Rituals
for
Grief
Because grief needs a place
Maybe you know you carry unexpressed grief, and sometimes it hides in plain sight. The grief that can freeze out other emotions, makes you irritable, flattens your experience of life and can even lead to grief avoidant behaviour, like extreme busyness or addiction.
There are big and little griefs: loss of those dear to us, disappointments in life or love, climate or war grief, and sometimes life is just really hard. We live in a world that is not so sympathetic to the expression of grief, a culture that has forgotten how to grieve.
An Invitation
Come and grieve at one of our rituals. We offer them throughout the year in various places.
On these pages we talk about the nature of grief & ritual, why grieving might be a good idea & why it is hard to do! We also tell you about ourselves and Malidoma Somé, who created this grief ritual for the west, based on rituals in his own land where there is a culture of grief, and tears are not so overwhelming and are welcome.
What we do
A grief ritual is a space to support the deliberate and radical expression of grief. It was created by the late Dr. Malidoma Somé, who saw how hard it is for us in the west to grieve, and what a burden this can be.
In purposefully coming together to express grief, it becomes easier to sit with the pain of it; sharing sorrows builds community. As a group we make a ritual space that acts as a container for what we often cannot endure alone, because it is too big or too scary. Sometimes we worry the flow of our tears might never end!
Our bodies know how to grieve and some forgotten, wise part of us knows how to be in ritual. We find everyone has their own style of expression in this ritual, be it to cry, sit silently, howl, or weep in the arms of someone who earlier was a stranger.
Collectively we lay our grief burden down. When we are done, people often look years younger: the load no longer has to be carried. People are in better shape to live life afterwards and engage a greater depth of feeling.