Tending the Rivers
of Grief
Welcome grief-tenders… & those feeling the pull to curiously and courageously tend the grief that runs through us all.
Tending the Rivers of Grief is a 4-week gathering, for those seeking an online space to explore their grief. If you find yourself here, I truly hope that this is an inviting space for you to come into.
You will be amongst the company of others whom are committed to tending, honoring and forever learning from the wisdom that grief can bring us.
In these sessions, we will gather together to be held and to be witnessed.
We will gather together to hold and to witness.
We will gather to remember that we are not alone. Our ancestors, no matter where we came from, enacted ritual practices that honored grief.
We will gather together to allow the deep roots of our human experience to have a place to land, and for our hearts to be collectively woven back into the fabric of our culture-making, our dreaming, and our relationships.
We will gather together to remember what still lives in our blood and bone, and to embody what we have always known how to do.
“Elisa’s communal grief rituals are an authentically beautiful experience that helped me in unexpected ways. She created a safe and supportive space for us to journey inward to explore and share from the heart. What made it so special was connecting with others. The act of offering and receiving unconditional love from the group was extremely healing. I’m so grateful to Elisa for her guidance and wisdom.” — Carolyn
Each gathering with include a transitional time to settle in and ground into the space, writing prompts and time for journaling, group explorations on various topics related to our ever-evolving relationship to grief, and opportunities to break into smaller groups for more intimate shares when there is desire.
Register for
Tending the Rivers of Grief
Single payment of $150
“Communal grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves. Through validation, acknowledgement and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing. Each of us has a basic human right to that genuine love, happiness and freedom."
“I believe the future of our world depends greatly on the manner in which we handle grief. Positive expressions of grief are healing. However, the lack of expression of our grief or its improper release is what is at the root of the general unhappiness and depression that people feel, all of which lead to war and crimes.”
-Sobonfu Somé
Because most humans have been conditioned to believe that grief isn’t something to prioritize spending time with, we find ourselves in a culture that is gravely and deeply emotionally immature.
The big emotions of grief will often be woven in with feelings of shame.
If you notice that happening, it’s very normal.
In all major rites of passage and thresholds of life, there is grief.
In many micro moments of every day life, we often feel sadness and grief.
When we don’t learn to feel it and express it, we skip over some of the most powerful alchemy that occurs at these times.
As parents, we know that children naturally express their sadness and their grief. Bodies know and can remember how to do this.
We once knew how to follow the impulses of our bodies. Grief got conditioned and shamed out of us by our familial and cultural norms.
Many of our bodies are often frozen in pain patterns that manifest as blockages to the natural flow of our passionately creative life-force.
When our grief is bypassed or continually shoved down, we also don’t know how to meet others in their experiences of grief. This creates major blockages in relational intimacy and feelings of isolation and loneliness.
As we develop a long term relationship to tending our grief, we often gain access to our life-force in a way that thaws the shame that comes along with the longstanding suppression of our emotions.
Expressions of our grief open the channel for emotional alchemy to occur and for us to make contact with the fierce expressions of love, passion and the deep truth, that live inside of our bones and blood.
The more we normalize our expressions and our shared experience of grief, the more connected we become to the greater webs of our shared humanity, and the potency and resilience of our shared life-force.
Yes, grief is messy, mysterious, and wild. To be in relation to our grief requires us to be in relationship to these energies and much more.
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness.”
“Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.”
— Francis Weller
“Rituals of mourning create strong communal bonds.” — Starhawk
“To grieve is to surrender to the fullness of the reality of my experience, in all of its uncertainty and contradiction. I don’t get to skip ahead to the end. I can’t tell you a pretty story about drawing the light out of the darkness without touching the darkness itself.'“
— Kelley Kidd, an attendee of Elisa’s in person Communal Grief Rituals
Clim your sgni
Register for
Tending the Rivers of Grief
Single payment of $150
We Tend the Rivers of Grief, Together.
