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Dear tender-hearted friends,
To say the last several years have been intense is an understatement. It doesn't appear that we're heading into a decade of ease and relief. Growing our capacity to grieve well is an essential skill for our personal and communal well-being. Grieving well is essential to keeping our hearts open and tender; to keeping our hearts permeable to beauty and resilient to despair.
You may be grieving the loss of a loved one, a loss of income, a loss of wellness or physical capacity, a loss of lifestyle, or a loss of the illusion of certainty. You may be grieving loneliness or longing for more alone time. Maybe you're grieving the suffering of others; grieving violent deaths like those killed in tragic mass shootings, wars, and genocides; grieving systemic racism, or grieving the increasing inequity across the globe. Maybe you're grieving the ongoing destruction of our beautiful natural world, the absence of birds, the many giant wildfires, floods and storms, the ongoing extinction of species, the reversal of rights happening in the courts, or the devastating loss of wilderness and beauty. Or perhaps your grief is for the divisiveness and meanness unfolding in a polarized culture. Perhaps your grief is for personal regrets, pregnancy loss, a beloved pet dying, difficult relationships, health crises, harm you've caused, or general overwhelm. Perhaps you're feeling the weight of your ancestors' grief, or grief on behalf of the world we're leaving the future ones. Maybe you're grieving with loneliness, the absence of community, and the longing for a more life-giving culture. Perhaps you're carrying all of this and even more.
"The sheer weight of these personal and collective sorrows is enough to crush our hearts, forcing us to turn away and find solace in anesthesia and distraction. When we come together, however, and share these stories of sorrow in grief rituals, something begins to change. When our sorrows are witnessed and held within a community of compassion, grief can surprisingly turn to joy, to a love emboldened for all that surrounds us. Love and loss have been eternally entwined. To acknowledge our grief is to free our love to fall outwards into the waiting world. Something is stirring in the depths of the times. Our collective denial appears to be cracking. We can no longer deny the fact that the world is radically changing. We sense in our bones the breakdowns occurring and, along with it, our hearts feel weighted with grief. It may be our shared sorrows, stirred by our love of this singular, irreplaceable planet, that will ultimately activate our communal commitment to respond to the rampant denigration of the world. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
– Francis Weller
You are warmly invited to join us for a powerful long-weekend retreat; a gathering of courageous, tender-hearted people co-creating a sacred space where grief is welcomed and can move through; making beauty and birthing profound compassion as it moves.
You don't need advice. You don't need to be cheered up or talked out of it. You need a safe and respectful space to feel it – to be held, seen, heard, witnessed, wholeheartedly welcomed, and even thanked for sharing your tender, broken-open heart.
Join us for a transformative weekend in just such a sacred circle.
We will make a generous welcome for grief and sorrow without forcing it and without anyone attempting to fix you or tell you to rise above it.
Let us enter the holy healing ground where you can let yourself fall down and weep. A sacred space will be held where you can honor the weight that makes your chest, guts, jaw, and heart clench. It's a gift to know you're not alone in this very heavy, very humbling, and very human experience of grief.
We are so grateful to be weaving this offering with our dear friends Alexandre Jodun and Alyona Kobevka, who are both psychotherapists, experienced ritualists, skilled facilitators, and wonderful human beings. They are each deeply rooted in ancient and contemporary wisdom practices in their personal lives and in their work. We're thrilled and honored that they'll be traveling from their home in the Sacred Valley of Peru to co-host this ritual weekend with us.
We will gather at a beautiful private location in the Sugarhouse area of Salt Lake City, Utah, over Labor Day Weekend, Friday - Monday, at the following times:
Friday, August 29, 5-8:30 pm MDT
Saturday, August 30, 10 am - 6 pm MDT
Sunday August 31, 10 am - 5 pm MDT
Monday, September 1, 10 am - 1 pm MDT
Please only apply if you can plan to attend the entire weekend.
Space is limited to 45 participants.
The cost for this four-day ritual is USD $695.00.
If you need a payment plan, please ask.
We have a limited number of scholarships available.
Participants are invited to organize their meals and lodging. We are happy to offer some recommendations upon your registration.
Applying for this event does not guarantee registration. We recommend waiting to receive an invitation from us and waiting until you complete your payment/registration before paying for any travel or lodging.
Our time together will include:
- authentic conversation and compassionate listening
- abundant soulful poetry and communal singing
- potent grounding practices to help us find deep support as we unwind and soften the bracing in our bodies
- quiet time indoors and/or outside
- the creation of 2-3 beautiful shrines
- micro-rituals of guided writing practices that include an opportunity to share and witness in small groups
- gentle somatic movement practices
- and will culminate in a powerful community grief ritual.
Please know that it's a come-as-you-are gathering with no pressure as to how you express grief or not. Grief does not show up on demand. The inner life runs from pressure. Thus while we do not pressure anyone to grieve, we offer a safe holding space where grief can emerge and move. You may weep, you may be a witness to others, you may be numb, you may be full of outrage – another face of grief – and you may be surprised. However you come, your presence is a valued thread in our community tapestry and will be met with respect. You will never be met with unsolicited advice or fixing. All that's required is your humanity, your authenticity, and your willingness to be present and to bear witness to others with compassion.
Whether you are actively grieving, tearful, outraged, numb, awkward, or full of trepidation, you are welcome just as you are.
To have your grief held and witnessed in a compassionate, listening circle is a gift.
To witness the grief others carry, with empathy, is a gift.
It's no longer "MY grief."
It's just grief and is something each of us and all of us carry.
Let us gather on the sacred ground of compassion, knowing we are not alone.
As Martín Prechtel writes, all war is unmetabolized grief. We do this work not only for ourselves but for the healing of the collective, now and into the future. Thank you for your courage to step onto this healing ground with us.
The photo above is our ritual bowl of stones and flowers from a past in-person grief-tending ritual.
“How I will cherish you then,
you grief-torn nights!
Had I only received you,
inconsolable sisters,
on more abject knees, only
buried myself with more
abandon
in your loosened hair. How we waste
our afflictions!
We study them, stare out beyond them
into bleak continuance,
hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas
they're really
our wintering foliage, our dark greens
of meaning, one
of the seasons of the clandestine
year -- ; not only
a season --: they're site, settlement,
shelter, soil, abode.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise when we lose whom we love. A nonfake grieving is how we praise the dead, by praising that which has left us feeling cold and left behind. By the event of our uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap, we are also simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live, the life that gave us the health and opportunity of having lived fully enough to love deep enough to feel the loss we now grieve. To not grieve is a violence to the Divine and our own hearts and especially to the dead. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive."
- Martin Prechtel from The Smell of Rain on Dust
Pema Chodron writes:
“Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta. An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.”
