Wild Sorrow Wednesdays
Wednesday, July 15
5:00 PM - 8:00 PM local time
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About
Wild Sorrow Wednesdays
_ Every third Wednesday of the month _
_ 6-9pm BST _
_ Online via Zoom _
An online community space to gather, name and tend our grief together and offer praise for what we are grateful for and love.
To find out more about Wild Sorrow come and meet us here…
Event info
Welcome to a space to tend and honour our loves and losses together in community.
_ 'Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.' - Martin Prechtel, 'The Smell of Rain on Dust' _
Together we will explore grief, the resources and support we have within and around us, and what brings us joy. There will be space to express your grief in the way that feels right for you, witnessed and held by a supportive group.
Gathering to tend our grief together enriches our web of interbeing, bringing connection and care to places in our heart, body and being that might be contracted, loving, longing, isolated, heartbroken, sad, shut down, depressed, numb, angry, raging, despairing, hurting, healing...
We are not gathering to solve anything. The intention is to apprentice to and tend our grief, to give expression to its mysterious living movement. When we do this, we may find we can begin to open to and weave relief, connection and beauty with our loss; to open more capacity to be intimate with ourselves, each other and the life we are called to live.
By spending time with and releasing our grief through a range of practices that can include sharing, sound, silence, creativity, intuitive movement or words, we can open to take in the nourishment from our digested experiences, as we release the waste. Unexpressed grief is not benign, it can block and weigh us down, impacting and distorting our relationships and potential to live in the present moment.
Each session will include a different theme and creative way into being with our grief. We will offer body-based practices to resource ourselves, ways to stir and share our grief, along with soothing, integrating and resting as we return from tending our grief.
Facilitation
Hosted by Ayla Willow, Rima Cotran and Rosanna Cooper. We are a collective of women with rich, varied personal and professional experience in holding curious soul spaces for others. We met through apprenticing to our own grief and attending training together to offer grief tending to our wider communities.
Ayla Willow is a Mother, home educator, dancer, singer/musician & lover of nature. She facilitates a remembrance of our wholeness through dance, song & reconnection to Self, Spirit and Nature.
Rima Cotran bridges the two worlds of business and soul, guiding their integration, and is most passionate about supporting societal change through personal leadership and transformation.
Rosanna Cooper is an arts psychotherapist and loves writing, dancing, sea swimming and hiking. She holds a passion for play and restoring depth and whole-making to our culture.
We are committed to an ongoing relational tending, as part of preparing the ground of our offering, into our own rich and varied ancestral lineages, both the grief and gifts of our cultural roots and stories. We welcome, celebrate and encourage diversity and difference. Everyone is welcome to draw up a chair at this table of belonging.
This offering is inspired by an 'Apprenticing to Grief' training completed withSophy Banks and her team. The facilitation of the space draws on and gives thanks to the practices, teachings and rituals of elders includingSophy Banks, Jeremy Thres,Maeve Gavin,Sobonfu Somé,the Dagara grieftending tradition,Joanna Macy,Francis Weller,Camille Sapara Barton,Martin Prechtel, and others.
What kind of grief can I express?
All griefs are welcome. Building on Francis Weller's 'gates of grief', these identified themes can help to frame the varied flavours of grief we may be carrying:
1 All that we love we will lose (Francis Weller)
2 The places that did not receive love (Francis Weller)
3 The sorrows of the world (Francis Weller)
4 What we expected but did not receive (Francis Weller)
5 Ancestral grief (Francis Weller)
Optional extra Gates of Grief:
6 Trauma (Francis Weller’s optional gate)
7 The harm I have caused to myself and others (Sophy Banks & Azul Thomé)
8 Anticipatory grief – fear of what is to come (Sarah Pletts)
9 Other – to include anything that doesn’t resonate with other gates (Sarah Pletts)
Timings
Each session runs monthly for 3 hours. We will not be on screen the whole time.
Once you sign up, you will receive an email before the session with joining instructions for the call as well as what to prepare ahead of the session.
Cost
We offer this at a range of levels to support all to attend. Please feel into what you can afford, knowing that the higher tiers support those that can pay less or need a free place:
£40/30/20
Is this right for me?
It’s very normal to feel anxious or apprehensive about attending something like this. We are remembering and re-finding our way to the art of unprivatising and sharing our sensitive, feeling selves with each other in community. Western culture tends to actively avoid, denigrate and pathologise our feelings in favour of our thinking, individualism, performance and achievement.
If your grief currently feels incredibly raw, or you are experiencing a severe mental health crisis, or feel particularly unsupported in day to day life, this session may not be suitable for you at the current time. Please feel free to be in touch if you are unsure and we can connect and feel it out together.
We look forward to welcoming you to tend grief and offer praise; to remember together our wider kinship and belonging to each other and the earth.
Feel free to get in touch with any questions you may have ahead of the session.
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