About – Loss and Liberation

Hi, I'm Lacye Winkelpleck

I am a writer, storyteller, shadow worker, yogi, and integrative grief support specialist. I came to this work through my own messy collision with grief.

In May 2018, I came home from a week of travel with my daughter to find my daughters father, my partner and husband, had died of an accidental overdose. With his death, everything shifted. I was suddenly aware of whole new dimensions of being. Grief and it’s varied spectra. Single-parenting a gifted and grieving child… whilst navigating the social, familial, and financial losses that all too often accompany death.

Despite the fact that none of us will ever escape great loss, I found communal, societal, and personal skills for understanding, supporting, and incorporating grief to be shockingly flawed and scarce.

How is it that this enormous piece of the human experience remains so silent? Why had I never been given the opportunity to support others in this place? If each of us will grieve, why is it that none of us know how to hold this rite of passage or have the skills to integrate into our completely transformed life? Why is it that the western world insists we do this alone? Why is there so much abandonment and shame interwoven in almost every grief story I hear??

All of these questions became the fuel for my own grief journey as a solo-mom and widow. By the grace of equal parts insanity and intuition, I bought us one-way tickets to Bali, where we lived for 3 years. There, we were blessed with a healing-centric community and an affordable lifestyle that offered the time and space together to fall apart and to rebuild, to recognize and implement my own skill set that has now become my offering for others. I’ve found my own answers to these questions, and I’m passionate about changing the paradigm surrounding them. The process has been messy. Going to the dark places always is. Yet it was in the darkness that I found the pieces of healing I needed to find wholeness again.

My mission is to normalize and validate grief in non-judgment. It was by falling apart that I was able to rebuild into something new. Only by acknowledging the ‘ugly’ emotions was I able to forgive and release them. Working WITH my grief enabled me to work through it. From the other side, I am offering supportive tools for coping, integrating, and, when it is time, for moving forward. I seek to dispel shame by honoring this shadow process with authenticity and compassion.

We all have the right to our Bliss. Sometimes the only way to find it again is to fall to our knees with deep, sorrowful tears. Then can the healing begin. Only in acknowledging what is there can we transform it and be liberated.