Tending grief for a decolonised future
- Saturday 9th – Sunday 10th November
- At The Hearth, near Totnes, Devon
- With Fran André, Sophy Banks and Annie Watson
- Cost £120 – £280, bursary places available – get in touch
- To apply for a place please complete this form
- For more details contact Fran, email franandreretreats@gmail.com
‘Ocean Song of Sorrow’ is a weekend gathering for white bodied people, to tend the grief of our colonised and colonising past and present. Connecting with the land at the Hearth, we will create ceremony, share songs, and express and witness the feelings that arise when we bring to mind historic and current events of colonisation.
Intention
We will give a particular focus to the ‘transatlantic slave trade’ and the middle passage (the transportation on ships of those enslaved from Africa to the USA), as there is a direct link between the painful legacy of these and the history of this land. Through grieving specifically for the involvement of this country and our ancestors in the transatlantic enslavement of African people, our intention is to welcome all responses that arise in relation to this theme more broadly.
This workshop was dreamed initially by Fran André, herself a woman of mixed heritage, who was inspired by visionary teacher Orland Bishop speaking of the huge numbers of Africans who died without ceremony during the middle passage. This work is intended as a way to bring more consciousness to what lives in us and our ancestral lines as white bodied people, with the hope of supporting the healing that is needed for us to take greater responsibility for our collective history.
We will also connect with the lineage of unbroken wholeness and indigeneity that our ancient ancestors knew, before the ruptures of relationship to land, body, ritual, tribe and spirit. Connecting with the well of goodness and wholeness which is at some point intact in our lineages, we will draw on resources to support us in meeting the challenges of turning towards our grief for coloniality.
Who is this for?
Anyone who has been racialised as white who wants to go deeper into exploring through the body, heart and mind what it is to ‘be white’ within the wider systems of white supremacy. Recognising that decolonising spaces can often focus on information and thought, we particularly want to create ways to surface and express the range of feelings that come up in this territory, including sorrow, anger, fear, guilt, stuckness, and other difficult feelings; and more positive emotions, perhaps love, self-worth, peace, gratitude – and anything else that may arise.
The journey of the workshop
Participants will be invited to bring some research about the transatlantic enslavement of African people, so the workshop increases knowledge of events as well as inviting felt responses. This might include exploring the involvement of any known family ancestors with transatlantic slavery.
We’ll connect with resources that support us, remembering that white people have at some time been colonised, as well as being colonisers, and that we all have lived experience of being oppressed and oppressor in our bodies and our lineages.
We’ll sense into our own historic legacy of ruptures from a place of belonging, community, and connection to the beyond human world.
We’ll give space with ceremony and song to connect to the suffering of those colonised by white people, especially those involved with the transatlantic enslavement of African people, with the intention of bringing healing to our ancestral lines.
Working with song, embodiment, connection to land and ritual we’ll create space where feelings can be surfaced, expressed and witnessed, helping to move and metabolise that which can stay stuck below the surface.
We’ll invite consideration of how this moves in our lives going forward, and nurture opportunities for further connection and community building.
We look forward to being in this space with you.
To apply for a place please complete this form
About the facilitators
Fran André
Fran André is a bringer of song medicine and embodied presence work. She is a woman of mixed-heritage with ancestry from both the UK and Mauritius. She currently leads the ‘Building Bridges’ National Lottery funded project with a focus on decolonisation for the three affinity groups of i) people of colour ii) people of mixed/dual heritage, and iii) white folks.
Fran was part of creating the BLM commissioning project which began in 2020, which sought to bring both a symbolic and practical gesture of reparation for black music appropriated throughout the ages and in the community choir world. The project raised £26,000 from choir singers in the UK, the US and Canada and funded the creation of 8 new songs by black composers. She was also a Trustee of the Natural Voice Network during this time, where she helped bring in a levy fund to support projects run by people of colour in the network, and where she led on ARCH work (anti-racism and cultural honouring).
Fran has facilitated two weekend retreats for women of mixed heritage, in 2022 and 2024. She has also facilitated a year-long programme of ‘Wholeheartedness’ music and singing events for all People of Colour including those of mixed heritage, funded by the National Lottery. She also took part in the Community Consultations 8 month journey with Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) for bodies of culture, and 8 month training in Body Informed Leadership (trauma-informed group facilitation skills) with Madelanne Rust d’Eye, both in 2020.
A large part of Fran’s decolonisation work is based in her commitment to embodied presence work which informs her inner enquiry into her own racialisation and the situation of belonging ambiguity that being a person of mixed heritage can create. She has 15 years experience training with teachers of embodied presence / awakening including Fanny Behrens and Colin Harrison, and Adam Bradpiece.
Sophy Banks
Sophy has been working towards the transformation of systems of harm for many years, as a radical footballer, therapist, constellator, apprentice to grief, and co-explorer of trauma informed cultural models. She spent 10 years in the Transition movement, supporting communities to strengthen their resilience in the face of the poly-crisis, weaving inner practices and insights into a movement that often focused on the outer dimension of change.
For the past ten years she has been offering spaces for shared grief tending, welcoming all the sources it flows from. She carries lineages from Sobonfu Somé, Joanna Macy, Maeve Gavin and others. She supports a growing network of grief tenders who have completed the Apprenticing to Grief programme with her and others. This work supports the intention of her teachers, to bring cultural healing and transformation. It is rooted in the understanding that when we tend pain together, held in beauty, depth, love, connection and respect for the human and beyond human world, we mature, learn to metabolise and recover from shock, violence and stress, and strengthen the relationships which holds us in life. Without such spaces, grief and pain can often become sources of harm, contributing to widespread suffering, including systems of oppression and domination.
Sophy also teaches “Healthy Human Culture, her distillation of cultural maps and principles to create ways of living that are vibrant, just, and regenerative of people and all of life. This work recognises the importance of creating “return paths” to heal recent and long past injuries, personal and collective, in order to create a more peaceful, just and vibrant human culture in the present and future.
Annie Watson
Annie is a mother, small holder, land steward and facilitator of spaces for nature connection, way of council circles and grief tending. The thread that weaves the various elements of her work and life together is a desire to contribute towards creating truly regenerative ways of living; she believes that spaces to honour and tend our grief are an integral part of this regenerative culture. She is supported by a number of trainings in facilitation and an awareness of trauma, as well as many years of meditation practice and a strong connection to nature.
At Moor Barton Wilding, Annie works to increase access to the land for people of colour, as well as other marginalised groups, holding the dream of a human community at Moor Barton as diverse and inclusive as the flora and fauna of the land. Recognising the link between othering people and othering the Earth, she believes that solutions to the environmental crisis must go hand in hand with ending the historic and on-going centring of whiteness. She is part of an ongoing online ‘White Shadow Circle’ (www.livingjustice.earth), a group of white people committed to the inner work of loosening and dismantling white supremacy and supporting each other in the journey to free themselves from race thinking and behaviour. She believes that spaces to surface and tend grief in its myriad of forms, as well as other feelings and embodied responses to our colonial history, are vital to this inner work and is grateful to be part of creating this one.
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