Grief Retreat Reflections
Reflecting on our Spring Equinox grief retreat, hosted by Kripalu Yoga and Wellness Center on unceded Mohican territory.
[00:00:00] My thoughts.
My reflections.
It was beautiful to work and walk with grief
with two
co-facilitators
who also are called to
grief support.
To grief literacy.
To grief relief.
To decolonizing the idea that we must fit our grieving into this westernized specific idea of something that happens following the death of someone for a short period of time.
And then maybe again on the anniversary of that death. And that there is a limited time frame to
grieve out loud
to talk about
what you've lost.
Who you've lost.
[00:01:00] And also the paradigm that grief is really only about the death of a person.
Both of those things.
That room of a total of maybe 35 of us including several gongs and singing bowls.
So we probably had more representation of sound components through bowls and gongs than we did of people.
So altogether we had close to 80 elements between human and sound beings in that space and oh we worked. We walked. We wailed. We moved our bodies.
AmarAtma's somatic support
was vital and beautifully
[00:02:00] integrated throughout these experiences with sonic forces.
Sonic energies.
Sonic soothing.
Sonic disruption.
Sonic co-wailing.
Sonic release invitations.
Sonic excavation.
Digging into
feeling into
putting flashlights
in the
darkest corners
of our
silenced
suppressed
grief.
Reggie's sonic support really helped us to unearth that and have it move through the room and onto the land to be composted there.
The stories that I invited and listened to and helped folks to really see the stories that they had. And to shape different stories through the unearthing of all of the different
grief stacks
that
[00:03:00] had been
stuffed into their
big ol' backpacks
our
big ol'
backpacks
that had been
sitting
on our shoulders
and the backpack
was so sweaty
and dense
that parts of it
were sticking to
our skin
on our back
and on our necks
and on our
shoulders.
And we did some
triage
work
in that room.
We laid people down
and invited them to
be with the weight
of those backpacks.
We asked for
and received
consent
from multiple people
to do that
triage work.
To separate those grief stack backpacks from them.
From their bodies.
From their skins.
We tended
to wounds
together.
We appreciated how
opportunistic
grief can be
in that when one
element of
GRIEF
is present
the other forms
of grief
that we
[00:04:00] have been
dealing with
and suppressing
intentionally suppressed
and unintentionally suppressed
grief
rose to
the surface.
And because we were together
as human beings
and because some of us had invited our
ancestors
into that space
some of us invited the energies of our
more than human
kin that had
passed.
Our dogs
our cats
our birds.
And because we had the
grounding
of that land.
Because we had all of that
my God
we did some healing work.
And we can call it that because the folks there named that to us.
They said how they
walked in heavy
and left light.
They said how much they
needed this
to happen again
and wanted to
make it
a family trip
and bring
as many people
in their circles
as they could the next time.
The urgency
[00:05:00] that was there
for more of it.
The honest reflections
on the parts
that
really
moved them.
And the parts
that were
too much
for some.
We brought all that in.
It's like we were sitting around a fire
and so many things
went into the pit.
And because we had
the flames there
we fashioned
pots and pans
and we cooked things
down and we
made them into
stew and syrups.
And we drank and ate.
Elimination happened there.
We created
"poop pits"
spiritually
symbolically
to release what we had
processed
and digested.
And AmarAtma talked us through that and moved us through that and helped us move our bodies through that. We had ruptures and reflections. We had wailing. We had silent motions
to conjure up
and soothe
certain emotions.
[00:06:00] We worked. We walked. We sat. We cried.
We talked about
RAGE
and
RESENTMENT.
PETTINESS.
We talked about
NOT
being sad
about certain losses
and how our people some of our people couldn't hold that.
We talked about still being sad after decades of a loss.
We talked about the need to go no contact
with people
who insisted
that our
grieving
should be
over by now.
We talked about
compassion
for those who were
so uncomfortable
with our grief
that they
distanced
themselves
or said
really
stupid
shit.
We talked about
being the people
some of us
myself included
who have been
the sayers of
stupid shit
to people around us who were grieving when we
[00:07:00] didn't know what to do what to say.
We didn't know how not to try to fix or change the feeling
but instead to walk with them.
We worked. We walked. We wailed. We discovered. We discussed. We deschooled. We loved. We talked about how
grief is savoring of loss.
And we talked about the difference between
savoring and stewing in it.
We talked about the bodies we had been dragging around because we didn't have the education on how to
facilitate
a death
a burial.
We talked about what was and wasn't true for us
in relationship to
grief.
We talked about
the myth of
"letting go."
We deschooled the premise of how we can reach
closure
and what
closure is
and ain't.
We listened.
[00:08:00] We listened.
We listened to each other.
We listened to ourselves.
We listened to our grief
in its diversity.
We complained. We criticized. We composted. We learned. We unlearned. We unraveled.
We talked about the value of the unlearning and unraveling.
We
built
SKILLS.
We assembled
POWER PACKS
in support of our relationship with
this entity
this birthright
called GRIEF.
We imagined together
more of this
with more people.
We identified
some of us
ourselves as
pollinators
of this
grief relief.
Of this grief literacy.
We were excited to share what we
[00:09:00] experienced and
learned
and
gathered
and
made
together.
We connected with new folks.
We found our
"grief twin"
some of us.
We found people
whose ways of
nurturing
their grief
really supported ours.
We just listened to them
and we took copious notes.
And we reflected upon what we learned from each other
in that room.
What we
put aside
because of
each other
in that room.
What we composted
because of what someone else said.
How they moved in that room.
We talked about
autonomy
in our right
to grieve.
We talked about the right for our grief to take whatever shapes and sounds it saw fit.
And some of us decided to be more ferocious
[00:10:00] protectors of our
right to grieve.
We talked about the history of our grief and the future of our grief. And we made sure our grief was present and cared for.
We washed our grief's feet some of us.
We apologized for treating it like a villain when it was really love. When it was really our insistence to not let go of all that remains even though that person
or animal
or relationship
or identity has died.
We did all of that
on Friday.
On Saturday.
On Sunday.
In that room
on that land
at Kripalu.
And we gonna do it again.
And again.
And again.
Because
endings
need
tending.
[00:11:00] And we
over those days
got a bit
more skilled
at moving ourselves and perhaps some of our people from being
grief struck
to being
active
practicing
grieftenders.
Join me for monthly grieftending sessions online with Kripalu.
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