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In this session, Mary Doane shares ways of offering compassionate support to someone in grief without losing yourself in the process.

As demand for our open courses increases, along with new partnerships requiring custom courses, we need more teaching time from our instructors. Across this year we have piloted an internal training program in which we provided additional training to three existing ZCP facilitators to qualify them to teach our Mindful Caregiving Education (MCE). 

The training consisted of 20 hours teaching with Executive Director, Roy Remer, and Senior Instructor, Mary Doane, covering our key modules, best practices for teaching MCE, and also a session dedicated to teaching online through Zoom. This training will be followed by the instructors co-teaching MCE courses with Roy or Mary.

Two of the instructors have shared what they learned from the training.

Loretta is a volunteer caregiver for people in hospice and palliative care. She has been facilitating New Volunteer Training with ZCP since 2017.

What, for you, was the most surprising thing you learned from this training? 

I was surprised to learn in the MCE training that I can set aside all expectations of delivering the perfect presentation and focus instead on being fully present to offer practices to caregivers. While there is much content to cover, I saw how effectively it was absorbed when there was plenty of space around the ideas. And by letting go of all sense of “performance,” my complete attention shifts to our participants. I look forward to practicing presence in the context of teaching

How do you feel it will support you in your professional teaching?

I know how powerful presence can be in caregiving, at the bedside with family members, and in hospice and palliative care settings. Presence is wholehearted and caring attention. It invites connection through deep listening – listening inward to mind, body, and heart; listening to others; listening with openness. With presence, we are better able to see what is true, and be with whatever shows up in the room, no matter how difficult. I feel certain that trusting and focusing on presence will support my teaching in the same ways it supports caregiving.

Was there anything you learned that you feel will be supportive personally?

Sometimes learning can mean remembering what we already know. The reminder to lead with an open heart will support me in life as well as teaching. The warmth and open-heartedness of the teachers and participants in the training helped me remember how healing this can be. I saw in them how leading with an open heart can be expressed through kindness, acceptance, vulnerability, and authenticity. Trusting presence and leading with an open heart are important lessons that will serve me, and allow me to serve others well.

Teresa is a journalist and zen practitioner. Born in Latin America, she grew up in Spain, and became a US citizen after two decades living and working in the US. She currently lives in Spain and takes care of her mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s.

Teresa partnered with ZCP to develop and teach our MCE for Spanish-speaking caregivers, which will be run in early 2022.

What, for you, was the most surprising thing you learned from this training? 

As part of the training, we did an exercise around Loss, which was very powerful. It made me realize how difficult it is to let go of things we care about, let go of our abilities, people in our lives, and our self-identities. Thinking that the people we care for or have cared for in the past already lost many of the things we struggle to let go of made me feel very compassionate towards them. The importance of setting boundaries and not feeling guilty about it was also a great learning.

How do you feel it will support you in your professional teaching?

The intense training, the teachings of Roy and Mary, the exchanges with the other instructors, and the opportunity to teach some of the modules prepared us for the next step of becoming instructors ourselves. I am very grateful.

Was there anything you learned that you feel will be supportive personally?

For me, I learned the importance of self-compassion and setting boundaries.

We at ZCP are grateful for the time and dedication our instructors have shown, and for their passion to support those caregiving for others. If you are interested in training with us, please keep an eye on the website for announcements of upcoming training opportunities.

If you like what you read, please join us and enroll in one of our courses, share our work with someone you think will benefit from it, or support us through a donation.

This year we began a two-year project in partnership with the Palliative Care Team at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), which is part of the Sutter Health Network. The aim of the project is to introduce support sessions for family caregivers within Sutter Health. 

The project began with Zen Caregiving Project (ZCP) delivering four sessions to the Palliative Care Team in Palo Alto and San Mateo. These sessions covered self-care, managing difficult emotions, loss, and maintaining healthy boundaries. The sessions were a way of introducing ZCP’s teaching approach and content to staff, helping them to recommend the sessions to family caregivers in the future, and hopefully also provided support to the staff in their emotionally demanding work. 

The next stage of the project will be running our CAREgivers program for family caregivers in Sutter Health. The CAREgivers course consists of six one-hour sessions, run weekly. The sessions are drop-in providing flexibility for the caregivers with their often unpredictable schedules. Each session includes some teaching on a topic, a short guided meditation, activities, and an opportunity for sharing with other caregivers in the group. 

We are working with social workers from two Sutter Health locations to recruit for our first pilot course in October and are planning to run another three to four courses in 2022. We hope that these first courses, taught by ZCP instructors, will build awareness and demand for the CAREgivers program among the family caregiver population. Following completion of the ZCP-led sessions, we hope to train Sutter Health staff members in the delivery of the program as part of our established Train-the-Trainer program. In this way, we would ensure the sustainability of the program and continued support for family caregivers. 

For more information on this project, CAREgivers, or our Train-the-Trainer program, please contact us at education@zencaregiving.org.

We have been working with Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (ZSFG) since September 2019; researching, designing, and implementing a Train-the-Trainer program. In this first phase of the project, we trained four staff members, providing them with materials such as lesson plans, videos and handouts, to support them in delivering six mindfulness-based sessions to family caregivers in English. We have named this six-session course CAREgivers.  In June, after much careful planning and thought, we ran our first CAREgivers course with family caregivers.

The population at ZSFG is more diverse than neighboring hospitals, has higher rates of people who speak English as a second Language, and has a greater number of patients on Medi-Cal and Medi-Care. Part of our project involved understanding the needs of this population and designing our course to be as accessible and attractive as possible to them. In this blog we share five key takeaways for designing for this audience.

1. Not everyone has Zoom!

At Zen Caregiving Project (ZCP) we have been running all of our programs online since the pandemic, asking participants to join via video call to create a sense of online community. At ZSFG, however,  some family caregivers can’t use video calls as they don’t have access to a smartphone or laptop, have limited data for video calls, and/or aren’t comfortable using online technology and software like Zoom. 

We have designed the CAREgivers course so that participants can call in via cell, landline, or video call, making it possible for anyone to participate in all activities regardless of how they are calling in. Not all family caregivers use email, so we also have simplified registration to a process that doesn’t require an email address. Additionally, as online polls can’t accommodate call-in participants, we don’t rely on zoom polls to collect data.

2. Don’t ask for too many personal details at registration

Some patients and family caregivers at ZSFG may have uncertainty around their immigration status, or may be undocumented, causing anxiety about sharing this type of personal information with institutions. To address and hopefully reduce any such concern, we have limited the amount of identifying information we ask for at registration and in the course and in marketing materials we emphasize that the courses are a safe space.

3. Recruitment takes time, and lots of effort!

Recruitment was particularly challenging this year. Online advertising of our course via email and social media outreach was limited as some of the caregivers we were trying to reach simply didn’t have email or use social media. Physical flyers and posters in clinic waiting rooms were not as effective as usual as COVID-19 meant many patients either didn’t attend sessions in person, or attended on their own without a family caregiver.

 In the end, we had the most luck by building networks within the hospital: clinicians were asked to refer anyone they thought may benefit from the course, and we built awareness of the program through social workers and the long-standing Cancer Awareness Resource and Education program (C.A.R.E). But the key to effective referrals was the hard work of a ZSFG team member who reached out to the referred caregivers, introducing the sessions to them, answering any questions they had, and reminding them when the next session was. This personal connection with each individual caregiver was very important in building the trust of attendees.

Initial sign-up numbers were small but we know that building word of mouth takes time and are confident that this number will grow as awareness of, and trust in, the program increases.

4. Keep language simple

Many of the patients and caregivers at ZSFG speak English as a second or third language. While we will be designing courses in both Spanish and Chinese, we wanted the course in English to be as accessible as possible. We also recognized that some caregivers may read at levels lower than those of the general population. In response, we reviewed all of our materials with an aim to adjust the existing  language so that it met an 8th Grade reading level. Instead of talking about boundary encroachment, for example, we talked about crossing someone’s boundaries. Instead of using “melancholy” we used sadness, and instead of talking about cultivating self-compassion we talked about growing or building self-compassion.

5. Mindfulness can support everyone, but don’t assume everyone knows what it is.

For some of us, Mindfulness can feel mainstream. It is mentioned in mainstream media, there are hundreds of apps and programs related to Mindfulness and it is being used in everything from professional sports to kindergarten classes.

It is not, however, so mainstream that everyone knows what it is. In our research with family caregivers at ZSFG there were many who had not heard of the concept, although were interested when it was explained to them. 

In designing our course we started with the assumption that our audience didn’t know what Mindfulness is. We worked hard to simplify our explanations, adding an additional session to give time to explain and discuss the approach. We also removed any explicitly Buddhist language like “Sangha” or “Dharma”, and grounded our explanations in real world examples to show how Mindfulness could be practically used in daily life.

Next steps

We will be running our second CAREgivers course later this year, and courses will continue throughout 2022. We also hope to transition to in-person sessions, as the city begins to open up after the pandemic lockdown. To read more about the program please see our previous blog on the start of the project, and the experiences of the Mindful Caregiving Trainees on the project.

The program

The pandemic has been a frightening time for everyone, but particularly those in healthcare. Healthcare professionals have cared for an overwhelming number of patients despite knowing little about the virus, how it works and the dangers it posed. They have also had to witness the suffering and death of high numbers of their isolated patients with little time to process or grieve, causing trauma and distress. Recent research indicates that a considerable proportion of healthcare workers have experienced depression, anxiety, stress, and sleep disturbances due to their pandemic experiences. 

To address this issue, 1440 Multiversity has designed a program called Healing Our Healthcare Heroes. The three-day, holistic residential program provides a place of rest and healing in which participants are offered a number of signature wellbeing sessions such as yoga and mindfulness and a core curriculum that explores Trauma, Resilience, Grief and Healing. Zen Caregiving Project partnered with 1440 Multiversity to design and deliver the Grief and Healing Session as part of the program.

Core elements of our Grief and Healing Session

• Introducing mindfulness as a tool in processing grief and loss. Loss can bring up powerful and uncomfortable emotions. Often our first response is to ignore them or turn away from them as they can be painful or unsettling.  This self-protection mechanism is often used by healthcare professionals who see multiple losses each day and yet need to continue their work.  Our session in Healing Our Healthcare Heroes shares how to use mindfulness to tune into the emotions of loss and grief, and explore them with curiosity.  Being with the emotions of grief allows for their processing. By building capacity to be with strong emotions, they become less disruptive. 

• Exploring how to use the body to integrate challenging emotions such as grief. We all experience emotions in physical ways: jaws clenching, fists tightening, heartbeat racing. In our session we share how to tune into these physical sensations as a way to bring oneself into the moment and ride out an emotional wave and anchor oneself to the moment. This is something that can be done easily and discreetly, at any point in the hospital or when seeing a patient. 

• Introducing the importance of Self-Compassion. Healthcare professionals are, by their nature, a compassionate group of people. They have been moved to devote their career to caring for and healing others. Often though, it is much easier to show compassion to others than to oneself. In the session we walk participants through a self-compassion exercise, reminding them that they, like other caregivers, have suffered during the pandemic, along with their patients, and they are deserving of their own self-compassion and kindness. In fact, self compassion is essential to build resilience and avoid burnout. 

• Using ritual for processing grief.  Ritual has been found to be extremely beneficial for processing grief emotions. In the session we explore different grief and loss rituals that could be used in a hospital setting, such as taking five minutes at the end of each day to sit quietly and wish well to those people you have seen that are suffering, or those you have lost. In the session, the instructor also invites participants to take part in a grief ritual, allowing them to remember those that they have lost and to be witnessed in that loss. 

• Connection and sharing. As with any course we offer to caregivers, connecting with others who have shared experiences is a vital element of the session. Healthcare workers have an opportunity to share stories and experiences they haven’t previously been able or willing to, as they are among others who understand and deeply empathize. We ensure that our session includes time for participants to share their experiences and interact. These connections both reduce isolation and aid with the healing process. 

The Healing Our Healthcare Heroes program launched on April 30 and continues to run with the generous support of healthcare foundations, private donors and philanthropic foundations. This partnership will reach at least 735 healthcare heroes by the end of 2021. If you are interested in contributing to this program as a donor or sponsor, please email CreateHope@1440.org.

Bethany Becker joined the ZCP Board of Directors in April 2021. She is a ZCP Volunteer, Senior Director of Marketing at Plume, and the owner of an adorable puppy called Ned. Here she tells us a bit more about how she got involved with ZCP, her experiences with caregiving, and the opportunities she sees for ZCP in the future.

How did you originally hear about ZCP and what drew you to the organization?

I first read an article about Zen Caregiving Project (then known as Zen Hospice Project) in early 2017 and something immediately clicked with me. The organization and its mission resonated in part due to my own experience with my grandmother’s death in 2015. That was my first time witnessing someone at the end of their life and actively dying. We were very lucky to have in-home hospice, with a comforting nurse who demystified the whole dying process. She transformed the experience for my entire family. 

When I learned about Zen Hospice Project, I realized that there was a whole movement around caring for people who were ill or reaching the end of their life, and that was a real revelation for me. 

What’s your involvement been with the organization?

Having read the article, I knew I wanted to get involved with the organization in some way. I attended some of ZCP’s courses, including an incredibly powerful Open Death Conversation. In that session, there was a young person dealing with a cancer diagnosis and a resident from the Guest House (the hospice facility that ZCP used to run) who was there with her family. It re-emphasized the importance of the organization’s work.

After that session, I started helping out at workshops and events and volunteered my skills in marketing and strategy to support the office team. I completed my bedside caregiver training through the Volunteer Program in May 2019 and have served as a volunteer caregiver since then. 

What excites you about being on the Board and what do you hope to bring to the Board?

Having witnessed the positive impact of the Volunteer Program on both residents and volunteers, I believe strongly in ZCP’s mission to support caregivers. Being part of the Board allows me to give back to the organization in new and important ways and support them in this mission. I try to bring the perspectives of a volunteer, caregiver and marketing professional to my role on the Board. 

The organization has gone through change and growth in the last few years, including a change of name and a broadening of scope to include supporting people and their caregivers at all stages of the illness journey. I hope to support this continued development and growth as ZCP evolves. Raising awareness and providing support at the end of someone’s life is vital, but in the time we are living in, caregiving more generally is equally important. 

What do you see as the big opportunities for ZCP?

I think ZCP has a very important role to play in raising awareness of the caregiving crisis we are in right now. Professional, clinical and family caregivers who support our society are taking on multiple roles, but their work is often invisible, undervalued and inadequately supported. Caregivers are burning out and don’t have the resources they need to care for themselves or others. Nearly all of us will be caregivers at some point in our lives, so it is crucial to bring awareness to the important, rewarding, challenging and very human work of caring for another person. 

Zen Hospice Project played an important role in raising awareness about end of life and palliative care, and pioneered a new and more holistic approach to the dying process. The approach emphasized meeting people where they were and providing emotional and spiritual support beyond pure medical care. It is my hope that Zen Caregiving Project can similarly help change the conversation around caregivers. Caring for a caregiver helps everyone, including the person they’re caring for, their family and their employer. 

Over the course of ZCP’s lifetime, the organization has built up a great body of knowledge, resources and practices. There is so much valuable learning and collective experience from the years it has operated, the cohorts of volunteers that have served and the range of teachers that have shaped the organization. This wealth of deep knowledge has led to the development of the Mindful Caregiving Education curriculum that is already being used in many ways across different populations. There is a huge opportunity for ZCP to expand this content to a wider audience that could benefit from its teachings.

How has your experience with ZCP influenced your own caregiving?

For me, the Volunteer Program training was incredibly powerful, as was serving by the bedside in Laguna Honda Hospital. I learned that there often is no “right” thing to do or say. Sometimes you can’t make things better, but the point is being there, fully, for someone in that moment. Just being present. 

This experience helped me a lot when I cared for my mother after a very serious neck and back surgery. I was her caregiver for two months and had a totally different level of patience and understanding with my mom than I would have previously. And I also had more patience for myself! My experience with ZCP prepared me to be a better caregiver for others, and that is partly because it taught me to also take care of myself.

If you like what you read, please join us and enroll in one of our courses, share our work with someone you think will benefit from it, or support us through a donation.

In this session, Mary Doane shares core emotional skills that support you to manage acute stress, achieve moments of calm in the midst of difficulty, and help you maintain your own emotional well-being. This session ran on May 14, 2021.

In this session, Roy Remer shares ways to bring more ease and connection to all our online communications. This session ran on March 17, 2021.

Curry Senior Center is a non-profit in San Francisco dedicated to helping vulnerable, low-income, and homeless seniors through a holistic and integrated care approach. The organization runs a Peer Outreach Program in which Peer Outreach and Drop-in Center Specialists help connect isolated older adults to services and social activities.

Working with a vulnerable older population, the Outreach Specialists often witness their clients experiencing multiple losses, for example, loss of mobility, loss of social connections and loss of their own living spaces as they move to assisted housing. During the pandemic, however, the losses experienced by the staff and clients intensified, with a number of clients passing, and the Curry team also losing a member of staff to COVID-19.

To support their staff with such losses, and to prevent burnout and overwhelm that can accompany such experiences, Curry Senior Center approached Zen Caregiving Project (ZCP) to run two online, interactive sessions on managing loss and grief. 

The sessions

Working with loss and grief is a core part of Zen Caregiving Project’s approach to caregiving. When the organization was first established as Zen Hospice Project over thirty years ago, it served people approaching the end of their lives, and provided hospice care. Offering on-going support for persons at the end of life, the organization advanced a Buddhist-inspired approach to working with loss and grief, allowing individuals to both feel the emotions that loss brings, and also build the capacity to sit with the loss and reduce overwhelm. 

The sessions for the Outreach Specialists were based on this approach and were taught by Roy Remer, the organization’s Executive Director. Across the sessions he introduced five ways to working mindfully with loss:

1. Loss is universal

It can be comforting to remember that loss is a natural part of being human. While the particular circumstances of loss may differ from person to person, we all experience loss. It is unavoidable. If nothing else, the shared experience of loss is what reminds us that we are connected to everyone else. 

2. Understand the value of exploring our feelings on loss

It is important to be aware of how we respond to our own losses, especially as caregivers. When we don’t work on how to process our own losses, it can be difficult to fully support the person receiving our care. Others’ experience and reactions to loss may be triggering for us, and it is hard to untangle the pain and emotion of their loss from the pain and emotion of our own losses. 

3. Introducing mindfulness to work with grief and loss

Often our first response to grief is to deny it or turn away from this. Mindfulness techniques can be used to turn toward grief, allowing us to see what sensations and emotions are felt, and what thoughts we are having. Being with the emotions of grief allows for their processing. We can build our capacity to be with strong emotions and over time the emotions will begin to quiet. The sadness of loss may not go away, however, we may begin to find it is not as disrupting  or overwhelming. We begin to integrate the loss into the normal rhythms of our life. 

4. Building compassion in the face of frequent loss

Caregivers may confront a lot of barriers to expressing compassion – these barriers can sometimes be exhaustion, hunger or frustration, and sometimes it can feel like what we are doing doesn’t make a difference. A deeper understanding of the dynamics of compassion and the ways it can be used enable us to more readily recognize and overcome barriers when they arise.  Practicing compassion means also including oneself.  Self-compassion is essential for caregivers to build resilience and avoid burnout: “you can’t pour from an empty cup.” (see our free webinar on compassion for caregivers)

5. Inviting conversations about loss with those we are care for

Conversations with care recipients about loss can feel awkward, but there are ways of approaching these conversations that help the other person open up, and feel supported. It is helpful to remember, in the face of loss we are all equals as no one can avoid personal loss and grief. In this regard, we are all alike. This thought naturally brings feelings of empathy and compassion for the person we care for. It is also helpful to notice if you are attached to a particular outcome for a conversation and perhaps let go,  trying to meet others where they are at. Maybe the person you care for isn’t yet ready for a big conversation on loss but providing an opportunity, may support them to get more comfortable with it over time. 

For a more detailed explanation of these five approaches please see our blog on approaches to loss.

The impact of the sessions

The sessions were deeply moving for all involved, with Curry staff sharing and connecting over common experiences and recognizing their own unique relationship with loss. The feedback we received from the session was very positive and it is our hope that the training will continue to support these staff persons in the important work they are doing in the community, as well as in their own personal wellbeing.

We would like to thank the Curry Senior Center for its holistic and compassionate approach to supporting its staff. For any enquiries on running sessions in your organization please contact us via our enquiry form.

We all experience loss and grief throughout our lives, but as caregivers loss can be very prominent in our day-to-day experience. Caregivers experience our own loss and also witness the losses experienced by the person we care for, e.g. loss of physical or mental health, loss of work, loss of social role. 

In the 30+ years since our founding, we at Zen Caregiving Project have learned a lot about loss and grief while caring for others through our work supporting people living with a chronic and terminal illness. We have developed a Buddhist-inspired approach to facing inevitable loss which we believe can support caregivers to more easily withstand the strong emotions that loss can bring.

Five approaches to exploring and working with loss and grief

1. Remembering that loss is universal

It can be comforting to remember that loss is a natural part of being human. While the particular circumstances of loss may differ from person to person, we all experience loss. It is unavoidable. If nothing else, the shared experience of loss is what reminds us that we are connected to everyone else. 

2. Understanding the value of exploring our feelings on loss

We may not like the idea of looking into our own feelings of loss and grief but as a caregiver it is important. Why? Well, exploring our own emotional response to loss will help us to tell the difference between our own suffering and the suffering of the person we care for. By untangling our emotions from the emotions of our care recipient it makes it easier to decide what is best for the person we are caring for. 

For example, a caregiver is caring for her father who is experiencing memory loss. She experiences strong emotions around her father no longer remembering who she is or remembering who he has been for so much of his life. This caregiver’s relationship with her father is shifting into completely new territory, so such feelings are natural. When she is able to step back and look at the situation, she sees that her father is in fact not distressed. Since he is not very aware of what is happening, he is not upset by it. Actually, he seems confused when she tries to comfort him about his memory loss. She is able to see that perhaps comforting her father is more about her strong feelings than his. 

3. Using mindfulness in processing loss and grief

Experiencing loss and grief is not easy and can bring up powerful and unpleasant emotions. It is normal to want to avoid these feelings, push them away or pretend they are not there. 

A mindful approach to loss attempts to meet grief directly. We can learn to simply observe our natural response to loss, at that moment, without judgment.  We can become curious: where do we feel emotions in our body? What color are they? What texture are they? In this moment, what is the nature of our emotional landscape? When opening to our emotions in a given  moment we may feel sadness, resistance, anger, vulnerability. Over time, we can accept that such emotions are natural and okay, and welcome them all in. None of the feelings associated with loss are “wrong,” nor should they be excluded. 

Being with the emotions of grief allows for their processing. We can build our capacity to be with strong emotions and over time the emotions can begin to quiet. The sadness of loss may not go away. However, we may begin to find it is not as disrupting or overwhelming as before. We begin to integrate the loss into the normal rhythms of our life. (See our free webinar on Working Mindfully with Grief)

4. Building compassion in the face of frequent loss

Compassion is an essential part of caring for others, but there can be times when it is difficult to express compassion to the person you care for. Caregivers commonly confront a lot of barriers to expressing compassion, including exhaustion, hunger, frustration, and feeling like what we are doing is not making a difference. 

Cultivating self-awareness through mindfulness gives us the mental space and clarity to identify when we come up against one of the common barriers to compassion. In recognizing these barriers (e.g. hunger), we can more easily overcome them (e.g. prioritize getting some food). It can be helpful to remember that we are not alone in facing barriers to compassion; all caregivers will experience some version of these barriers from time to time. Struggling to maintain compassion is a common part of caregiving, yet compassion is like a muscle, the more we work with it, the stronger it becomes. 

 Practicing compassion means also including oneself. For many, it is easier to experience compassion for others than it is for oneself. However, self-compassion is essential for caregivers to build resilience and avoid burnout (see our free webinar on Deepening compassion in challenging times). 

“If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.“
– Jack Kornfield

5. Inviting a conversation with those we are serving

Conversations with care recipients about loss can feel awkward, but there are ways of approaching these conversations that support openness and care. We suggest approaching the conversation as a peer; another human being who experiences loss and grief. In this regard, we are all alike. Being aware of this common experience naturally brings increased empathy and compassion for the person we care for and can also make us feel more comfortable talking about loss with them. 

It is also helpful to notice if there is attachment to a particular outcome for a conversation and if so, try to let go of any goals and follow their lead. This will make it easier to meet others where they are. If the person we care for isn’t quite ready for a big conversation on loss, we can start by talking about change. This can provide an opening for a bigger conversation on change and loss in the future, if that’s where the care recipient wants to go as they get more comfortable with the topic.  

On a more practical level, we can set an intention to listen generously. This includes giving our full attention, using open-ended questions, allowing for silence, and checking our eagerness to express our own thoughts. 
We at Zen Caregiving Project hope that these approaches to working with loss help in your caregiving journey. We have more free resources on mindfulness and loss on our Resources pages, and our Mindful Caregiving Education courses also explore this important topic in a group setting.