Tending Our Grief

This weekend immersion is an invitation for mothers, inclusive of all the ways one can be initiated in and through this portal, to come together and entangle ourselves in an ancient, emergent, and futuristic practice: communal grief work.  

We will create a sudden village, a communal container, to touch what Francis Weller has named the five gates of grief:  

• Everything we love we will lose  
• The places that have not known love  
• The sorrows of the world  
• What we expected and did not receive  
• Ancestral grief  

We will also explore the sixth gate: the harm we have caused (articulated by Rachel Rice and Holly Truhar).

We will weave writing, song, movement, poetry, and sharing circles with vulnerability, transparency, and care. These ingredients will help prepare us for a culminating group ritual.    

Pain and sorrow unexpressed harden the heart, leaving us swinging between overwhelm and numbness. Grief requires a form of containment, the eyes of others, for full release. When we work in this way, we become more available to feel and therefore meet ourselves, our families, and our communities in a present and potent way. This gathering aspires to break our hearts wide open, stretch our connective tissue to include all life, and allow our tears to become a source of medicine.

This offering is part of a larger body of work, holy mama work, that is dreaming and experimenting with mothers working collectively to seed tiny pockets of living culture.  

To read more about Grief Ritual, please go to holy mama grief ritual.