For children in foster care, struggling with grief and loss can go hand in hand with experiencing trauma. Grief and loss are unfortunately a common, and sometimes pervasive emotional state. What's worse, is the effects of grief and loss - be that internalizing or externalizing, are oftentimes missed as being connected to the grief and loss. This results in many foster youth never understanding their own grief or never mourning their own loss.
The Gift of Compassion fellowship is a program where youth and young adults can learn about using meditation as a way to move through grief.
Draped over LaTeesha Pinkney’s white “Gift of Compassion” t-shirt was a long, thin necklace, carefully strung with gold beads and a dozen or so charms. Pinkney made the necklace, hand-picking each charm for some significance or memory it brought to mind. When asked which is her favorite, the 26-year-old quickly spun the necklace to a smooth but oddly shaped green stone.
“When I first saw it, it reminded me of an imperfect world. You know a globe, it’s all perfect and a circle,” she explained. “But it’s not really like that living how I’ve lived … so it’s just an imperfect circle.”
Pinkney made the necklace as part of the Gift of Compassion fellowship, a program that she and five other former foster youth and leaders participated in to learn about meditation as a way to move through grief and find “a way back to your true self” – the group’s working definition of therapy.
This past Thursday, the cohort led a day-long conference for policy-makers, social workers, independent living coordinators, and other foster youth at the California Endowment called “Overcoming Trauma and Grief Through Meditation: A Dialogue on Available Youth Services.”
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