I am so grateful to be facilitating two community grief circles for the women of The Red Earth Herbal Gathering this coming september. Now more than ever gathering in community to share our grief is deeply important for ourselves and the planet. Grief is a tricky experience for us all, living in a grief and death phobic society makes it hard for us to understand what we need when we go through loss. To be clear, I define loss well beyond the loss of a loved one to death, as we live through our lives we are faced with numerous losses that deserve to be grieved.  A life well lived is going to produce many losses, therefore uncovering our relationship to grief, exploring different ways to support ourselves in our grief, and learning that grief is at best a practice that needs to be tended to over and over again. There is no one size fits all approach, and when we gather in  community to look at the mysteries of grief something magical happens. 

 

Now more than ever we need safe spaces to explore our grief. The space that I offer is a simple one, it is a space where you are invited to come as you are, where we never apologize for our emotions, we embrace them, where we are given the opportunity to touch in with ourselves, our inner life, and then listen to the stories of others and share our own or to sit quietly and witness. Grief needs a witness. Grief needs an opportunity to be explored, unleashed.  To normalize grief, is to support us all in our unique and various experiences with it. There is no hierarchy to grief and loss, it is a human experience that given the chance to be witnessed and honoured may offer us the remembering of our own humanness and belonging. 

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I am gratefully invite you to come and sit with myself and other members of this community to practice grief together. Be prepared for silence, breathing, sharing, and an opportunity to open your heart and check in with what you are grieving right now. 

With love and care, Willow