We are living in chaotic times. There is so much to grieve, yet it can feel too overwhelming to allow our hearts to soften into the vulnerable place needed to tend our personal and collective sorrows. Paradoxically, when we do not allow our grief to be felt, we can harden to our own selves, and the world around us. In a time where the world needs more caring and compassion than ever, grieving is a radical act.

Do you feel stuck in your grief, feel like you need to grieve a recent loss but don’t really know how, or are perhaps resistant to even going there? Are your coping strategies or default to survival mode failing you, leaving you exhausted and overwhelmed? Perhaps you would just like more support and guidance during this sorrowful time, or a place of welcome and witnessing that honors the weight of what you carry. You may have recently lost a loved one, the ending of a relationship, experienced the death of a beloved pet companion, or are reeling from the humanitarian and planetary calamities of our times.

How do we turn toward our individual grief with compassion in the midst of so much collective grief? How do we bear witness to climate change, societal collapse, and the multiple pandemics from police violence to COVID-19 of the last several years and keep our hearts open to engaging with the world and our communities as we’d like to? Join us in journeying through these questions together in a healing group container held by expert facilitators. Participate in guided meditations, somatic practices accessible to all bodies (or alternatives will be given), and creative offerings to learn how to carry our grief with care, patience and trust in its medicine, rather than ignoring, or being obliterated by, it.

Together, we will explore the various types of grief arising in us and learn helpful frameworks and resources for navigating these losses and transitions — and for deepening our capacity to be in relationship with this lifelong companion. Embracing our grief and keeping our hearts alive amidst the collective numbing of our times is part of the paradigm shift that is so needed as we face such tumult and uncertainty.

Grief is not something we’re meant to go through alone, no matter how solitary the work can be. As we gather in community and in kinship with the human and more-than-human world, we find a sense of belonging in our shared grief, helping to metabolize our losses and transmute them into a balm to soothe our own hearts, and the broken heart of our world.