux-Threatt’s work as your guide. From suggestions such as “How To,” practice prompts, sharing stories of her losses, and finding joy again, as a grief professional myself, I find very useful. I’ve participated in her journaling workshops and attended the Grief and Happiness Alliance. These are good works manifested by the gifted Emily.
-- Rev. Richard Carlini RN BA C-RNPC
Minister - Unity Center of Davis
Senior Minister, Transform Myself Inc., A Unity Ministry
A dear friend of my husband died suddenly a few months after my husband did. He was much younger, so I was concerned for his wife who had no idea she was going to become a widow at a young age. We had moved to Maui two years before this happened, so I was an ocean away from her. I wanted to do something for her that would provide comfort and support long after the celebration was over, and friends and family were getting back to their lives. I decided I would write her a note every week for the first year. Living on Maui I am always taking pictures of the beauty that surrounds me, so I created a card that had one of my pictures on the front with the note inside the card. She expressed to me she loved the comfort of getting my note in the mail every week.
Since then, I found a way to publish those cards so that comfort and support could be given to anyone. The 52 cards are printed on a nice heavy stock and come in a lovely box. One side of each card has the messages I wrote, and the other side has a picture of beautiful Maui. Each cards has a different picture. You can have a box of cards that you draw a card from whenever you would like some comfort and support, you could give a box of cards to a friend as a bereavement gift, or you could drop one of the cards in an envelope one a week and mail it to a friend to give support and comfort through their first year of grief.
Grief is not a problem to be solved. Grief is a situation in life we each move through in our own way. Use these cards to support you and your loved ones in that unique journey. They are here for you to use as you need. The greatest healing and growth comes from reading a new card every week. The loving sentiments and nurturing photos are here to give helpful, healing guidance to you. We who are grieving are One; as we say in Hawaii, we are Ohana, and we are on this journey together.
All the profits from the sales of the cards goes straight to the Grief and Happiness Alliance Nonprofit Organization to support their important work.
Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief is available now on Amazon.
Also available at
In life, we all share two events: birth and death. While we joyfully anticipate the birth of a baby and spend months preparing with reading books, taking classes, preparing a nursery, and having baby showers, when death nears, we tend to focus on everything but death. Just like birth, the more we prepare for death, the easier it will be to go through the process and everything that surrounds us. But we don’t usually get to do that. Most of us live is some state of denial until the death actually occurs, then we are lost. Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief is an expression of the journey and process to when you feel alive again with tools to help you pull yourself up in a positive way along the way to help you live again. The format allows the reader to be supported and actively participate in recovering for a whole year one chapter at a time.
Who is this book for?
After the funeral or celebration of life, those who are grieving often find themselves in isolation with loved ones keeping their distance not knowing what to say or do to help. The primary audience for this book are those who are grieving and want help through the process, and the book can also help those who know someone who is grieving but don’t know how to help. By focusing on different topics, emotions, and events each week, the reader will discover ways to cope and to know that they are not alone in the process.
Forward for Loving and Living Your Way through Grief by Michael Bernard Beckwith
Oftentimes when a loved one dies, its sting can catch and hold us in a web of grief, loss, and even despair. As we tend to feel emotionally, soulfully, and even physically connected to our loved ones, these relationships often provide us with a profound sense of intimacy, comfort, and stasis, and can become the very foundation of who we believe we are. So when they die, it can feel like pieces of our very identity has been snatched away, and the sense of loss is felt at the core of our being. Such feelings of loss often engender variations of the questions: Why did this have to happen? Why did they have to leave? Who am I without them in my life? How am I supposed to live without them? What will I do? Although such inquiries are typically borne of grief, when understood within a spiritual context, they can provide the opportunity for intense inner reflection and contemplation, and ultimately, transformation.
You see, not only is it possible to live happily and thrive after a loved one transitions, it is required of us as the eternal and expansive beings we actually are. Many of us have been conditioned to experience our earthly lives and relationships through our physical senses, to what and whom we can see, hear, and touch, so we are attached to this as the ideal experience. However, limiting our ability to feel and share love, intimacy, beauty, and bliss to only that which we can see, hear, and touch, literally blunts our awareness of our innate cosmic connection to our supernal reality in which these conditions actually exist.
It would support us immensely to remember that while the terms of our relationship with our loved ones may change, the nature and reality of it doesn’t, as Real Love, in its eternality, can never “die.” To grasp this, we must rethink and process how we relate, how we love, and what actually constitutes an unconditionally loving relationship from within. Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief can be your trusted resource and guide through that process back to recognizing Real Love. Emily is a living example of someone who, instead of merely coping with her grief and sorrow, transcended those experiences to live an authentically peaceful and joyful life through spiritual self-discovery.
I met Emily through her husband and my good friend, Rev. Ron Threatt, when they attended Agape International Spiritual Center while living in Los Angeles. I saw Emily’s spiritual growth through her right use of spiritual principles in a very powerful way. When Ron passed, you could simultaneously see her sadness and loss while embracing the spiritual principles that ultimately pulled her through. Through her spiritual practice and self-realization, Emily was able to ultimately alchemize her sadness into a deeper awareness of Love, earning her invaluable revelations, insights, and the wisdom that comes with spiritual transformation that both allows and calls her to minister to and support others who are grieving from the loss of not only a loved one, but loss of any kind.
Study this book and utilize its practices. It will support you in taking back your mind, heart, and life from merely coping and getting by after loss, to living and loving—freely and unconditionally—as you you’re meant to. As Emily says, “By approaching this process with an open heart and open arms, we can all learn, love, share and be the best that we can be.”
Peace & Richest Blessings,
Michael Bernard Beckwith
Founder & Spiritual Director, Agape International Spiritual Center
Author, Life Visioning and Spiritual Liberation
Endorsements for Living and Living Your Way Through Grief
When you’re hurting, Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief serves as a steadfast guide to ease your deep sorrow, open your heart to joy, and restore your life after loss.
Emily Thiroux Threatt not only teaches you how to use love and joy to cope with loss, but also offers many practical tools and useful suggestions to rebuild your shattered world. From journaling to practicing gratitude to setting intentions, you’ll find support, understanding, and comfort whether you’re new to grief or have been living with loss for years.
Filled with insight, wisdom, and relatable stories, this resource shares everything you need to know to start living again with joy, meaning, and love after loss.
--Chelsea Hanson, author of The Sudden Loss Survival Guide – 7 Essential Practices for Healing Grief
Threatt’s personal experience with the deaths of husbands, parents, and other loved ones equipped her well to author this primer in navigating the territory of grief. She recognizes the uniqueness of each person’s grief and offers a smorgasboard of practical suggestions to help people along their individual paths. This book is quite timely, given the current pandemic which has left immeasurable grief in its wake.
--Brooke A. Brown, Ph.D., Founder of Nā Keiki O Emalia, a non-profit foundation who provides support to grieving children, teens, and their families to help them heal after the death of a loved one
There are many reasons I love this book. Two of them are that it is easy to read and it contains many easy-to-do ideas to ease your loss. I wish it was available when my wife died. It wasn’t then, but it is now. Don’t miss a chance to get this heartfelt handbook of healing. It is a godsend.
--Allen Klein,
Author of Embracing Life After Loss
Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief is a deeply transformative book.
Emily’s poignant experiences of loss captivates the reader and takes them on a journey of inner strength and hope. She has distilled her lifetime of experiences into timeless wisdom and strategies to help others work through their own losses and to know they are not alone.
As a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst with over 35 years of experience, I can highly recommend this book to anyone who has or is facing challenging life circumstances.
--Tony Toneatto, PhD and Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
An insightful, riveting, thoughtful and thoroughly engaging work on finding joy while experiencing grief. Inspired by her personal experience, Emily Thiroux Threatt generously and lovingly offers a practical yet spiritual guide for loving and living your way through a process no one welcomes but all must at some time traverse.
“Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief,” provides a wealth of reader-friendly support, guidance, encouragement and acknowledgement for implementation of its wise, workable recommendations for navigating through the loss of a loved one.
Spiritual practice, common sense and uncommon wisdom fill these pages. Letters and lists, stages and steps, principles and processes address, inspire, and motivate feeling how you feel, living in the moment, surviving and thriving -- all in the midst of your grief.
A wondrous and welcome addition to your library of living and loving through loss, this book is to be savored, treasured and kept close at hand and heart as needed, desired and required. A true gift to a grieving heart.
--Rev. Greta Sesheta, 7- Pointer Star Ministries
We all know that grief is a long process, but I find few resources that are structured to walk us through that first year of loss in both an empathetic and a constructive way.
Reading this book is like sitting down with Emily on her back porch in Maui, sipping tea and talking about life.
While it’s so easy to self-isolate when grieving, this book might be the first “friend” you invite back in. You’ll find kind, gentle words, as well as practical resources to help you on your journey.
--Danica Thurber, Certified Therapeutic Art Life Coach, Project Grief
Emily Thiroux Threatt’s “Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief” vibrates with a gentleness and compassion that I didn’t realize I needed until I read it. Thank you Emily.
--Laurie Kilmartin, Comedian, Author Death People Suck, writer for television’s Conon
Afterword for Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief by Melo Garcia
Congratulations. Yes, I am congratulating you. You have just read so many different ways to help you to navigate through your journey of grief through your journey of loss. And it hurts. And it's impossible many days, but it's worth it, to find your way to live. Not to exist, not to wait. But to find living after the loss. When I met Emily virtually, it wasn't entirely because of grief. Yet we spoke for hours about the similarity of the way we both view grief and loss, yet I yearned for her peace and her calm. I began to study her, I devoured every morsel of her website, and her journal course she gifted me. And as I started not only to practice journaling but to create ways to find living each day, I found the ability to grieve and to live, and it wasn't one or the other. I found myself feeling again, and I was so attached to feeling only emotions related to grief and loss; it was a welcome and needed opportunity to utilize the exercises and theories Emily gave ( and continues to) provide me!!We often create an expectation of what grief looks like, and as Emily highlights throughout the book, we must decide to allow the living to change and become a new. And then a few months before publication, she gave me the manuscript of this very book you are reading. I sat and read, nodding at every word, in tears of gratitude that these words will live in this world forever, helping all of those who have grief and loss. Grief and Loss aren't meant to be cured or diagnosed but felt, worked through, and the result is to live. To live in peace and to live and to grieve. Emily is one of a kind soul, yet this book has been left for you to devour or to nibble as you are able. This book is meant for you to give to anyone who you see face grief and loss. And the whole meaning of this book isn't sadness and death, but it is, in fact, one of the greatest love stories you'll ever read; it's a story of love that is infinite. It's your love story, and it's my love story, and most importantly, it is Emily’s love story. If grief was a language, Emily writes and speaks it fluently and without question has helped you to create the steps you need to find your way. She brilliantly advises only to do what you can when you can, and maybe that's to pay this book.
Reviews
"Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, "Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief" is an ideal instructional guide for dealing with grief and is particularly timely in this present era of pandemic that has resulted in the loss of half a million Americans and more. Deserving of as wide a readership as possible in these particularly troubled times, and while especially and unreservedly recommended for community library Grief & Bereavement and Stress Management Self-Help collections."
--Midwest Reviews
Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief: A Comprehensive Guide to Reclaiming and Cultivating Joy and Carrying on in the Face of Loss (A Grief Recovery Handbook) by Emily Thiroux Threatt is a handy manual for readers who are grieving and have experienced loss and it will help them in taking back their minds, hearts, and lives from merely coping and getting by after loss. The author's personal stories and experiences teach readers the inevitability of crisis and death, and she gives good support to readers who are starting to live again and makes them open to loving and living again. No preparations can be made by anyone to deal with the reality of loss when it happens. The tools and techniques shared by the author will encourage readers who dealing with loss to embrace the process of learning how to start living again and welcoming sustained moments of joy while being aware that they are loved and supported.
Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief by Emily Thiroux Threatt is engaging and tackles a topic that is universal and yet cannot be dealt with that easily. Reading this book and the stories shared in it is a good way to ease pain and gives one the confidence to be in the world in a new way. There are tips like meditating and allowing space for mindful grieving, sadness, and loneliness, finding joy and gratitude in difficult times and learning what to tell others so that they can help in the recovery journey. It is a resourceful support that will help those grieving to think in a positive way to bring back the joy in living again.
--Reviewed By Mamta Madhavan for Readers’ Favorite
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