Date/s: Friday 13 May to Sunday 15 May, 2022
Time: Friday | 7pm - 10pm
Saturday | 8am - 10pm
Sunday | 8:30am - 4pm
All meals included / billeting for out of towners
Country: Canada
Region: Salt Spring Island BC
Venue: Beaver Point Hall
Location: 1361 Beaver Point Rd
Park leaving the drive clear!
Pre-Registration is appreciated and required. Limited to 40 participants.
This weekend event is immersive and tuition includes all meals. Admission by interview.
https://vimeo.com/670949707/5dcbab0e1f
The modern world has exiled grief. The exile takes many forms, from spiritual bypassing to climate change denial, and even the personal repression of feelings in order to appear “normal.” This banishment has all but cut out the tongue of one of our most intelligent advisors—the grief that knows what needs healing.
Being without a tongue for grief has us caught in cycles of grief and exile without the nourishment of being witnessed, held and welcomed. On the other hand, the ability to listen to grief, and welcome what is trying to return from exile creates the conditions for a return from an "ordeal of healing." Ordeals are properly meant to bring new-found or renewed wisdom, to strengthen initiatory capacity and confirm community. Experiences of grief are meant to revitalize life.
As Martín Prechtel says in the talk below (on YouTube), "Grief is praise of what we have lost, and praise is the grief for what we still have." Grief is a skill, and it can be learned. Grief makes beauty, and beauty makes life. We need to make beauty together, so that we can live in a way that serves life.
The Grief Ritual Intensive Training is a ritual gathering to heal and learn experientially. Each ritual, while it rests on strong foundations, also carries its own unique flavour, based upon the troubles of the times, and the place and people calling it in. A real ritual has to have a wide recognition for the depth and intensity of the kinds of losses that threaten to consume us—from the personal to the global, from past actual losses to concerns about future jeopardy. It is a place to express where the emotions do not go in between people, but rather get pointed toward the Other World, where it they can be metabolized.
The stresses of modernity and collapsing communities (human and ecological) make us all at risk of isolation. Our wounds, pains, losses, guilt, rage, ancestral grief are giants that loom over us. We carry a common need for welcoming, listening, nurturing and inclusion. This is the territory we will head toward. Together we’ll explore. Together we will bring the wisdom of grief and “mis-fitting” home to our own hearts and to community.
OUTLINE
The registration process will ask you to consciously create an intention, a focus of the work as you see it now. That is done knowing that the intention may develop, change, and that some grief may emerge that you were not consciously aware of. If you would like help creating this focus, please discuss with the facilitator.
Also as part of registration, you will be asked about your allergies, food sensitivities and preference of vegetarian or omnivore. Good food is part of the care of welcoming. All the meals and snacks are catered, though we will help the chef with cleaning dishes! Since there may be some out of town guests, if you are able to provide billeting, please offer it.
Gathering times will be:
Friday 6:00 pm until around 10:00
Saturday 8:00am for breakfast through to around 10:00pm