COMMUNAL GRIEF RETREATS
Facilitated by Ahlay and Laurence Cole
We offer grief retreats on the traditional lands of Coast Salish People.
WHAT TO EXPECT
This is a two day retreat. We will be on ritual time, meaning time is left at the door once you enter.
Our time together will be a combination of singing, poetry, movement, practice in sacred listening, witnessing and being witnessed and sharing with the whole group and in smaller groups.
Communal grief rituals are a group of people who come together to be witnessed in their sorrows. Through listening to others in their grief we can learn to articulate what has felt ineffable. Here we are invited to destigmatize, metabolize and remove pathological labels of our grief, to co-regulate our nervous systems in village and to be reminded that we are not alone.
READ ABOUT THE LINEAGE OF THIS RITUAL HERE.
This space is an opportunity to share what is moving through us in whatever shape or form it comes in - perhaps numbness, shame, rage, trembling, stillness, wailing or something else.
Our work is also inspired by the five gates of grief from Francis Weller: Everything we love we will lose, the places that have not known love, the sorrows of the world, the things we cannot even name that we ache for, and intergenerational or ancestral grief. Together, we will lean into the vulnerability, trust, and surrender needed to remember how to grieve together as a community.
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.
We don't believe in barriers to healing spaces. The cost of this retreat should not be a barrier to you if this space is calling to your soul. That being said, the cost of this ritual is so that the facilitators and organizers may be resourced. We are committed to making this work accessible to a wide variety of communities; especially cash poor and working class folks who are on the front lines of social movements and community work. Limited Scholarships available.
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
For questions or inquiries you can reach us via email.
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.
Join the waitlist for Communal Grief Rituals
We will add you to the waitlist for the dates you are interested in and send you updates as they arise.