Shadows to Light is an 8-week group support program that provides a once per week group meeting in a safe, nonjudgemental environment, lead by a professional Grief and Bereavement Coach. Journaling guidance, skills and practices for problem management and resources for further assistance and connection.
This is a supportive group and is not intended to be replaced by therapy. Resources and referrals will be available for therapeutic supports.
Legacy projects are meaningful ways to ensure that important aspects of your loved one’s life continue to have an impact on the world. These projects aren’t about memorializing the past but about carrying forward what matters in active, living ways. Legacy project planning focuses on how your deceased loved one formed who you are today and how these aspects continue to live on within you. What values or qualities of theirs do you want to carry forward? What would they want their legacy to be? Legacy projects can provide profound meaning by transforming grief into purposeful action that benefits others while honoring what was most significant about your loved one. 4-6 sessions
Gottman Institute Certified Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work Program Leader
The Gottman Institute is a globally renowned organization dedicated to improving relationships and marriages through research-based practices and interventions. Founded by Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, the institute is known for its work in relationship psychology , particularly in the areas of marital therapy and couple counseling.
The Institute employs a scientific approach to understanding relationships , relying on extensive empirical research, including observations of couples and longitudinal studies. This research has led to the development of effective therapeutic interventions designed to foster healthy relationship dynamics.
The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work is a widely recognized book and program outlining key strategies couples can use to build and sustain strong relationships. As a Program Leader, Molly Zola leads couples into a deeper dive into Seven Principles, showing them how to strengthen their relationship, enhance their emotional bond, and improve their overall satisfaction in their life together.
The Program, using discussions, exercises and activities, takes participants through the following seven principles:
Enhance Your Love Maps - This principle emphasizes the importance of knowing your partner’s world. Couples should build a detailed understanding of each other’s history, dreams, preferences, and aspirations (the “Love Maps”). It’s about being intimately familiar with each other’s lives, which forms a strong foundation for a relationship
Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration - Maintaining a positive perspective about your partner is crucial. This principle encourages couples to express appreciation and affection regularly. By nurturing fondness and admiration, partners can counteract negativity and improve their connection, fostering goodwill and respect even during conflicts.
Turn Towards Each Other Instead of Away - Couples are encouraged to recognize and respond to each other’s bids for attention, affection, and support. Turning towards each other means actively engaging with your partner’s attempts to connect, rather than dismissing or neglecting them. This practice builds emotional intimacy and strengthens the bond between partners.
Let Your Partner Influence You - This principle focuses on mutual respect and allowing influence in decision-making. Couples would value each other’s opinions and feelings, which promotes equality in the relationship. When partners feel they can express themselves and be heard, it leads to greater collaboration and partnership.
Solve Your Solvable Problems- Not all conflicts in a relationship can be resolved, but man can. This principle provides strategies for addressing solvable problems through effective communication and compromise. It includes identifying the issue, discussing it calmly, and brainstorming solutions together.
Overcome Gridlock -Gridlock occurs when couples face perpetual issues that lead to recurring conflicts. This principle encourages couples to understand the underlying dreams and values associated with these conflicts. By gaining insight into each other’s deep needs and desires, partners can work towards finding a way to accommodate these issues, rather then allowing them to lead to resentment.
Create Shared Meaning- This principle emphasizes the importance of creating a shared sense of purpose and meaning within the relationship. It involves developing rituals, shared goals, and values that strengthen the couple’s bond. Couples are encouraged to cultivate traditions, shared dreams, and a common vision for their life together, thus enhancing their emotional connection.
This tickets for this program are sold at a per couple price.
In my Life Coaching work, I kept noticing the same pattern: person after person struggling with aspects of grief that was making it difficult for them to move forward. They weren’t just experiencing pain in the natural way people do when they lose someone—they were suffering. Pain is different from suffering. Pain is a human response: yearning for the person, missing them, feeling lost, and recognizing that what was loved is no longer present. It hurts, but it is real, and it cannot be “taken away” from grief because grief itself is the mind and body learning how to live around a loss. Pain is a natural part of love expressed through loss.
Suffering, however, is something else. The grief I witnessed was often complicated by an additional layer—confusion, resistance, and the belief that the pain should be different, should end sooner, or shouldn’t be happening at all. People were not simply grieving; they were holding themselves in a prolonged struggle against what they were experiencing. And when suffering becomes tangled with grief, recovery is delayed. It prolongs the process, and it creates disconnection—disconnection from the person who is grieving, from the life they used to know, and often from the deeper truth of who they are and what the loss means. Pain can be endured; suffering is what makes grief feel impossible.
It made sense to me why I felt drawn to specializing in bereavement coaching. Because all of us grieve. Some of us may never meet our “true love” in the romantic sense, but in this life, we will all grieve something. No one escapes grief. Yet, despite its certainty, our culture struggles to talk about it. We avoid conversations about death, loss, and what it means to miss someone. We become uncomfortable with pain, and in that discomfort we quietly adopt myths—beliefs about how grief should look, how long it should last, and what kind of reaction is considered acceptable.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that grief is a problem to be solved quickly. Instead of seeing grief as a meaningful human process, we often treat it as pathological—a “chapter” that must be closed, a wound that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. The cultural message becomes: grieve less, move on faster, don’t feel too much. But grief isn’t a defect that needs rapid correction. It is a response to love. It is the cost of attachment. When we treat grief like something that needs to be eliminated immediately, we inadvertently intensify suffering.
This is where the myths matter. The suffering many people carry is frequently caused not by the loss itself, but by the stories they have internalized about grief. Those stories make them resist their pain. They try to override their own experience. They add pressure on top of the loss, and that pressure becomes its own kind of pain—one that keeps people from connecting to what is true.
That is why I want to clear up the myths today. I want to return grief to what it really is: pain that belongs in the human experience and has a pathway through it. In the coaching work, a central theme is learning how to stay with the pain. Staying with pain does not mean drowning in it or giving up. It means being willing to feel it fully and honestly, without turning it into judgment, shame, or resistance. It means allowing grief to move through you rather than hardening into suffering.
When we stay with the pain and eliminate the suffering—the extra layer created by myths—clarity and peace become possible. That shift doesn’t erase the loss. It transforms the relationship to it. It becomes easier to find a way forward: not by pretending the loss didn’t matter, but by integrating it into life in a way that makes meaning and breath available again.
Importantly, this isn’t only a comforting idea. Research has suggested that what we practice with grief—what we allow ourselves to feel and process—can influence the body and the brain. Epigenetic studies and neurobiological research indicate that humans have an innate capacity to move through painful experiences. Our bodies carry the knowledge that we are built to survive and resolve what we must feel. Pain is encoded in us not as a punishment, but as part of how the nervous system and the human organism learn to recover. From a biological perspective, pain is not simply something that happens to us; it is part of the process through which resolution can occur.
Because grief is one of the guaranteed experiences of life, the question isn’t whether pain will come. The question is whether we will let pain become suffering by adding resistance, myths, and avoidance. Pain can’t be removed from love. But suffering is optional. Suffering is created when we deny what we feel or when we believe there is something wrong with our grief.
In this presentation, I invite the audience to separate pain from suffering. Pain is natural—yearning, missing, feeling lost—and it cannot be erased. Suffering is the delay, the prolonging, the disconnection that happens when we fight the pain instead of moving through it. The path forward is not denial or quick closure. It is presence.
Stay with the pain. Let it be felt. Let it teach you what it needs to teach you. Then—when suffering is released—clarity and peace can emerge. And you can begin to move forward with your grief, carrying what matters without being trapped by what you fear.
That is why I want to clear up these myths today: because the more we understand grief accurately, the more we can support healing. And healing—real healing—doesn’t require you to stop loving. It requires you to stop suffering.
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