In Memoriam

Where we remember our members who have passed away.

Catherine Larson

Cil Braun, Certified Sandplay Therapist, 1934-2023.

Cil Braun, a long-time member of the Minnesota Sandplay Therapy Group, passed away on March 11, 2023, after struggling with dementia for several years. She started her professional life as a nutritionist but was always drawn to the spiritual quest. After becoming ordained, she became a spiritual director, helping others find answers to their spiritual questions and identities. Cil learned about sandplay from Barbara Weller, as so many in Minnesota did, and realized immediately that the work in the sand added a whole new dimension to the spiritual work of herself and her clients. Sandplay was a groundbreaking area for spiritual direction and others followed her, enabling their clients to find the sacred in deep and numinous ways that had been unimaginable before. Cil developed a method of silent retreat, where clients spent three days in silent reflection at her home on Lake Superior, creating a sandplay image each day with Cil as witness.

            Cil was a kind person who combined her clarity of purpose with compassion and humility. She always had a twinkle in her eyes and had a gift for making the space around her safe for taking risks. I always imagined her way of being was a wonderful gift to her clients as they struggled with great questions of meaning, identity, or their relationship with God. We have missed her warm presence in our sandplay community.

Cil was, in her quiet way, a remarkable warrior in what is Jung called the struggle between the spirit of the age versus the spirit of the deep. She began her professional life as a food nutritionist but found this very unsatisfying. She became ordained as a Presbyterian minister but also found this unfulfilling. She then turned to spiritual direction, working with clients who wanted to understand and deepen their spiritual life. Each of these paths took her deeper and away from the mainstream. When she learned about sandplay therapy, she found what she had been seeking for decades. It was sandplay that could take her, and her clients, to the depths needed to find the spirit of the deep in themselves in a shallow world, through connection to the Self. Her insight that sandplay could enrich spiritual direction profoundly transformed her work and that of others significantly.

            Cil will be greatly missed by all of us for her kindness, compassion and clarity of spiritual vision.