Grief Tending Ritual At Great Salt Lake, Earth Day 2019
Friends,
I’m so honored to invite you to join me and Kinde Nebeker for a Community Grief Tending Ritual this April.
You’re warmly invited to join us on Earth Day, Saturday, April 20th from 3-9pm for an evening of healing, deep listening, and sharing, with ample time to acknowledge and honor our grief, both personal and collective. Our time together will include an afternoon gathering in the city (location announced after you register), and then we’ll caravan to the shore of Great Salt Lake where we will ritually welcome our grief to flow, releasing it to the wild sky and the great salty lake as the sun disappears over the western horizon.
A donation of any amount signs you up!
We will let you know which organization(s) we’re sending the donation money to at the conclusion of our gathering.
Please make sure the email you use to make the donation is the one you prefer for communications about the event. As the date gets closer, we will send you an e-mail with details on where we’ll be meeting for the circle before we caravan to Great Salt Lake, as well as details on what to bring and what to expect.
Read more about how I was called to holding space for Grief Rituals here.
With the support of community and kind-hearted, embodied presence, let’s tend the River of Grief together.
I believe we’re being called to refine these beautiful instruments of our hearts so we can be of help to this world that so desperately needs sane people with clear hearts. We can’t refine the instrument without making space for the layers of grief that often block them.
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.”
