Cathy Chiplen Compassionate Therapies

08/12/2025

Thankyou so much for all your support, we have raised over £1000! We have 20 hours left. Can you help us reach our target?

06/12/2025

First day of Module 5 today online, ‘Research Appraisal’ with Orla Keegan. Her excellent teaching & delivery made it feel very accessible to me as a newbie to this arena. Bring it on for my Year 2 Research Project next (academic) year! Back in Dublin on Wednesday for Thurs & Fri in the classroom, can’t wait!

05/12/2025

02/12/2025

Did you know we offer our publications in different languages?

We've just launched a Polish version of Planning Ahead and we also have Portguese, Polish and Romanian versions of What to Expect in the Last Days of Life on the Somerset EOLC website

https://somerset.eolcare.uk/content/somerset-planning-ahead-alternative-language

We can organise ANY language for ANY of our resources...just reach out at eolceducation@somersetft.nhs.uk

02/12/2025

01/12/2025

Princess Diana was famously the first member of the Royal Family to touch someone with AIDS. A lifelong advocate, she attended the opening of the UK’s first HIV/AIDS unit at London Middlesex Hospital in 1987 and was a patron of the National AIDS Trust at the time of her death in 1997.

John Eaddie was named as the UK’s first AIDS victim following a 2021 investigation by ITV’s Tonight. His friend Ken Dee appeared on Good Morning Britain in November 2021 to talk about his late friend’s life and death, and the stigma faced by gay men as the virus spread across the UK in the 80s.

When asked by host Susanna Reid how the Princess of Wales’ decision to be photographed shaking hands and hugging AIDS patients changed things, he said it was a "momentous moment”.

“I think a lot of people then realised that it couldn’t be transmitted just through touching [when that happened],” he said. “I think for the gay community it went so much further than anything else had possibly done when that happened. I remember seeing it at the time and crying, thinking this is amazing.”

📷 Getty

01/12/2025

29/11/2025

Dame Judi Dench’s private woodland on her six-acre Surrey estate is unlike any other — a living, breathing memorial where love, loss, and memory continue to grow in the quiet company of trees.
For decades, Judi has carried out a ritual both heartbreakingly simple and profoundly hopeful. Whenever someone dear to her passes away, she plants a tree in their honor. No fanfare, no carved stone, no formal dedication — just a tender act of remembrance rooted quite literally in the soil. She once explained, “I plant a tree for every person I’ve loved who has died,” a tradition that has turned her estate into a sanctuary of stories.
Among the trees stands one planted for her husband, actor Michael Williams, whose death in 2001 left a space in her life that no words could adequately fill. Their marriage — warm, playful, grounded in deep affection — remains one of the great love stories of British theatre. Judi has quietly admitted, “I miss him every single day,” and in the woodland, that grief finds a place to rest, rise, and breathe.
In the 2017 BBC documentary Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees, she walks through the grove with the reverence of someone visiting lifelong friends. Her hand drifts across a trunk as she says softly, “It’s like an extended family out here — only this one keeps growing.”
And with that single line, she captures the essence of what she has created: a family made of bark and branches, roots and remembrance.
Each tree represents a life, a relationship, a story that mattered. Some stand tall and fully formed, others still stretch toward the sky. Each one holds a name whispered into the wind. Each one carries a memory that refuses to fade.
Judi’s woodland is not a place of sorrow, but of continuation. Here, grief doesn’t feel like an ending — it feels like a beginning. “I like to think they’re still with me,” she reflects in the film, her voice hushed but steady. “Growing with every season.”
There is quiet poetry in her choice to honor loved ones not with monuments of stone, but with beings that sway, breathe, and outlive us. Trees endure. They witness decades, even centuries. They stand through storms. They hold time in their rings. By planting them, Judi extends the lives of the people she treasures into the natural world.
Her woodland reminds us of something universal: love doesn’t stop when a heartbeat does. Memory doesn’t end at a final breath. Loss can be transformed — not erased, but reshaped — into something that stands tall, offers shade, and catches light.
Every rustle in Judi’s grove sounds like the echo of a life once shared. Every root digging deeper into the earth feels like a promise that those we lose are never entirely gone. And every new leaf is a gentle reminder that healing, like a tree, takes time — but it comes.
“It comforts me,” Judi says simply. “To know they’re still here. Growing. Always growing.”
In that woodland, grief becomes a forest — and love becomes something that never stops reaching for the sky.

27/11/2025

Today we remember young Damilola Taylor who was brutally killed on 25 years ago on 27 November 2000 in London. 🙏🏾

Damilola, aged 10, who was born in Nigeria, had been in Britain only a few months when he was attacked after walking home from the library after school.

Rest in Peace Young King. Gone too soon. 🖤🕊️👑

27/11/2025

It can be difficult to talk about su***de, but the words we choose matter. Saying someone “died by su***de” instead of “committed su***de” avoids associating their death with crime, wrongdoing or sin, which can add stigma and shame.

Thoughtful language shapes understanding, builds empathy, and offers support. The words we use protect vulnerable people from harm and help shift the way we talk about su***de as a society.
Learn how to speak safely: https://ow.ly/suyt50XvQl9

26/11/2025

Elsa gives her royal seal of approval to my box of Holy Fire Reiki 2 Manuals!!! Getting ready to teach Reiki 2 again in the New Year, please see my website for further information if interested 🫶 https://cathychiplen.com/reiki/ ®

24/11/2025

Deepen connections and understanding with what's going on in your own body and mind, with the Introduction to Gentle Release Therapy Online Course.