Opus Peace’s annual National Anchor Your Heart Day is February 2nd (Opus Peace)
Switch the phone to silent for 180 seconds, get comfortable, and sign in: It’s time for National Anchor Your Heart Day. From St. Petersburg, Florida to St. Petersburg, Russia, and beyond, participants worldwide will share a collective pause from 3 p.m. to 3:03 p.m. on February 2nd as they seek inner harmony. You read that right; it’s just three minutes.
The virtual event, organized by St. Pete-based nonprofit Opus Peace, features a simple grounding technique accessible to all. Deborah Grassman and Opus Peace’s other co-founders believe that three-minute anchor your heart exercise offers a path to healing an injured soul.
“Sit back, reflect,” says Grassman. “Ask yourself, ‘What is it about me, that spark inside me, that can be open and real?’”
A free one-hour webinar titled “You Matter! Letting the Threat of Death Wake You Up!” starts at 2 p.m. as a lead-in to the event. During the webinar, hospice professionals will share powerful stories and profound lessons learned at the bedside of dying patients. The webinar will examine the power of self-compassion through videos and “how to” cards that lead individuals through healing experiences. Participants can expect plenty of firsthand stories, practical tools, and the exploration of what it’s like to bring consciousness to one’s own mortality. These lessons, learned from the experiences of the dying, serve as reminders to be fully present in life.
Opus Peace and its initiatives are rooted in that type of firsthand experience. Grassman and her four fellow co-founders are former VA hospice nurses who cared for more than 10,000 dying veterans. They formed Opus Peace to act on their belief that many individuals suffer soul injuries, a wound that separates a person from their real self, that can be repaired before their last moments.
“At the end of life, the conscious mind gets weaker while the unconscious mind grows stronger,” Grassman says. “Regrets surface. A lot of times, memories would surface unbidden on the deathbed. Stories would come forth that had been repressed previously because they were painful. As a hospice nurse, I was charged with helping that person make peace with the past and the present. But what if repair was possible before those last moments?”
Through Opus Peace, the co-founders want to use the multitude of emotions and lessons revealed during their experience as hospice nurses to share insights on how to live, not just die, healed. Pain and peace, they say, can coexist. They want more people to understand how to thrive within that reality.
“We live in a society that is blatantly afraid of emotional pain,” Grassman says, “but our human experience includes everything: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. Our programs include all the parts of self and coming to terms with that.”
For more information and registration for February 2nd event, go to Opus Peace