Winter with me. Come Tend Your Endings Here.
Say it with me, fam: endings need tending.
If you’ve spent any time with me in a grief circle or in any of the spaces where I sit with people around loss, you’ve heard me say that before.
To tend something is to offer it attention and to stay with it long enough to understand it, and to touch it with care. Tending asks us to move toward what is difficult instead of away from it.
When I say endings, I’m talking about deaths, departures, identity shifts, ruptures, reckonings, migrations, awakenings, estrangements, and all the many thresholds where something familiar dissolves and something...else/unknown/new begins to take shape.
And when I list out these endings, I do so because they are all experiences that are inextricably linked with some level of grief.
Grief is a path we will all walk again and again across our lifetime. When we have an unhealthy relationship with it, it can feel like a dense forest we are afraid to walk through. Or a perilous sea we only acknowledge in moments of overwhelm.
When we learn how to tend to it, especially in the presence of others, grief begins to feel more like a vast garden that holds many forms of life at once: thorny plants that will draw blood, strangling vines that demand boundaries, medicine that grows quietly in corners, and flowers that still bloom in the shape of memory, love, and the many things that continue beyond the loss.
This February, I’m co-facilitating a three-part online grief gathering with Reggie Hubbard and AmarAtma Singh Khalsa, hosted by Kripalu.
We’ll meet across three Thursdays — February 12, 19, and 26 — from 7:00–9:00 pm EST, for a total of six hours together. Registration for the full series ranges from $99 to $149. It’s a space for people who understand that grief is not something to get over, but something to build skill with.
A place to practice what it means to be in relationship with grief instead of only reacting to it when it crashes through the door of our lives.
What makes this gathering especially meaningful for me is the opportunity to tend this terrain alongside two grieftenders whose work I deeply respect.
I was recently in Reggie’s Winter Solstice Community Practice, and I left feeling both softened and strengthened in the ways that only skilled griefwork can do. Plus, Blackfolk do griefwork more like griefwerk. The energy hits different, and I needed that. There was music moving through the room, sound carried by the beautiful gongs Reggie plays, breath and movement weaving people back into their bodies in ways that felt reverent and alive.
Music is a tool I use in my own teachings, and it felt especially meaningful to experience how he uses sound as a companion for grief and release. I’m genuinely delighted that others will get to experience that kind of care, beauty, and embodiment with me through this gathering.
My introduction to AmarAtma’s work came through How We Heal, a May 2025 summit Reggie organized with Kripalu. Watching AmarAtma teach and tend in that space, I remember thinking how empowering it can be to experience someone holding grief with the kind of depth, steadiness, and devotion that only comes from years of walking alongside people in their most tender moments.
He spoke with a gentleness and spunk (yes girl, spunk!) that did not dilute the gravity of grief at all. Seeing him work in that summit made me deeply grateful that this February gathering will hold his presence.
And I come with my own language and practices around grief: the belief that endings need tending, and that grieftending is a skill we can practice. I also come with a consistent reminder that we are not meant to carry our losses alone.
I come with a devotion to creating spaces where people can bring the deaths of loved ones, but also Kananápo: the deaths of roles and dreams, the deaths of old selves, and the quiet, unnamed griefs that often go unseen, and have them all met with care.
I want you to know that this is where my work lives in the world these days. In shared rooms, in real time, inside intentional space-making, in breath and movement and story and presence. And you are invited to join me/us/this.
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