Being with Grief

9 Week Course in Cultivating the Art of Grieving

 

Elemental Grief Tending

In this 9 Week Course we will be working in direct connection with the 5 elements in cultivating grief literacy and skills. We will allow the elements to guide us in our personal relationship with grief

  • Earth - Resourcing, Working with Depression

  • Water - Inner Stillness, Allowing Flow, and Opening the Flood Gates (Gateways to Grief), Working with Overwhelm

  • Fire - Transmutation, Metabolizing, Working with Anger

  • Air - Winds of Change, Working with Anxiety

  • Space - Resting into the Unknown, Working with Numbness

Grief Ritual

The dictionary describes ritual as an established form for a ceremony. The etymology of ceremony comes from the latin word ‘caerimonia’ meaning holiness, sacredness, awe, reverent rite.

In Grief ritual we are creating a container to honor the sacredness of our grief. This is an important aspect of being with grief, as it allows us to open and be present in ways that might not be possible otherwise.

In our culture of production, consumption, and distraction it is important to carve out time and spaces for just being. Ritual is a potent tool for reclaiming the power of our own presence.

Don’t run away from Grief o’ soul, look for the remedy inside the pain

Because the rose came from a thorn and the ruby came from a stone

~ Rumi

REMEMBERING THE ART OF GRIEVING

‘I don’t believe you need to heal grief. Grief is the medicine. Grief itself is the healing. Grief is not trauma. People get confused. Loss can be traumatic. But grief itself, that’s the medicine.’ ~ Malkia Devich-Cyril

We live in a grief-heavy culture, land and world. We have lost much of the traditional and innate wisdom about how to move toward our grief, to feel it and allow it to move through us. Lacking tools and context for befriending grief, we tend to suppress and deny the grief that is in us. This contributes to the stuckness, overwhelm and avoidance so many of us experience, and the unfortunate repetition of cycles of dysfunctional ways of being in our lives and relationships.

We are in the times of re-discovering our innate capacity to grieve. There is no other way but through surrendering to being alchemized by our grief. Our grief holds the keys for our freedom, joy, and aliveness. Grief makes the space for us to open to, envision, and create a new future for ourselves, others, and the world.

Grief is the medicine. All grief, no matter how big or how small, how old or how new, can be met with kindness, presence and the resource needed for its tending and transformation. Opening to these places with support we can surrender to the medicine of grief. We recover our inherent resiliency and joyful aliveness.

Being with Grief is a 9 week course where we cultivate the skills and capacity to meet our grief with loving presence.

This course is offered as supportive preparation or integration for our in person Community Grief Rituals. It can also be taken on it's own in your personal journey with grief.

In this course we will:
~ Co-create a courageous, resourced virtual space in community to honor individual and collective grief.

~ Directly explore the 5 Elements based on Daoist, Buddhist, Indigenous philosophy

~ Learn about different types of grief and ways to identify how it may be showing up in your life.

~ Discover the difference between embodied grief and re-traumatizing catharsis

~ Gain practices to support presence, grieving, and embodied integration such as Meditation, Qigong, Self Compassion/Empathy, Connecting with Nature and the Well Ancestors

~ Expand perspectives on how grief is held in wisdom traditions and indigenous ways.

~ Express your grief through writing, movement, song, and circling.

~ Cultivate the Capacity to Hold the Fullness and Paradox of Grief and Praise

~ Open our Connection and Sense of Belonging with the Natural World

~ Learn to create a personal grief ritual

~ Share in a virtual Communal Grief Ritual

Being with Grief

Our journey together will be three months long. We will begin Saturday January 11th, 2025 at 9:30am pst. The 9 live classes will be held online for 2 hrs each, 3 weeks on and one week off, with the exception of the last class. That weekend there will be an in person grief ritual in Santa Cruz (admission not included in Being with Grief). Our last class together will be an online grief ritual on March 29th.

BIPoC and LGBTQIA Welcomed and Wanted!

Cost: Sliding Scale $270-$450

Scholarships Available By Application

Registration Opens December 2nd, 2024

 About the Facilitator

Mikyö Black-Wangmo (they/them) is a devotee of the Great Mystery, reclaiming indigeneity, and of ritual. They are based in, and in love with, the Red Willow lands of Northern New Mexico, otherwise known as Taos. They hold grief medicine as a pathway to freedom and Essence. 

As a facilitator, educator, death doula, and somatic practitioner Mikyö brings deeply cultivated presence in service to the empowerment of those they work with. They are a student of the Elements and Natural world, their indigenous mexican and more-than-human Ancestors, of Grief and Death, and of their esoteric teachers and lineages. 

Their positionality as a queer, 2 spirit, indigenous PoC, transracial adoptee allows them the privilege to exist and work outside of and beyond the systems of oppression we all live in and are affected by. Mikyö is dedicated to becoming more and more joyfully alive and free in service to love and life, and in supporting others to do the same.