Grief Medicine Circle: Tending to Our Broken Heart

“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.” – Joanna Macy

The last few years have been intense. Growing our capacity to grieve well is essential for both our personal and communal well-being; it is essential to keeping our hearts open and permeable to beauty and resilient to despair.

Grief is an integral part of life that requires our attention if we want to be fully available to life. In our culture, however, we have forgotten how to share our grief with one another. In addition to our personal losses, given the emergent climate crisis and its impacts – the extinction of species, the COVID pandemic, and the unrest and turmoil within human societies – the burden of grief that we are carrying as individuals can begin to feel unbearable. There are very few spaces where we are invited to experience and express this complex grief in the community.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

In the Five (05) Bi-Monthly circles, we will experience Francis Weller’s “Five Gates of Grief” to connect participants to their distinct and multifaceted experiences of grief and reconnect them to the life force that wants to be birthed through it.

“The sheer weight of these personal and collective sorrows is enough to crush our hearts, forcing us to turn away and find solace in anaesthesia and distraction. When we come together, however, and share these stories of sorrow in grief rituals, something begins to change. When our sorrows are witnessed and held within a community of compassion, grief can surprisingly turn to joy, to a love emboldened for all that surrounds us. Love and loss have been eternally entwined. To acknowledge our grief is to free our love to fall outwards into the waiting world. Something is stirring in the depths of the times. Our collective denial appears to be cracking. We can no longer deny the fact that the world is radically changing. We sense in our bones the breakdowns occurring and, along with it, our hearts feel weighted with grief. It may be our shared sorrows, stirred by our love of this singular, irreplaceable planet, that will ultimately activate our communal commitment to respond to the rampant denigration of the world”. Francis Weller

We invite you to join this restorative and sacred space where grief is welcomed and can move through, making beauty and birthing profound compassion as it does.