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The Grief Commons; A Community Grief Ritual
The Grief Commons
A Community Grief Ritual
Where sorrow is honored as sacred and soul is met in community.
Grief is a natural expression of love, change, belonging, and the ways life has touched and shaped us. It is not something we carry alone. Grief moves through families, communities, landscapes, lineages, and the wider web of life. It arrives in many forms and speaks through many languages—through tears and laughter, silence and story, movement and stillness, creativity, memory, longing, and love.
The Grief Commons is a three-hour community grief ritual created to offer a welcoming space for grief to be witnessed, expressed, and tended in community. Through story, song, silence, movement, creativity, council, and shared witness, we gather in the presence of grief as it moves through our lives.
Together we honor what stirs, what moves in silence, and what rests in mystery. We welcome personal, ancestral, collective, ecological, and unnamed griefs, while remembering that grief is not only about loss. It is also about love, connection, devotion, beauty, and our capacity to care deeply for one another and the living world.
This gathering draws from community grief tending traditions, ritual, council practice, embodied presence, and the understanding that grief has its own wisdom, rhythms, and timing. There is no right way to participate. Tears are welcome. Silence is welcome. Laughter is welcome. Movement is welcome. Simply arriving as you are is welcome.
Together we nourish the deep places of the soul, remember our kinship with one another, and reconnect with our place within the great weaving of life.
Saturday, July 18
10:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Please arrive 10-15 minutes early to orient to the space and settle in)
Please come with a cushion, blanket, water bottle, flowers or foliage, and altar items for a community altar such as photos, crystals or items that represent the elements of earth, air, fire, water and ether. Come with anything that feels nourishing and supportive for you. Cell phones and other devices other than medical devices are requested to be turned off and tucked away unless needed for communications with children or other necessary circumstances.
Location: Obsidian Lodge, 2250 East 29th, Eugene, OR (use this as address in maps) The gates will be open, drive on in and park over by the lodge unless encouraged differently.
Contribution: $35–$55 Sliding Scale
Please contribute at a level that feels sustainable and supportive for your circumstances.
Contact Info: Jonathan 541-632-3676/jonathan.stemer@gmail.com, Willow 305-302-8101/willow@willowsatnarayan.com
Payment accepted at the door or to reserve your spot:
pay via Venmo and put the name of event and date in the notes: @Willow-SAtnarayan
Jonathan Stemer, MS, LPC is a licensed professional counselor with over 30 years of experience in mental health and wellness. He has worked with adults from diverse backgrounds. His clientele includes empaths, highly sensitive people (HSPs), creatives, and those experiencing spiritual awakening or profound personal change.
His approach is integrative, transpersonal, and strength-based, supporting the whole person—body, mind, and spirit. He offers a safe, compassionate space grounded in presence and deep listening. Some of the areas of focus in his work include grief, recovery, identity, purpose, and relationship patterns as pathways toward healing and meaningful transformation.
He incorporates somatic awareness, connection to nature, and expressive arts to nurture resilience and creativity. His work builds on the client’s inherent strengths, supporting choices that align with their deepest values and guiding them through change toward greater wholeness.
Willow Sat Narayan is a Licensed Psilocybin Facilitator, Grief Tender, Death Companion/Doula, and Body-Oriented Integration Coach who companions people through grief, change, initiation, and the many ways life invites us to grow, deepen, and become more fully ourselves.
Informed through years of experience in end-of-life care, ritual, healing art modalities, somatic practice, and entheogenic and non-entheogenic journeywork, she offers grounded, relational spaces where people may listen more deeply to themselves, one another, and the living world around them.
Guided by the understanding that we are shaped through relationship, her work honors grief, the healing, and becoming as part of our belonging to one another, our ancestors, the great weaving of life, and the mysteries that move through and beyond us.