Grief Tending Offerings

Individual • Group • Community Ritual

Grief is something that opens the gates of the heart, softening the body toward truth, tenderness, and deeper connection with all that we are woven into. It moves in spirals rather than straight lines and lives in our bodies, breath, bones, stories, and lineages. Grief is not a burden to manage but a form of love and a sacred labor.

I offer three pathways for tending grief: individual sessions, group circles, and community grief rituals.

Individual Grief Sessions

A steady, companioning space for personal grief.

In one-on-one sessions, you’re welcome to arrive exactly as you are. Through embodied listening, presence, conversation, breath, movement, silence, sound, somatic practices, and simple ritual, we allow grief to be and share in authentic expression. Space is held for grief to be and to move at its own pace. 

This work may support:

  • Naming recent or long-held losses

  • Pre-grieving and anticipatory grief

  • Complex or disenfranchised grief

  • The spiral nature of grief

  • Embodied awareness and unwinding

  • Cultural, ancestral, and relational layers

  • Grief in caregiving, illness, dying, and transitions

  • Emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue

  • Elemental grounding and tonal support

  • Ritual actions for honoring, releasing, and remembering

Nothing is forced. I accompany you as grief reveals itself—in tears, stillness, trembling, stories, or quiet knowing.

Group Grief Tending Circles

A shared space for witnessing and belonging.

Group circles create a relational field where grief can be held collectively rather than alone. These gatherings weave somatic practices, ritual elements, nature-based grounding, and communal presence.

Together we explore:

  • Individual, collective, and ancestral grief

  • The value of communal grieving

  • How grief is carried in the breath, body, psyche, and lineage

  • How different cultures—and our more-than-human kin—grieve

  • Practices of forgiveness, honoring, and remembrance

  • Teachings, voices, and writings from grief-centered authors, poets, and traditions that help open pathways of understanding and release

Participants may share, stay quiet, move, breathe, or simply listen. All forms of expression are welcome.

Community Grief Rituals & Ceremonies

Raised when the community calls.

Community grief rituals can be created for families, groups, or the wider community. These ceremonies are rooted in the teachings of Sobonfu Somé and the Dagara tradition, honoring the grief-tending practices she brought into the world.

Ritual elements often include:

  • A community grief altar or shrine

  • Elemental grounding

  • Drumming, rhythm, and movement

  • Welcoming rituals

  • Breath, sound, and tonal work

  • Spiral storytelling

  • Collective release, reflection, and rest

  • Forgiveness and remembrance practices

  • Group singing, humming, or vocal expression

  • A team of grief tenders supporting the field

Grief rituals happen throughout Eugene and surrounding areas and can also be raised specifically for families, organizations, or communities seeking this work.

In community, grief becomes shareable, bearable, and held with dignity.

How These Spaces Are Held

Across individual, group, and community grief work, I offer:

  • Presence rather than fixing

  • Attunement rather than intervention

  • Relational connection rather than correction

  • Cultural humility and embodied listening

  • Respect for pacing, consent, and boundaries

  • Non-medical, holistic, soul-centered care

  • Warm, steady accompaniment

Grief arrives in many forms—tears, numbness, anger confusion, longing, gratitude, memory, silence. Every expression is honored.

Grief as a Spiral

Many people come to grief believing they must follow a prescription — that grief is supposed to move neatly from one stage to the next, as popularized by the “five stages of grief.” While meaningful for some, these stages were never meant to describe the lived, wild terrain of personal grief. Real grief does not unfold in a straight line, nor does it follow a tidy sequence.

Grief does not move in order. It moves like tides inside the body — cyclical, surprising, layered, and alive.
It circles back, softens, sharpens, disappears, returns, and reshapes us over time.

There is no formula for how grief is “supposed” to look.

As Martín Prechtel teaches, grief is a form of praise — the living proof that we have loved. And as Clarissa Pinkola Estés reminds us, grief is part of our wild, instinctual nature, a force that refuses domestication or schedules.

Grief is something that opens the gates of the heart, softening the body toward truth, tenderness, and deeper connection with all that we are woven into. It asks us to listen rather than manage, to tend rather than control.

Grief lives:

  • in the heart’s ache and its widening

  • in the bones, muscles, breath and voice

  • in dreams, memories, and unspoken stories

  • in the mysteries we carry

  • in our ancestral lines

  • and in the communities that hold us

Grief is individual and communal, personal and ancestral.
It belongs to the soul and to the village.

Tending grief—whether alone, with a companion, or in a community ritual—creates room for integration, belonging, and the quiet return of life-force.