The Grief Village

A Sacred Walk with Grief

“Grief is not what happens to you, grief is what happens within you. It is a part of our human condition. A place we live and rest and that lives and rests within us.”

This space is a village of humans apprenticing to and befriending grief, with a willingness to begin to process how grief shapes us and animates us so that we stop passing our pain, trauma, and suffering on and down untended.

Whether you are working with something acute or global, or have resources and energy to offer toward the process of/for others, we need you! We are meant to carry this together.

This Grief gathering is all of this and more.

Join us for a monthly online event, the first Wednesday of each month at 5pm pst, where we will explore the journey of grief together. Through rituals and sharing/discussions, we will learn how to navigate the complexities of loss and sorrow within community. This event is a space for healing, devotion, praise, and reflection. Let's walk this path together with understanding and support. Processing and tending our losses, sorrows, ancestors, and Souls through ritual, connection, and compassion.

The goal is not to heal to get rid of grief but to be stewarded and animated toward more aliveness, openness, and vitality for this limited-time experience in these bodies.

It is cultivating relative safety within and together, it is practice, it is trust, it is healing, it is expanding, it is walking with, it is embracing the knowns and unknowns, it is our edge, it is Love.

We will make offerings, use the senses to explore and develop our capacity. We don’t heal from grief, we heal WITH grief as we tend. Grief is our guide, companion, and steward.

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak it till your voice catches the
thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.”
- Naomi Shihab Nye

MEET YOUR GRIEF GUIDES

“Our shared sorrow is the communal cup from which we all drink” and may be nourished. - Francis Weller

“Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”- Martín Prechtel

We meet once a month on zoom, the first Wednesday of each month, 5 pm PST

Gatherings are scheduled for 1 hour but may run up to 90 minutes depending on attendance and emergent sharing.

Pricing: This is an (optional) donation-based/pay-what-you-feel offering. Please do not let the financial aspect stop you from attending.

Community Guidelines, please consider each of these carefully; they are part of the agreement we each make in showing up compassionately, responsibly, consciously, with integrity and dignity for ourselves and one another.

1. This is a place of relationship. We do not have to agree or even like what is emergent, and we maintain our personal and each other’s dignity, right to feel grief, and (relative) safety always. Please consider each individual’s dignity as you center your share. If it is inflammatory due to global conditions/experiences, we may ask for you to consider that and offer an alternative space. (While we cannot guarantee another’s safety, it is an inside job, we encourage bravery here.)

2. We ask that while this is a new experience for many, and we will get messy from time to time, that we all assume healthy intent. Recognize intention and impact are not always congruent, take responsibility where needed. Repair happens when it supports all involved.

3. This space comes with a built in activation warning. Part of maturing as adults is the capacity to hold on to yourself and tend/take care as needed. One option/offering is to begin to imagine your own competent protector - a way to feel accompanied in the territory of grief, sorrow, challenges, loss, and suffering. Another way to think of this is who or what did you need when you were younger, bring the energy of that with you. Examples could be; a protective animal, a soft lap, a comforting element, a human or non-human guide.

4. Make space - take space. This is a reciprocal space, noticing and adjusting when, where, how often you share or don’t is an important practice. From time to time we may practice the pause, asking you to check within about what feels important, what feels generative and supportive, and where we can practice restraint.

5. Maintain sovereignty, no one can make you feel a way you choose not to. Practice boundaries, the space between each of us to love ourselves and to be loved. Prioritize your energetic, emotional, and spiritual hygiene, recognizing activation and tend to your nervous systems fluctuations.

6. Silence is a component in processing, healing, and ripening. Something IS happening in silence. Notice how you can practice engaging spaciousness and silence in the places that usually get filled. Please know that sharing is not necessary to participate.

7. Practice sacred listening. Sharing things that have helped can be supportive, encouragement is encouraged, but no coaching, cross-talk, or advice please.

8. Lead with Love and compassion, we are all fighting battles, works in process/progress, and we all are deserving of safe spaces from judgment, shaming, ridicule or call-out/cancel culture.

9. Confidentiality is a requirement. Protection for you means protection for all of us. If our stories can be generative, then so be it, please always leave names and identifying information within the shared space. We don't require that you remain on screen but we ask that you join on screen if possible to create connection, and relative safety for all in attendance, presence and participation via chat are encouraged if off camera.

10. We hold and intend these guidelines as navigation beacons while welcoming in the whole human condition, and healthy trickster energy who may invite us to edges, invocations, territory we may not know we need.

Grief can be felt in so many ways, yet in most of our experience death is the only place it is often tolerated. Most of us have never received the support, containment, or guidance to know how to even attempt to be with our grief. We hope this space becomes a place to unburden your heart from carrying it all alone.

Sorrow and grief are personal and communal and can be experienced through many arenas such as but not limited to; death or separtation from loved-ones, loss of self or identity, genocide, imperialism, ecocide, oppression and marginalization, extinctions, economic, living/shelter/food insecurity, ancestral, soul-loss, pollution to air, water, land, psychic injury, manipulation, indoctrination, religion, separation/isolation, mental health, neglect/harm/trauma/abuse, colonialism, the ways we have caused harm, caste systems, community and belonging, violence, social systems, political systems, injustice, and more.

We are not experts nor is this space intended to substitute for counseling, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, mental health care, or substance abuse treatment, and it is not to be used in place of any form of therapy. It is solely a communal space of individuals gathering around grief, loss, and sorrow and is only offered as such.