On Healing Ground-Communal Grief Retreat

Join us for this powerful communal grief retreat.

Saturday 9am – 9pm

Sunday 9am – 5pm

We carry grief of all kinds. Joy and sorrow are a main staple of our daily life. And this ancient wisdom teaches us that our culture is sick not because we grieve too much, but because we don’t grieve enough. We aren’t given permission to fully grieve.

Many of us feel alone and isolated in our grief.  Western cultures tend to have a “don’t ask for help” and a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. It is forced down and shamed until it turns into a personal pathology rather than collectively held and honored. We are not meant to grieve alone!

When grief is not processed, it often gets passed down through the generations and can come out in harmful ways. But we can choose differently.  We can reclaim our natural ability to heal alongside one another.

Grief is not something to get over but to be embraced and cherished for the love that it is. It is ok to hurt, we just need each other to collectively hold that hurt and support one another to carry what we cannot carry alone. Sometimes we can get stagnate and drown in our grief because we aren’t given a way and a community to allow it to move through us.

This medicine helps us regain our interconnectivity. This being human is no easy task and part of our challenge in life is learning to be more human. To celebrate the full range of our human experience and that means our deep sorrow. But touching on that agony is often scary and why we need companions to journey with us through the tunnel of grief until we come out the other side.

The ritual includes talking circles, singing and drumming, poetry, movement, practice in sacred listening, witnessing and being witnessed, ceremony, sharing food and quiet time. The heart of the retreat is a ceremony inspired by Sobonfu Somé and shared by Pacific Healing Circles.