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.
SHAPES OF GRIEF
An Introduction to Embodied Grief
April 17 & June 26, 6-9pm
Come to one or both!
Grief can take so many shapes. In Shapes of Grief, we’ll explore embodiment & song practices as stepping stones to express & metabolize what the body holds. Leaning into grief can feel clunky, foreign, or sometimes, terrifying. Let’s practice taking it slow as we make visible what’s moving on the inside.
Our time will include guided meditation, song, movement, & sharing from the heart. We’ll practice finding ground & exploring the shapes, sizes, & speeds of our grief. Through it all, the essential ingredient is us: being together, breathing into the places it hurts to go alone.
Guided by Monika Denise and Kelsey Maloney.
WERITO
Outdoor Grief Ritual Practice
for people who’ve previously attended an embodied grief ritual or workshop with Kelsey and Monika Denise.
5:30-8:30pm:
Wednesday April 30
Tuesday June 3
Wednesday July 16
Wednesday August 13
Come to one or all!
SAVE THESE DATES!
WINTER WELLSPRING
January 22—25, 2026
A 4-day Open Floor Workshop at Aldermarsh, Whidbey Island including dance, art, song, ritual, and story.
Guided by Monika Denise and Kelsey Maloney.
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