Community Grief Circles

Community Grief Circles with Willow Meili (The Grief Support Network).

In community, we gather. In this 75 min experience, we come together in a sacred community to practice being witness to not only our own grief but the grief of others. Each Circle includes:

Circle Guidelines shared and agreed upon by each participant to ensure safety and sacredness.
Guided Mindful meditation to check in with the inner world and access grief.
A short Journaling opportunity.
Sacred Share Circle. Each participant is given the opportunity to tap into the essence of what needs to be shared and witnessed in the moment. If sharing is not what is most supportive, showing up to quietly listen and have your presence felt is enough. In our circles, we do not comment on each other’s shares or participate in cross-talk. We listen, cultivating our deep listening skills and only Willow will respond with the Validation of being seen and heard by each participant.
Integration Meditation to ground us and close our container.

We will, in truth, spend many of our hours alone with our grief. In the cover of our solitude, we encounter another layer in our apprenticeship with sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. Our ability to drop into this interior world and do the difficult work of metabolizing sorrow is dependent on the community that surrounds us. Even when we are alone, it is necessary to feel the tethers of concern and kindness holding us as we step off into the unknown and encounter the wild edge of sorrow.”

― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Willow Meili

Willow is a certified Mindful Grieving Facilitator, End of Life Doula, and Grief Advocate who is passionate about changing the culture of Grief and Death in western society. Willow believes that grief is an experience that will touch us all, for to love is to grieve. Through the facilitation of safe spaces offering community and the opportunity to have our grief witnessed, and to be the witness to others, Willow helps to ease grief out of the shadows and into the light. Grief is something to be practiced, there is no step by step formula or process to work through and it is not something that will ever leave us. Grief may change over time, as it offers us a new relationship to the ones we have lost as well as the other losses that occur over a lifetime well lived. Each of us will have an individual experience of grief and grieving, AND through the experiences of being in community with our grief we soon learn that while our experiences and losses may vary, it is through our sharing that we remember our humanness and how essential it is that we have one another along this journey.

Willow works in partnership with The Grief Support Network, a non-profit organization committed to changing the culture of grief through its offering of no cost grief support programing, education and community building.