Encouraging conversations; connecting our community and creating the space to move through grief with understanding and awareness.
Over the past several years, DragonFly’s Rest has developed into a sacred space, where all members of the community are invited to come and gain deeper insight and healing into themselves – in life and death.
Grief and Bereavement Counselling
Ceremony
Funeral Celebrant
Conscious Death Educator
End of Life Photography
Grief and Bereavement Counselling
In person
Home visits
Phone / Online Counselling
Leanne is an exceptionally qualified and experienced counsellor, specialising in grief and bereavement. She acknowledges that everyone’s journey is different and requires different forms of support. At DragonFly’s Rest, Leanne’s aim is to ensure individuals gain supportive awareness of their own grief and their journey of loss.
Leanne is highly trained in many modalities within her counselling abilities and has gained a national reputation for her specialised Grief and End of Life Support Programs.
Every session is individualised to clients needs with compassion and supportive outcomes.
With Leanne, feelings of safety and comfortability are ensured. As such, sessions can be at the centre, home visits, online or phone counselling is also available.
At some stage in our lives, we will be confronted with major grief through loss.
This may be through the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a relationship, home or employment.
For most people, major grief is an unprecedented experience in their lives and is a very isolating time. Although our families and friends are willing to be with us, sometimes the experience that comes with grief is very difficult to share with those close to us.
If you are struggling with grief and are seeking a compassionate counsellor, Leanne can provide quality therapeutic care at a time of loss.
End of Life Support
As a highly skilled Conscious Dying Facilitator I am able to offer my caring and passionate touch with support in navigating your dying wishes and I have a passion for making death and grief a widely accepted part of our lives within our Westernised culture, where death is habitually seen as a taboo subject.
This passion takes form in my work as a Conscious Dying Facilitator.
My support is to walk with you and relieve any uncertainties about the final transition; be it planning, making informed decisions, navigating unknown emotions, and guiding those in denial of their end of life journey.
I will ensure that a respectful and peaceful death awareness is experienced and that emotional, physical and psychological support is provided with comfort and care.
As an active board member of the South West Compassionate Communities Network, as well as a member of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement, my dedication to this area runs deeply.
I am fully insured and perform my role as a Consultant to the highest degree of standards, with a professional but soft and nurturing touch.
As a Consultant, I am here to facilitate open conversations about the journey of death and dying. I work to ensure that a strong connection is made with those who are dying as well as their family and their carers.
Dying is a natural transition and it is often that this natural part of life is not properly spoken about.
As such, the planning of how someone will spend their final day or how their body will be cared for once they have passed is frequently overlooked.
I work to remove this lack of conversation and develop conscious awareness of your thoughts, values and beliefs.
Ceremony
Leanne offers to continue the connection past the end of life transition and onto the journey beyond. Clients may choose to celebrate the death of a loved one through ceremonious events.
Just as she was there for the transition, loss and grief; Leanne will continue to be there to find healing in rituals and ceremony of life and death of loved ones.
Vigils and Post Death Support
This is an event where family and friends come together around someone soon after they have passed. Time is spent recollecting, conversing, reflecting and celebrating through music or readings.
It is a symbolic ceremony to shower the person whom they loved with reverence and adoration and is useful in the grief process as it allows those present to publicly commemorate the deceased.
A vigil depicts death as another step in the journey of life, and not the conclusion.
Transition
A major part of her role as an End of Life Consultant is to guide life’s final transition. If you would like Leanne to be at your side at the time of your active dying, the moment of death and to offer after-death body care at home (for any or all of these stages), she will be there for you.
An End of Life Consultant is particularly helpful when it is necessary to ensure that your personal, expressed end of life wishes are heard, acknowledged, and acted upon at your end of life journey.
Home Funerals
The Centre offers a Funeral ceremony unique to the life of the individual who has passed on. It is often the last opportunity that family and friends get to express their final goodbyes, and to celebrate the part of life that they were given with the deceased. In their contribution to this celebration, family members may be given a sense of healing and unification. It is an opportunity to come together and to think about how to live life without the individual.
Wakes
After the funeral celebration, a wake will offer an opportunity to celebrate the life of the individual who has passed. It is seen as an affair to impart recollections, and to remember the deceased. The details of the wake will be entirely up to the family, or carers. The Centre will be there to organise the ceremony and ensure it is held respectfully.
Death Photography
Capturing the last moments of life through a new lense.
Photos can be a powerful tool to approach and move through the difficult and scary aspects of life, such as death.
End of life is painful but through the lens we can capture the love, connection and the natural process of sorrow.
I believe the most powerful works of art are vulnerable, personal but also relatable.
Art can create a sense of connectedness and community, to not feel alone in their pain as they say goodbye to a loved one who is dying.
In this way, art and photographs are tools of healing for both the artist and the viewer.
The aim is to promote resilience and well-being in response to Grief, Death and Dying and to encourage staff to build their death literacy. The goal is to make it easier for the workplace to support team members experiencing grief and loss and to develop compassion in the working environment.
LEANNE O’SHEA
FACILITATOR
How to Build a Compassionate Workplace
4 Hr Workshop tailored to each business, team and workplace policy.
Does your workplace have a grief policy?
Do you work in a compassionate workplace?
Do you want to learn the tools to develop grief resilience?
Are you death literate?
Do you have a critical incident debriefing plan ?
Compassionate leadership means having the ability to understand the needs of others, and being aware of their feelings, thoughts and emotions.
Compassion in the workplace is positively related to job performance, team morale and emotional wellbeing.
The ability to be compassionate and connect with others is critical to our lives, both personally and professionally. Demonstrating empathy in the workplace — a key part of emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness — also improves human interactions in general and can lead to more effective communication and positive outcomes, in both work and home settings.