Nancy Jean Larson Warner

Nancy "Nance" Larson Warner lived a life rooted in love, growth, beauty, and the cultivation of pure awareness at the heart of her being. She spent her life helping people find their way back to this truth as a teacher, psychotherapist, hospice volunteer, meditation practitioner, artist, beloved friend, devoted mother and grandmother, and lifelong student of consciousness. Born with a fearless spirit, an open heart, and a smile like an ever-rising sun, Nancy was a lifelong learner through academia, books, continuing education and perhaps most of all, relationships. She earned her bachelor's degree from George Washington University before completing a Master's in Social Work at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. While attending The College of Wooster, she met David Warner, with whom she would spend the next twenty-five years raising a family and accompanying one another through the often untidy work of becoming. Together they built a life shaped by curiosity, travel, service, and a shared commitment to growth until David's sudden death in 1993.

Her work carried her from elementary school classrooms to clinical social work, and eventually into the private practice she co-founded in Appleton, Wisconsin—Wellness Counseling Center —where for many years she counseled individuals, couples, families, and groups. Long before wellness and mindfulness became commonplace, Nancy wove together family systems, bodycentered psychotherapy, non-dual thinking, transpersonal psychology, Gestalt practice, meditation, women's empowerment, and compassionate presence into the work she loved most: helping people navigate change, grief, relationships, and the unfolding mystery of what it means to be human.

Following her more formal career, she immersed herself in yoga teacher training, Voice Dialogue, hospice bereavement work, abstract painting workshops, volunteering at her grandchildren’s schools, spiritual exploration, and countless conversations and gatherings that stretched both mind and heart, nourishing her deeply spiritual life. She was as likely to recommend a Mary Oliver poem as a therapy exercise, and believed that lasting healing arose through non-dual awareness, deep and honest connection, and unconditional love.

In Colorado she flourished as a grandmother, abstract painter, and friend, nurturing the depth she valued in close relationship, and also relishing the solitude between them. The trails around Wonderland Lake became a place of quiet pilgrimage, walked thousands of times through changing seasons. She found beauty in wildflowers, horizons, and the ever-changing colors of the natural world. She recycled and ate tofu before it was fashionable, lived by the backpacker's creed of Leave No Trace, and wished that, after her death, her ashes would nourish the roots of a flowering tree. She looked forward to what she called the grand adventure of formlessness.

Nancy was also a woman who cultivated community wherever she lived. Friends knew Nancy for her ready laugh, her endless smile, her creativity, her gift for asking the question beneath the question, and her unwavering conviction that the universe is a friendly place born of love.

She treasured her Women's Groups, Spirit Voices choir, Golden Thread dialogue circle, hospice colleagues, and the many friendships that deepened across decades. She believed that the sacred revealed itself most readily in ordinary life—tending her plants, sharing a meal, creative play, in quiet conversation, or stretches of solitude—and that consciousness and love both precede and outlast our individual lives.

She is survived by her children, Eric and Kimberly, their families, her beloved grandchildren, sisters and brother, extended family, and a wide circle of friends whose lives were forever enlarged by her generosity, wisdom, and inner radiance.

Nancy often returned to the words of poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:

How easily I forget,

I contain the story of the universe…

As if I am separate from the shimmer that made it all.

Those who loved Nancy know she spent her life remembering exactly that. She left us with one final invitation: "Watch for signs of me somewhere near the horizon. Live your lives fully, and know that I'll happily await our reunion in the One."