About Living Aspen
Living Aspen is a community of survivors continuing our journey of healing from abuse by addressing the needs of our body, soul, and spirit in a self-directed, integrated process. Our greatest goal is to restore hope and joy to women and men in a community of safe resources. Most organizations for survivors of abuse are focused on crisis care. Living Aspen is here for the rest of the journey. We seek to connect, encourage, and companion survivors who want to move from surviving to living a full life.
After experiencing abuse many of us may struggle with finding and staying in healthy relationships, navigating conflict, identifying safe people, taking criticism at work, or responding to authorities in a workplace environment. We may also experience loss of sleep or interrupted sleep, unidentified physical pain, fatigue, auto-immune symptoms such as increased allergies. Emotionally we may feel a sense that we are broken beyond repair and will never be happy again. Most often, as survivors, we feel utterly alone in our story of survival and in finding our way back to ourselves. You are not alone.
Living Aspen began because our founder, Cheryl Meakins, realized all the people, professions, experiences it took for her to heal from her story of childhood abuse. It took a network of people to help her discover “all the ways she wasn’t broken, but deeply profoundly whole” (artists Kelly Rae Roberts, Be Brave Manifesto). Out of her journey grew a desire to build a community where we all discover our wholeness and heal our brokenness together.
Our name, Living Aspen, is both a statement of fact and a lofty goal. Aspen trees appear to be a collective group of individual trees, however, they are a colony connected to one another through a complex root system. Like the Aspen trees who are a community of survivors, abuse can only be healed in safe community. Likewise, the Aspen tree reminds and challenges us to find beauty in our scars. The bark of the Aspen tree is white, the black marks are scars left by humans, animals, severe weather, and the natural process of death and growth. It is this beautiful contrast of black and white that reminds us of the beauty of our brokenness, when our stories of abuse no longer define us but simply become a part of who we are.
Our hope is that our collective lives will be as breathtaking as the glittering gold aspen trees in the fall. The darkness of the evergreens are the contrast that highlights our quaking joy. Together we live and love again.
After experiencing abuse many of us may struggle with finding and staying in healthy relationships, navigating conflict, identifying safe people, taking criticism at work, or responding to authorities in a workplace environment. We may also experience loss of sleep or interrupted sleep, unidentified physical pain, fatigue, auto-immune symptoms such as increased allergies. Emotionally we may feel a sense that we are broken beyond repair and will never be happy again. Most often, as survivors, we feel utterly alone in our story of survival and in finding our way back to ourselves. You are not alone.
Living Aspen began because our founder, Cheryl Meakins, realized all the people, professions, experiences it took for her to heal from her story of childhood abuse. It took a network of people to help her discover “all the ways she wasn’t broken, but deeply profoundly whole” (artists Kelly Rae Roberts, Be Brave Manifesto). Out of her journey grew a desire to build a community where we all discover our wholeness and heal our brokenness together.
Our name, Living Aspen, is both a statement of fact and a lofty goal. Aspen trees appear to be a collective group of individual trees, however, they are a colony connected to one another through a complex root system. Like the Aspen trees who are a community of survivors, abuse can only be healed in safe community. Likewise, the Aspen tree reminds and challenges us to find beauty in our scars. The bark of the Aspen tree is white, the black marks are scars left by humans, animals, severe weather, and the natural process of death and growth. It is this beautiful contrast of black and white that reminds us of the beauty of our brokenness, when our stories of abuse no longer define us but simply become a part of who we are.
Our hope is that our collective lives will be as breathtaking as the glittering gold aspen trees in the fall. The darkness of the evergreens are the contrast that highlights our quaking joy. Together we live and love again.