Sheri's Place - Companioning Life's Unchosen Chapters

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Sheri's Place - Companioning Life's Unchosen Chapters

Soul midwife through iIlness, dying, caregiving, estrangement and the quiet ruptures no one prepares you for.

03/31/2026

Stepping outside to go to the bus my heart swelled.

The sun peaking through the trees with promise of warmer days.

One cannot help but close their eyes and soak in the breath of fresh air, the gratitude of a bright day, and the way the air touches your skin.

Like many I dream of the softness that warm air brings, however today, I held the bite of the cold on my skin, this to shall pass and the beauty in the stillness will once again fade.

Today as I gazed at the sun through the trees I noticed the misty air that float through the branches and wondered if what I was feeling, sensing and thinking was that too of the trees.

How wonderful it is to be surrounded by such beauty.
Some may see just plain trees, some may see those frickin poplars, I see so many friends, so many secrets, so much of everything I am and every story I've told to the branches of beauty I dream of.
This yard whilst it isn't me, it's everything in me.

03/28/2026

This is my dad’s coffee mug.
The sticker is worn from his hands, and now from mine.
The logo is from the job that took him away more than it brought him home. They’ve rebranded since he died. New colors, new design. But this old one feels like him. Irreplaceable, like he was.

Most mornings I drink from it and send a quiet “good morning, sunshine” into the light, hoping he catches it somewhere.

Grief as a friend rests in the ordinary.
It reminds me that like them, it is everywhere and nowhere.

In the way I still reach for this cup without thinking.
In the habits that stayed long after he didn’t.
In the small moments that feel like him for no reason at all.

One day this mug will break.
I think about that
where our love will travel when the mug is gone.

And then I remember:
Our love isn’t in the mug.
It’s everywhere and nowhere.
It’s with me always.

03/24/2026

I watched a Reel yesterday that spoke about grief as a symptom to fix — to heal — and it’s been sitting with me.

It asked:
“Have you ever been in a grief group and found yourself talking about the same thing over and over?”

And while rumination, like anything in excess, can be unhealthy, talking about your pain in safe spaces is rarely a symptom to fix.
It’s a pathway.

A pathway to let others see what was unseen.
A pathway to allow others to hold what was unheld.
A pathway to finally be witnessed in the places where you’re still bleeding.

Pain that asks to be repeated isn’t trying to trap you.
It’s asking for more compassion.
More witnessing.
More love.

It’s pain that still bleeds and still needs presence to heal.

Healing often happens in community - when someone says,
“I see you. I’ll stay.”

Healing happens with companionship.

03/21/2026

People sometimes ask how I learned to sit with grief the way I do —
how I can hold the heavy things without flinching,
how I can listen without needing to fix,
how I can stay steady when someone’s world is falling apart.

The truth is:
I didn’t learn it in a course.
I didn’t learn it in a book.
My initiation began as a child.

As a child of divorce, like many, I grew up in the space between two adults who were hurting in their own ways.
No one intended harm, but the impact was the same: I learned early how to navigate love that was inconsistent, confusing, or conditional.

And in all of that, my mother had a favorite.
I wasn’t it.

There’s a particular ache in realizing you are the one left waiting —
the one hoping to be chosen,
the one learning to contort yourself into worthiness.

People sometimes call that “desperate for love.”
I used to believe them.
But it wasn’t desperation.
It was survival.
A child will do anything to be loved — including carrying stories that were never theirs to hold.

As I grew older, grief didn’t repeat itself — it accumulated.
Each chapter had its own shape, its own story, its own cost.

The grief of abusive relationships.
The grief of a plane crash.
The grief of cancer.
The grief of motherhood’s thresholds.
The grief of losing my dad — and the grief of family complexities and estrangement that surfaced alongside it.

Different griefs.
Different wounds.
Each one distinct.
Each one asking something new of me.

And through all of it, something in me was being forged — not into strength, but into capacity.
Into intimacy with the places most people turn away from.
Into a steadiness that isn’t confidence, but familiarity.
I know my edges.
I know what I’ve survived.
I know what it costs to keep loving in a world that didn’t always love me back.

This is why I companion the way I do.
Not from theory.
Not from training.
But from lived grief — the kind that rearranges you,
the kind that teaches you how to sit with another’s ache because you learned how to carry your own when no one else knew how.

This is the lineage of my work.
Every chapter I’ve walked — energy healing, end‑of‑life doula training, even the grounded clarity of accounting — has become part of the way I hold others.
All of it lives inside the sanctuary I offer now,
a place built so you don’t have to walk through your grief, your story, your pain alone.

03/12/2026

Reflections from the deck:

There is no sun and the air somehow feels colder on the skin than it did in December. The trees show no signs of waking, but instead reveal who the wind has taken.

A sight that could be easily viewed as depressing to many finds my eye in beauty and awe. The only thing I find depressing is the hum of humans in the background of a chickadees song.

I may prefer warmer days, a gentle breeze and the beauty of a forest that's luscious in its greenery.

However this season.. is one where beauty is met with the soul, within the oneness of creation.

A season where the give equals the take. I can see why some would find it depressing.

As I stand here in this moment, I feel so incredibly spacious and small at the same time. But isn't that what it is to be in awe while standing in oneness?

03/03/2026

Some moments in life split us in two — before and after. Many of us white‑knuckle these moments alone, because we haven’t yet found someone who can simply carry it with us. Not trying to fix us. Not pathologizing us. Just being there. The space we need — somewhere between our therapist and our loved ones.

Companionship — someone who can hold the weight without turning away, when words fall short and the heart is bleeding on the floor.

We used to have villages. We used to have elders. Now we stare into screens, pretending we aren’t quietly dying a little inside. White‑knuckling life like Ross Geller: “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”

03/01/2026

People hear the word companioning and they imagine:

▪️ gentle support
▪️ encouragement
▪️ someone to talk to, someone to check in, someone to “be there”
▪️ the kind of things friends do when life gets hard

But companioning, as I practice it at Sheri’s Place, is something rarer.

It’s not cheerleading.
It’s not advice or counselling.
It’s not “you’ve got this.”
It’s not tidy hope, spiritual bypass, or silver linings.
And phrases like “at least…” or “be grateful…” are not used lightly — if at all.

Companioning is presence in the places where life cracks open.

It’s the human who can walk into the rooms counselling can’t ethically enter and friends can’t emotionally hold.

It’s the steadiness beside you when your nervous system is collapsing and the world feels too loud, too bright, too much.

It’s the witness who doesn’t flinch when the truth is messy, contradictory, or “ugly.”

It’s the person who can sit with you in the moments you were never meant to navigate alone — the thresholds, the crossings, the before-and-after moments that split a life in two.

This is what companioning is at Sheri’s Place.
Not fixing.
Not tidying.
Not painting with positivity.

Just a human who can walk with you into the hardest rooms with steadiness, grace, and truth.

02/28/2026

Most people don’t know they need a place like this.

You tell yourself you just need to be:
Quieter.
More over it.
Stronger.
More organized.
To get it together… because everyone else seems to have.

But here’s the silent truth:

No one has helped you hold your truth.
So you slowly retreat because it hurts less than being misunderstood.
You get tired of explaining or hiding your grief to make other people comfortable.
You feel guilty for going on about the same thing and why you can’t just “get over it.”
You’re tired — unexplainably tired, the kind no amount of sleep can fix.
You start to believe you can’t be yourself because no one will understand.
The song Iris by Goo Goo Dolls becomes a mantra: “And I don’t want the world to see me, 'cause I don’t think that they’d understand.”

This is where the loneliness of being you comes in.
Not because you want to be alone,
but because there’s nowhere for you to land without guilt or shame.

Sheri’s Place exists for these moments.

You don’t have to be falling apart - though I won’t turn you away if you are.
You don’t have to be in crisis - though I won’t flinch if you’re in the thick of it.

You can simply be tired.
Tired in your bones.
Tired of holding it all.
Tired of pretending to be okay.

You don’t come here because you’re weak — because you’re not.
You come because there’s actually someone who can hold it with you.
The grief, the fear, the truth, the parts you’ve kept hidden because the world doesn’t know what to do with them.

You come for the silent relief
in your chest.
In your breath.
In the place where the ache has been living far too long.

02/28/2026

As some of you know I took a marketing course to gain clarity on what I offer and how to express such offering, but the clarity I found was something I’ve been circling for years.

I am not one thing, one service, or one promise.
I companion tides no one asked for.
I am steady in storms most people never see.
I know the terror of the deep — the kind of darkness that rearranges you from the inside out.

I know what it is to struggle.
To long for someone who can hold the whole truth without flinching, without bypassing, without offering tidy solutions to storms that have none.
Some chapters don’t get fixed.
They get survived. They get crossed.

Chapters that carve a Before and an After you never agreed to. Illness, estrangement, grief, identity rupture, death — they drop you into an ocean you never trained for, with no map, no language, and no shoreline in sight.

They leave you with the guilt of feeling like a burden, because be fu**ed if you know where shore is anymore.
These are the dark nights you wish someone could sit with you in, but you don’t dare ask, because the depths feel too vast, too unfriendly, too much for anyone else to bear.

This is why I built Sheri’s Place.
Because the cost of living is often paid in the darkest rooms, where truth‑speakers are rare and companions even rarer.

I’m the one who travels with you when the ground disappears and the fog begins to set in.
Sheri’s Place — built for the thresholds no one prepares you for. Life’s Unchosen Chapters.

01/16/2026

It's been Crickets around here. 😬

I'm still here. I'm using the season of winter to immerse myself in purpose and clarity.

Some of you may know I've spent many moons on a personal passion project, building a geodome!

She's glorious and makes my heart ever so happy.

The shifts and changes within that occurred as I built this structure piece by piece, day by day, tears, blood, curses and prayers have been immense.

It all led me to two men Alex and Tad. Two people who are amazing in their own passions. Helping me distill my purpose, passion and message to the world.

This season is uprooting the soul, to share the gift.

I'll be back... until then... here's a little photo of my passion project. 💜

12/24/2025

As I sip coffee looking out the window at the snow falling with the company of a beautifully red pine grosbeak my mind wonders.

Reflecting on the stillness of the season. It's not sadness or grief, it's the silence of the million ways life has changed, the millions of memories that only play for me.

The witness of life, the joy and the loss, perhaps what happens as you enter a new stage of life, the stage that begins the cycle as the old ends.

Christmas gaining new meaning as love encompasses it all, a witness to those who hurt, those who celebrate and there you are, somewhere in between.

Life through two panes where Merry Christmas holds both joy and mourning and you love them both the same.

11/23/2025

Good Morning

I've been guide to offer a gathering.
A guidance that has rarely left me alone.

Winter months tend to bring more to the surface, be it the collective around Christmas or the stillness of winter, grief arrives heavier than in the previous months.

🌿So Without Further Ado The Offer:
Companioning hearts
An hour of gathering for the heavy heart.
You show up as you are; you can be grief heavy or just navigating the heaviness of how still it all seems.
A place to sip hot beverages and have conversation.
🌻In person looks like a hot cup of tea, a puzzle, a knitting project, and company with those who get it.
Online looks similar.
A moment of exhale.
A gentle tending of the heart.
An hour to share stories, struggles, laughs and tears.
A gathering for real humans, being.
I’ll be hosting in-person gatherings during the day, and online in the evenings, so you can join in whatever way feels most supportive.
If this is something that feels warm to the soul, let me know in the comments.
much love,
Sheri ❤

Address

Sherwood Park, AB

Website

http://www.sherisplace.ca/

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