Healing Through Your Grief
One-one Sessions to Awaken Through Loss
Have you had a deeply challenging last few years through the pandemic and feeling a sense of numbness, shutdown, isolation or anxiety regularly?
Does this time of year bring up subtle or great sadness for you that you just can’t explain and feels like a heavy burden?
Are you wanting to feel more aliveness in your life and greater ease in your relationships with your family?
Are you taking the next big step in your life and feeling like there are some emotional blocks that are holding you back?
All of these experiences can be caused by unexpressed grief that can be both personal and shared. While we often think of grief coming from the death of a loved one, we can be going through grief for so many reasons in our lives. This course can help you to understand and feel through your current experience of grieving in order to live more fully.
The world has been changing at an increasing rate and we are called to continue changing as well to cultivate greater resilience to meet these challenges from a place of greater wholeness. It’s from this wholeness that we are better able to meet our needs as well as those of our families, communities and the collective. Grief comes with all of our experiences of change and is a challenge that we all face now more than ever. Grief can also separate us from our wholeness if we don’t allow ourselves to move through it and learn from it. You are invited to take a step into honoring your wholeness in community amidst the many ways that we can feel torn and drawn in different directions. Let us instead come together both within ourselves and in community to heal together. In so many traditions and for many of our ancient ancestors, grieving is and was a collective practice. For those of us who have been separated from this communal healing practice we can once again return to it in tender, loving and profound ways.
Join in this 7 session journey to get a taste of the process of healing through grief that can be nourishing and grounding, joyful and expressive, comforting and connective as well as a growth experience. We will be using our bodies, our breath, our knowing and our creative expression as our guides to awaken latent wisdom that can offer us greater resource and resilience amidst the challenges we face. Inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and somatic movement, this journey will invite you to learn about and move through the directions and layers of grief in gentle and powerful ways. We are all united through our grief and it is in grieving, especially with others, that we are able to remember who we truly are and what we are here to be and do in service to all beings.
There will be trauma-informed embodied (somatic) movement, breath and meditation guidance in the form of tools and practices that can support your journey as well as an open space to share your experience in circle each week. We will be supported by the wisdom of the elements and the directions and archetypes as we honor our bodies, the land and the wisdom that we all carry within us as the living Earth.
The Curriculum of the Sessions
Week 1 – Grounding and Landing into the Grief Wheel together – Commitment, Resourcing Tools, Self Love, Guidelines and Agreements
Week 2 – East – Air balanced by Earth – Child
Rooting through Confusion
Week 3 – South – Fire balanced by Water – Villain/Fool Flowing through Scaredness
Week 4 – West – Water balanced by Fire – Lover/Beloved Surrendering through Despair
Week 5 – North – Earth balanced by Air – Warrior Taking Conscious Action through Anger
Week 6 – Center – Ethers – Healer/Sage/Elder
Honoring our Connections and Callings
Week 7 – Integration & Application in our Lives
Through this healing journey
you will receive:
- Tools and practices to address grief and that will support you to heal through your grieving process
- An understanding and perspective of how we are all in grief and grieving collectively
- An experience of how grieving can open us to our joy, our creativity, the beauty of life and our ability to celebrate and connect more deeply
- Learn about and practice cultivating greater awareness with nature, the elements and with the land to deepen your relationship with yourself
- Resourcing your own inner wisdom through your body
- Practices to help you boost your immune system
- Guidance for your own personal healing practice at home
Each session will generally include:
- Grounding and land acknowledgement
- Personal check in
- Sharing about the stages of grief through The Grief Wheel with Elemental, Directional and Archetypal guides
- Trauma informed movement & meditation guidance to address a stage of grieving
- Invitation to personal practice each week
- Visual StoryBoard and resources for each week
Acknowledgements
This course is inspired by many traditions and comes directly from Joanna Macy, Ph.D, who is an author, teacher, scholar of Buddhism, systems things and deep ecology. She developed The Work that Reconnects. Hilary collaborated with Grandmother Kaariina Saarinen, a shamanic bloodline chief and pipe carrier, and offered an online Grief Wheel Facilitation Training last winter.
There are also threads from Tibetan Buddhism and Body Mind Centering including:
- His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, Lama Willa Blythe Baker, Lama Tsultrim Allione
- Sky Otter (Bill Pfeiffer), Founder of the Sacred Earth Network
- Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Founder of Body Mind Centering, Christine Cole, Founder of Somatic Body Training
- Embody Lab teachers of the Embodied Social Justice and Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Certifications
- All clients & students are teachers
If you’re interested in learning more, book a free 30 minute discovery call to see if this journey is right for you: