You Respond: Chris Welsh, President of Mastery of Learning ®, tells about how photography helped him during stressful times. Click here to read Chris’s response.

In the Directory of the new edition of Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World, I’ve added a section on photography. Just looking at beautiful pictures can life our spirits. Check out the two websites described below. And if you go to a website that features beautiful photography that lifts your spirits, please let me know by email and I will include the site you recommend in a future edition of this website.

Here is what is in Seven Choices:

There are many photographers’ websites that display images that uplift the spirit and bring beauty to the eye. I especially enjoy the work of photographer Joey Bieber, found on her website www.bieberco.co.uk. About Joey’s photographs of Burma, Lord Hindlip, Chairman of Christie’s writes, “Some of the photographs illustrate the poverty and deprivation of the country and the suffering of its citizens, but most demonstrate the extraordinary beauty and serenity of these peace-loving people. Joey Bieber shows us the rivers and temples, the monks, impoverished mothers and their still smiling children, their animals, their whole way of life. She is a wonderful photographer who uses her art for the good of others, in this case the beautiful people of Burma.”

A different response to bereavement can be found in Pedro Myer’s work called “I photograph to remember.” (www.zonezero.com, click on Gallery and search name Pedro Meyer.) Pedro photographed his parents in their last months of their lives. Pedro Myer says this about “I Photograph to Remember”: I took all those photographs for myself as a way of dealing with death itself….After all, memory is precisely that, a way of making a moment permanent. I knew full well that my emotions at the time would not allow me to recall further on, the specifics of any given moment. The photographs have indeed allowed me to return many times to those captured slices of my experience, and flawed as those pictures inevitably are, due to the limitations inherent to the photographic medium, I do get a sense of the way it all happened.”

Website reader, Chris Welsh, responds:

There is another side of photography that is useful too. For me, it is the act of taking the pictures. Lately, in stressful situations I like to go out and take a group of photographs.

I like my digital camera because of the instant gratification. When I set out to photograph things, my mindset changes and I look at the world a bit differently. I find it a good way to focus and re-orient myself to the world around me.

When I look at the photos, after I have downloaded them into my Mac I find it interesting to see what the camera saw.

Anyway, that is a form of therapy for me.

Chris

Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.