Grief Tending in Community

Grief and Praise in times of pandemic

We often speak about the two wings of the bird in grief tending – an image that comes from Martìn Prechtel. The two wings represent grief and praise, the pain of life and the joy of life. In the teaching as I’ve come to understand it, a full life means one where both wings are strong. We cannot love deeply without deep grief. We cannot celebrate beauty, open to the joy of the moment, let ourselves be free with laughter or creativity without also meeting those moments when the loved one is gone, the laughter and beauty is finishing. Impermanence means every sources of joy comes to an end, everything living dies, every moment passes.

COVID Grief

COVID and grief. I’ve been speaking to a few people recently and finding a shared experience of something like a layer of grief in our awareness. It doesn’t feel very acute or sharp, something like a dull ache that comes into focus if I put my attention on it, and then the tears may come. It feels hard to name them all, but somewhere in that layer are griefs for the end of normality, for the imposition of government rules into private spaces, the difficulty of balancing autonomy, choosing the risks I want to take, with public health obligations, the ongoing quiet loss of contact with others, of hearing of the massive wealth grab that is happening by the most powerful, the sense of impending trouble as the fallout of all this on mental health, inequality and poverty roll out, of the slow wearing down of people’s well being, the outrages that are being committed by the old against the young.

End of the Line Events Start

Tending the Grief of Unwanted Childlessness

Last night saw the first event in the series End of the Line, for those with the grief of not having children. Over 30 on the call shared a little of their journey with childlessness and the resulting grief, and heard a bit about how the practices of grief tending can be transformative for those who have longed for children.

Grief tending Update June 2020

Loving life, welcoming grief.. staying in touch with our truth in times of change and upheaval

Here are some new dates for on-line workshops from me (Sophy), a bit of update from Jeremy about what he’s offering, and some reflections on these times and how this grief work might connect to the response to George Floyd’s killing. Continue reading “Grief tending Update June 2020”

Trauma, Grief and Times of upheaval

From Sophy, June 2020 Connecting indigenous perspectives on trauma with the landscape of pain in our culture, grief work, and colonisation.. what would a healthy culture look like, and how could these personal and collective traumas such as racism and abuse not be addressed if those of us with power and privilege were not so acclimatised to a traumatised landscape? […]

From Sophy, June 2020

I’ve been reading books about indigenous perspectives on trauma (including Trauma Trails and Decolonizing Trauma Work) and it’s helping me to shift my understanding of what trauma is, seeing more of how much of a western view I’ve held. I originally came to understand trauma as a personal thing, something that happened to an individual. I had already felt a powerful teaching from holding grief work has been to see that trauma – an injury to spirit, mind, emotion or body that leaves a residue of harm – doesn’t arise in the original event, but is the result of a failure of the holding field around the person or group experiencing the injury. Continue reading “Trauma, Grief and Times of upheaval”