STAND TODAY
STAND TODAY
STAND TODAY
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 2025
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July 31 - August 6, 2025: Big Sur, CA : Week Long Grief + Psychodrama Retreat (Linda Thai + ahlay blakely)
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October 18 + 19, 2025: Bellingham, WA (Laurence Cole + ahlay blakely)
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November 8 + 9, 2025: Corbett, OR (Laurence Cole + ahlay blakely)
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December 6 + 7, 2025: Bellingham, WA (Laurence Cole + ahlay blakely)
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December 11 + 12, 2025: Durham, North Carolina (Laurence Cole + ahlay blakely)
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We’re excited to expand our retreat venue options for our 2025-2026 in-person gatherings. If you know of a U.S.-based location—especially on the West Coast, with a focus on Washington state—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
We will be on ritual time, meaning time is left at the door once you enter.
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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.
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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.
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The ritual rides the ripples of the footprints of Elders/Ancestors Malidoma + Sobonfu Somé along with the wisdom gifted by teachers and lineages such as Joanna Macy, the professional mourning women of Greece & Italy, the keeners of Ireland and Scotland, the Mikonenet from the Jewish lineage, Francis Weller, Martin Prechtel, Stephen Jenkinson, the immense amount of compounded grief of our times, Whales & so many more.
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READ MORE ABOUT THE LINEAGE OF THIS RITUAL HERE.
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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.
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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
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Please subscribe to the newsletter for
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.