About Rondi Lightmark, M.A.
Rondi Lightmark has climbed inside the grief process and pulled out all the essential truths we need to turn our mindless grief into soulful learning.
-- Suzanne Falter-Barnes, author of "How Much Joy Can You Stand? A Creative Guide to Facing Your Fears and Making Your Dreams Come True"(Ballantine)
Rondi Lightmark offers a new way to experience loss and grief. Her stories show that the death of a loved one can bring us closer to the world of spirit, turning our grief into an opportunity to heal our souls.
- Carol Bowman, author of "Children's Past Lives" (Bantam Doubleday)
Rondi Lightmark, M.A., is a professional writer, photographer and a certified counselor in Washington state, with a masters in psychology from Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco.
Between 1993 and 2000, Lightmark was a caregiver for four people dying of cancer: her husband, her mother, and two friends.
When her husband Jim became ill, she cared for him at home until he died and took care of his body without the help of a funeral director (this is legal in the enlightened state of Vermont).
After her husband died, Lightmark developed her own way to heal from grief, which was based on mind/body techniques, dreamwork, studies of death and dying in other cultures, and personal creativity.
In 2001, on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in NYC, her article Heal Grief in Your Body, appeared in Body & Soul magazine (www.bodyandsoulmag.com).
Her thesis on a holistic approach to working with cancer is published in the May 2004 online International Journal of Healing and Caring (www.ijhc.org), edited by Daniel Benor, M. D.
Lightmark is also certified in the family systems therapy technique of Bert Hellinger (www.hellingerusa.com), the German psychotherapist whose work has gained international recognition. Hellinger is particularly noted for his belief that the dead have a consistent influence on the living in powerful ways. Thus, he says, it is important for us to understand how best to heal and maintain the right relationship with those who have gone before us.
A passionate advocate for personal creativity, Lightmark has written profiles, articles, and reviews for the holistic and spiritual education center Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.
She has also worked for the renowned personal growth center Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, researching Esalen's contribution to the development of holistic medicine in America.
Lightmark’s essay "Crossing Points," which is a description of her time caregiving her husband, is published on this website and in the anthology When a Lifemate Dies: Stories of Love, Loss and Healing (Fairview Press), along with the essay “A Question of Naming,” a humorous recounting of an extraordinary gift she received from her husband 5 months after he died.
Lightmark has a deep connection with animals, and especially dogs. She is the co-author with animal handler and trainer April Frost of Beyond Obedience: Training with Awareness for You and Your Dog, (Harmony, 1998), and has written academic articles and chapters with William Benda, M. D., on the healing benefits of the human-animal connection.
In 2005, she launched GREAT DOG GREETINGS, a greeting card company featuring images of dogs in cars and trucks, along with humorous captions. She shows her photography regularly in galleries in the Seattle area.