COMMUNAL GRIEF RETREATS
Facilitated by ahlay and Laurence Cole
We offer grief retreats on the traditional lands of Coast Salish People.
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UPCOMING GRIEF RETREATS 2026
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Grief and Psychodrama w/Linda Thai
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March 8-14 (WA state) 2026
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May 31-June 6 (WA state) 2026
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August 3-9 (Big Sur, CA) 2026
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River trip in w/ahlay, Pinar (Queer Nature) & Linx via The River's Path
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April 19-25 (Utah) 2026
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Weekend Grief Retreats 2026 w/ahlay + Laurence in Bellingham, WA
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March 28+29
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Oct 24+25
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Dec 5+6
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We’re excited to expand our retreat venue options for our 2026 in-person gatherings. If you know of a location within a 50 mile radius of Seattle, WA that could be a perfect fit, we’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to us at grief.healingattheroots(at)gmail(dot)com - Thank you for your support!
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WHAT TO EXPECT
This ritual is rooted in many tributaries, yet at its core it carries the lineage of the communal grief ritual of the Dagara People of Burkina Faso, brought to the West by the late Elders Malidoma Somé and Sobonfu Somé. As Sobonfu would say, we “cook the ritual” by drawing upon other streams of wisdom, but the fire at the center remains Dagara. The ritual begins later in the evening on our first night together and unfolds across two days.
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We will be on ritual time, meaning time is left at the door once you enter. Our gathering will move through singing, poetry, movement, sacred listening, witnessing, and sharing - sometimes as one body, sometimes in smaller groups.
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Communal grief ritual is a space where we may gather as a village and be witnessed in our sorrows. By listening to others, we may begin to find shape for what has felt ineffable in ourselves. Here, there is the possibility to destigmatize grief, to metabolize it, to lay down the pathological labels placed upon it. Together, we may co-regulate our nervous systems, restore belonging, and remember that we are not alone.
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The ritual walks in the ripples of Malidoma and Sobonfu, while also drawing from other teachers and traditions: Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, the professional mourning women of Greece and Italy, the keeners of Ireland and Scotland, the Mikonenet of Jewish lineage, Francis Weller, Martin Prechtel, Stephen Jenkinson, Angeles Arien, the compounded grief of our times, the teachings of Whales, and many more. These tributaries feed the current, but the root is Dagara.
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This space welcomes whatever arises: numbness, shame, rage, trembling, stillness, wailing, or silence. Inspired also by Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief: loss of what we love, places within us that have not known love, sorrows of the world, what we expected and did not receive and ancestral grief… we will lean into vulnerability, trust, and surrender to remember how to grieve together as a community.
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READ MORE ABOUT THE LINEAGE OF THIS RITUAL HERE.
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As a woman of European descent, I hold the complexity of carrying a lineage of African descent. This is something I continuously grapple with in humility and respect. I oscillate with the question of whether to continue forward in this lineage at all, knowing the deep wounds of appropriation, enslavement, and extraction tied to bodies of African descent on Turtle Island by people who look like me. And yet, I return again and again to the reason Malidoma and Sobonfu were sent West by their Elders: to help mitigate colonization and neo-colonization. Having lived through French colonization themselves, the Elders asked: how could such a people enact this violence? Their answer: a people with frozen hearts, grief illiterate, severed from ancestors.
A photograph of three professional klogerins taken in the cemetery of Nemriov, Ukraine, by members of the 1912 Jewish Ethnographic Expedition lead by S. Ansky. The photo is published in the memoirs of Abraham Recthman, one of the researchers who took part in the exhibition.
This is why I continue to grapple with carrying this lineage: in service to decolonization, in service to breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma both caused and endured by my ancestors, and in service to reconnection with the ancestors. As Martin Prechtel has said, all war is unmetabolized grief. My intention is to hold this work with as much integrity as possible, and I remain open to feedback and conversation about the complexities that accompany carrying this lineage. I am committed to ongoing learning.
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We do not believe in barriers to healing. If this ritual is calling to your soul, cost should not stand in the way. Contributions support facilitators and organizers to be resourced, and limited scholarships are available, especially for working-class and cash-poor folks on the front lines of community work and social movements.
humpback whale teach us how to breathe, into our bodies so that we may grieve
deep into the dark, into the abyss - so we may rise up into all our bliss
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registration for grief retreats.
We currently do not have waitlists for our already full retreats.
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We tithe towards building infrastructure for healthy water access for the Dagara Tribes of Burkina Faso, West Africa in reciprocity for the ripples of communal grief work Sobonfu + Malidoma Somé brought to the west in the 80's + 90's as an antidote to colonialism.