MEDICINE FOR OUR TIMES
GRIEF RITUALS AND SUPPORT
Every person experiences grief throughout their life. Each time we attach to someone or something we’ll also lose something that is precious to us. It can be a loved one, a pet, a house, a job, a relationship, a dream. Our grief can be connected to injustice, deep concern for the earth, inherited grief from our ancestors, weltschmerz — the melancholy one feels in their heart about the state of the world. Grief is the echo that death and loss leave behind. Grief is a matter of the heart and a felt experience.
Many of us do not receive the support, acknowledgement, or compassion needed to be present with our grief. Unexpressed grief can lead to illness, depression, addiction, and violence towards ourselves and others. Expressing and being seen in our grief can open us to our full range of human emotion and deepen our connection with life and community.
art by Christina Greené
What do you and I need to build trust with each other so we can gently lift the rug where we sweep our grief, and let our grief be visible in community?
Join Kelsey Maloney, Monika Denise and guests at one of our upcoming grief offerings in Bellingham, WA.
A 5-part grief intensive for anyone longing to shift the story of grieving alone.
Together, we build a community of care.
GRIEVING GROUND is as it sounds–a ground to be with your grief. A ground where you can go slow and breathe into the places it hurts to go alone. You don’t need to hold it together here.
With the medicine of meeting ourselves and each other as we are, we’ll follow the wisdom of the body’s process. We’ll lean into embodied ritual, witnessing, somatic listening and art making–resources to navigate the terrain. Between each gathering, we’ll stay connected by sharing resources,checking in together, and exploring creative projects.
Guided by Kelsey Maloney and Monika Denise.
Sunday September 15, 2024: 1:30-7pm
Sunday October 27, 2024: 1:30-7pm
Friday November 22, 2024: 6-9pm
Sunday December 15, 2024: 1:30-7pm
Sunday January 19, 2025: 1:30-7pm
Registration is now closed.
In this embodied grief circle, we’ll name what is present in our hearts and practice giving expression to our grief and gratitude through movement and song. While we are tending a space for our sorrows of the world to be shared and witnessed, all grief is welcome.
Guided by Kelsey Maloney and Monika Denise.
Join us in setting a place for our grief and gratitude for the world.
Friday Nov. 22: 6-9pm
At Presence Studio, 1412 Cornwall Ave.
Learn more and register here.
WINTER WELLSPRING
January 23—26, 2025
A 4-day Open Floor Workshop at Aldermarsh, Whidbey Island including dance, art, song, ritual, and story.
We remember. Before masks. Before gathering spaces were closed down. Before screens and zoom rooms.
We remember that once, we gathered at wells where nourishment and connectivity flowed along with the stream of water. When our ancestors were connected to the old ways. When our skin fit true and that was enough for belonging…
Guided by Kelsey Maloney and Monika Denise.
ABOUT THE GRIEF TENDERS
Kelsey Maloney
(she, her)
I’ve been connected to grief from a young age — though I didn’t know to call it that until I was older. Throughout my life, I’ve felt the ups and downs of life intensely. My mom used to joke that between my sister and I, I got 100% of the emotions. I struggled to find places (both inside and outside of myself) where the full range of emotion was honored. Instead I encountered dismissal, misattunement, or pressure to be different. In my mid-twenties, through the practices of conscious dance, systemic family constellations, peer-counseling, and long-distance bicycle touring, I found compassionate community spaces that could hold the depth of my experiences and emotions. Movement, listening, and ritual have expanded my capacity to be present with my own emotional landscapes of grief.
My relationship with ritual and communal grieving deepened in 2019 with the unexpected death of my dad. Far beyond anything I’d experienced before, his death knocked me off any sense of center I may have had. Through the recommendation of a friend, I found my way to a Sacred Groves community grief ritual on the weekend of what would have been my dad’s 69th birthday. I’d never experienced grieving in a space where everyone around me was not only grieving also, but understood and respected the potency of what I was navigating. From there, Christina Greené and I formed a ritual-based grieving group with a small group of friends to listen to and support each other in what wanted and needed to move through us. In ritual, we’re able to connect with the magnitude and mystery of grief, reclaim our centers again and again, and be held by something larger than just ourselves.
To each grief circle, I bring study and personal exploration in the realm of emotion, grief, and embodiment, experience as a hospice volunteer, and certification as an Open Floor International Embodiment Instructor.
I arrive here with you now
with a humble heart.
Monika Denise
(she, her)
When I was 16, I wrote in my journal that I was a “grief eater.” While there were already losses in my life from the deaths of significant grandmothers and life-shattering moves, I also soaked up the suffering of the world like charcoal. Without knowing how to grieve with others, I fed my inner grief eater the only nourishment I knew—a steady diet of art, music, writing and time in nature.
As an adult, I followed the “grief eater” thread into a vocation as an art therapist. I felt I had stepped into my purpose to “sit with people in their pain and not turn away.” I worked with people in hospice; I was certified as a trauma therapist and became established in an art therapy practice. While my spine grew strong to show up in the deepest of pain and grief, I slowly began wondering what in me hid behind my capacity to hold and what would it look like to hold each other?
I left my hometown for my ensuing pilgrimage and entered an initiation of tending to my body through deep listening when my health suddenly collapsed. I began studying somatic therapy but more importantly I began asking for help, grieving what I hadn’t received in my life, and raging about the ways I had been dropped. The grief eater in me began to metabolize the energy I absorbed as holding it in my body was no longer a choice, and I began to tend that grief as sacred and welcome. This all deepened when I moved to Bellingham and joined a movement lab with Kelsey. Something woke up in me that remembered how to grieve with community, mirroring each other to deepen into the love and sorrow together and tapping into the fabric of experience nearly impossible to touch alone.
Since then, I am learning each time we come together. I am learning from community grief rituals with Kelsey & Christina, Laurence Cole, Ahlay Blakely and others. I continue to apprentice to Mystery, letting her teach me how to follow the threads that are longing for compassionate and safe witness and tending.
I arrive here with you now to honor what is and metabolize what is ready to compost.
Together, we remember how to grieve.
www.monikadenise.com