GRIEF TENDING
“I’m not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, and our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. this is the secret to being fully alive.”
Francis Weller
Grief is a part of life, and yet, our culture turns away from it more often than not. When we find ourselves immersed in the deep, murky waters of grief, we may feel isolated, alone, unsupported, and even misunderstood by others around us. When we do not receive adequate connection, understanding, and support from others when we are in times of grief, our process of healing may be delayed or even cut off. This can have disastrous effects, leaving us drowning in the darkness of unhealed sorrow for much longer than is necessary.
Grief is not limited to the loss of a loved one, and for trauma survivors, grieving fully is key to healing. We carry grief for what happened in our lives, what didn’t happen, what we got, and didn’t get, the love we expected to receive and did not receive, ancestral grief, collective grief, and even ecological grief. As you can see, grief is something that is always with us, and it is a vital step on our path of healing. In addition, grieving gives us access to greater joy, love, and connection with all of life.
“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”
Oscar Wilde
The Healing Time
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into all the places
where I said no to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin and bones,
those coded messages
that send me down the wrong street
again and again
where I find them,
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them one by one
close to my heart and I say
holy holy.
- Pesha Gertler
Grief is sacred. Grief is holy.
It is made out of great Love.
We join together in community in sacred circle to tend to our grief. Grief tending is the antidote to the solitary burden. Grief tending invites us to bring compassion, care, and kindness to our grief. We recognize that grief is not a problem to solve or a thing to be gotten rid of, it is a place of woundedness that needs tending to, a place that needs our love and care. All parts of you and your grief are welcome in our grief-tending circles - your sadness, anger, rage, despair, guilt, numbness, and loneliness - all you bring is welcome here.
To have the pain you are struggling with being witnessed and held within the container of sacred community helps to alchemize our pain, assisting in transforming it into the compassion that is at the heart of the medicine and path of the healer.
Grief tending invites you out of the shadows of isolation to be seen and held in your grief. It longs to be held and witnessed in the sanctity of holy sacred circle, where it is witnessed in Love. We learn to hold our grief more adeptly, seeing it as holy, and we recognize that it offers us a deeper connection with our hearts and with life itself. In circle, we gain more capacity to hold all of the flavors of life…the darkness and the light, including our sadness, pain, anger, joy, peace, and love. When we turn toward our grief with openness and care, we gain more acceptance and gratitude for the seasons and emotions: life, death and rebirth, joy and sorrow.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. “
Kahlil Gibran
Grief Vigil
We will open with a grounding practice, welcome, and reading, and then we will light candles to mark our time in sacred space. There will be an invitation to share grief in the chat so we can hold them in our communal container.
Music will play, at which point we can tend to our altars, meditate, connect with ancestors and guides, write, cry, move, or just be.
At the end, we will come back together for a somatic centering practice and another reading, blow out candles, and close our circle.
Circles are held online via Zoom.
Please check back or reach out to inquire about dates.
