I slept 9-10 hours most nights, and a few of my days included 3 hour naps on top of that.

I was actually astonished at how much rest my body (& soul) needed.

Sleeping to the sound of surf is deep magic, and I feel restored in a way that I’m not sure is possible without this kind of medicine.

[Update/Sidenote/Interlude : I originally wrote this Saturday morning, and then spent Saturday and Sunday unpacking, drying gear and cleaning our house like mad.

Basically, came back like a bat out of hell and then hit the wall midday Sunday. By Sunday afternoon I decided that I needed some DEEP integration of our retreat still – mostly in the form of REST.

Reflecting back and forth with my dear friend Tecca Thompson from brought me to the decision to commit to I am a 40 day Rest Practice, wherein I lay down and close my eyes for a minimum of 15 minutes EVERY. SINGLE. AFTERNOON. I’m both excited and terrified by this commitment. But I just woke up from a 20 minute rest and now here I am, alive and well, lol.]

now…back to our regular programming …

I’m so grateful, and I also recognize the immense privilege I hold to be able to take this kind of time out, and to be able to access a place where I can be immersed in such deep, raw, wild beauty.

Our family doesn’t have a lot of money. But we have skills, health, knowledge and a relationship with nature that allows us to do this once a year – and to take shorter trips like this on a regular basis.

But listen. When I retreat like this, it is with full awareness that the world is burning around me.

This is possibly also why we are all so exhausted.

Whether we are aware of it or not, there is the constant background buzz of apocalyptic world conditions in the background of our day to day life.

I know that to have the capacity to stay present with the depth of suffering on the planet right now, it is critical that I also take time out – where I allow my senses, my mind and my being to be completely surrounded with the healing energy of nature.

Grief Tenders require deep self care. This is non-negotiable.

Have you ever wondered how you can sit with deep grief & suffering on a regular basis and still maintain your own deep health & well-being?

That is a big part of why I love mentoring people in this work. Because there is a LOT more to deep self care for grief tenders than retreating into nature for 10 days once a year.
And I think that is a big piece that holds many people back from stepping into this work.

Listen...
The world has never needed more grief tending spaces than we need in these times.

I returned from my trip to find out that the province where I live has been in a state of emergency due to wildfires. The israeli (& american funded) genocide of Palestinians is ongoing and worsening, although since the so-called ceasefire, it is no longer in the news as much. Same in the Congo & Sudan, although these barely make the news.

The biosphere of the earth (our home) and the Indigenous people’s standing in they way to protect it are under constant seige by global multinational corporations. We are living through the sixth great extinction – the first ever that we know is human-caused.

I could go on.

We are under siege globally, and only a few who have the privilege to pretend it isn’t happening and are too emotionally frozen from their own history of colonization and intergenerational trauma can ignore it.

If you’ve been through (or are going through) deep, life-shattering grief, then you likely already know there is not nearly enough support built into Western society/culture for us to process this collectively.

And things are likely going to get worse before they get better, globally.

I believe that community based grief tending is at the heart of not only our collective liberation, but our collective health as a culture and planet.

People are suffering. The earth is suffering. We need all hands on deck with deep alchemy skills to support the collective death & rebirth happening ... and we need it now.

And we need MORE of us so that those of us who are already doing this work can get some damn rest. (LOL…maybe teaching this work is ultimately self-centered of me!!)

Pause. Let’s take one deep breathe together.

If you are grieving deeply or acutely at this time, this next part might not be for you, and I want to give you full permission to take 15 minutes to lay down and close your eyes rather than continuing to read.

Sending you a huge hug if you decide to do that.

Disclaimer & further pause….

I rarely do any kind of ‘marketing’ over here on Substack, because I consider this a space for my readership to let go into the slow food of good old fashioned reading.

I really hesitate to sell anything here because I want to keep this space Sacred.

That said, I’m going to mention something now that is just so epic that it would be a bit of a disservice not to mention it, for those of you who aren’t also on my other email list and this just might be the really-perfect-exact-right-soul-calling thing and you haven’t even heard about it yet. :)

If you have dreamed of building a thriving Grief Tending practice that sustains you deeply, serves your community & supports collective liberation.

Our Dark Woods Level 1 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training begins Sept 15th and applications close August 28th ✨(and just a handful of spots left)

This is the prerequisite to our Level 2 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training which takes place as a combo of in-person retreat & online work from March – June ‘27

Tomorrow, Tuesday, August 18th from 5-6:30pm PDT we are offering a live Q & A on Zoom with Jane Spielman & myself. If you can’t make that live session, we are doing another one the following Tuesday the 25th at the same time.

If you can’t make either but are really keen, shoot me an email info@darkwoodsofgrief.com and we will arrange a time to chat 1:1.

SIGN UP TO JOIN US FOR THE LIVE Q & A HERE.

more about the full training below ...

This program is our 4 month professional training designed to support you to grow your capacity to tend grief & trauma with confidence in both 1:1 and group settings.

For $3397 USD you will be immersed in a 4 month initiatory journey designed to:

• Build your capacity to stay present when grief intensifies - learning to recognize the signs when someone is moving deeper, and developing somatic skills to hold space with confidence

• Tend your own ancestral and personal grief so it stops getting activated when you’re holding space for others - learning to differentiate between what’s yours and what’s theirs

• Trust yourself to hold the full spectrum of human emotion - rage, despair, terror, ecstasy - without needing to fix, soothe, or manage it

• Understand the difference between grief and trauma - and know precisely how to work with each in the moment, reading the signals in someone’s nervous system

• Build sustainable practices for staying grounded and vital while doing deep work - so you can serve from overflow rather than depletion

• Be held in a circle of practitioners who understand this work intimately - where you can bring your own grief, your questions, your edges, and be met with fierce compassion

• Bring these essential healing practices to your community - knowing you’re part of a growing network restoring grief literacy for this and future generations

Weekly live discussion calls, pre-recorded learning material, small groups for somatic practice & discussion & access to our other programs.

Payment plans available · Solidarity pricing available for Black, Indigenous & POC practitioners

Learn more and APPLY HERE NOW

That’s all for today!

Grá mór, (big Love)

Josea & the Dark Woods Team

Ps ~ this is a 100% reader supported publication. If you’d love to support my writing & work, consider becoming a paid subscriber OR sharing this with someone who you think may benefit.

Aiden had a baby the same year he did the training, and so it took him a little while to integrate all that and put it into action. Actually, he didn’t really take the training necessarily thinking he would offer grief ritual work in his community. As a community builder and someone who is constantly facilitating and organizing, he took it more to be held in the community that the cohort offered him.

But who knows where these things will lead us…and this is the story of what happened 3 years later!

Aiden is a queer, neurodivergent transman, a dad, a nonprofit leader, circus artist, labour doula, and grief ritual facilitator, among many other titles — endlessly curious about life and the intricacies of the human experience.

He completed the grief ritual facilitators program in its very first cohort (2023), and has carried those tender moments and lessons into all of his varied work since.

He’s also the founder of Elevate Acro Association, a nonprofit AcroYoga festival, and Rainbow Threads Gathering, a 2SLGBTQ+ family-friendly retreat. He’s currently studying nonprofit leadership at Carleton University. Outside of all that, you’ll find him crafting, gardening, hunting, chasing down an energetic toddler, and taking on far more projects than any one person probably should.

Dark Woods Level 1 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training is our 4-month professional online training.

We begin Sept 15th and applications are OPEN NOW ✨(and spots filling FAST!!)

This is the prerequisite to our Level 2 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training which takes place as a combo of in-person retreat & online work from March – June ‘27

For $3,397usd | payment plans available | solidarity pricing for Black, Indigenous & People of Colour) – you will step into an initiatory journey that will grow your capacity to:

✦ Stay present when grief intensifies — with somatic skills and unshakeable confidence

✦ Differentiate between grief and trauma — and know exactly how to meet each in the moment

✦ Tend your own ancestral and personal grief so it doesnt’ get in the way of your work

✦ Hold the full spectrum of human emotion — rage, despair, terror, ecstasy — without needing to fix or manage it

✦ Serve from overflow rather than depletion

✦ Be part of a growing network restoring grief tending skills for this and future generations

Learn more and APPLY HERE NOW

If you’re deep in grief and seeking support, you might find our Grief Support Group or our Return from the Underworld course more right for you at this time.

That’s all for today!

Grá mór, (big Love)

Josea & the Dark Woods Team

Selina Stanford’s spiritual life began before she can even remember it — steeped in the Black church, in her parents’ devotion, in a lineage of prayer and praise. But her journey didn’t stop there. When her father died the same year she would begin college, she was stopped in her tracks and began to ask herself, what is really important to me? When she met her husband, she was welcomed into Ifá, the traditional Yoruba spiritual system of West Africa, and something in her found what felt like her true spiritual home.

Now Selina carries a vision: bringing West African–style healing rituals into the heart of inner-city Philadelphia – into a Black community carrying real weight – daily violence and very real grief – as a path toward collective healing.

This conversation moves through ancestry, faith, and the sacred work of building ritual containers for communities that need them most. And by the way, don’t listen to this if you are offended by laughter because we could not stop. Selina is funny af and this might be the most I’ve laughed on this podcast, ever.

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to hold multiple spiritual lineages at once, or you’re curious about Ifá, or you just want to hear two people talk about the holy and the hilarious in the same breath – this one’s for you.

About Selina:

Selina is a grief tender and trained death doula who has been walking alongside individuals and communities in grief work for over five years. Her approach is rooted in a traditional African understanding of grief as a communal experience—one that calls us into relationship, witnessing, and collective care rather than isolation.

She holds grief as a sacred portal—an opening into deeper self-awareness, connection, and alignment with our life’s purpose and work. Her practice centers on creating spaces where grief can be expressed fully and authentically, whether through wailing circles, communal grief rituals, or somatic practices that honor the body as a vessel for healing.

She is here to hold space for others with compassion and presence, supporting the unfolding of grief as both a personal and collective journey. Through this work, I aim to nurture environments where people feel seen, held, and empowered to move with their grief in ways that are meaningful and transformative.

To connect with Selina, send her a message via carrier pigeon or email her at: linastanford64@gmail.com

Dark Woods Level 1 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training is our 4-month professional online training.

We begin Sept 15th and applications are OPEN NOW ✨(and spots filling FAST!!)

This is the prerequisite to our Level 2 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training which takes place as a combo of in-person retreat & online work from March – June ‘27

For $3,397usd | payment plans available | solidarity pricing for Black, Indigenous & People of Colour) – you will step into an initiatory journey that will grow your capacity to:

✦ Stay present when grief intensifies — with somatic skills and unshakeable confidence

✦ Differentiate between grief and trauma — and know exactly how to meet each in the moment

✦ Tend your own ancestral and personal grief so it doesnt’ get in the way of your work

✦ Hold the full spectrum of human emotion — rage, despair, terror, ecstasy — without needing to fix or manage it

✦ Serve from overflow rather than depletion

✦ Be part of a growing network restoring grief tending skills for this and future generations

Learn more and APPLY HERE NOW

If you’re deep in grief and seeking support, you might find our Grief Support Group or our Return from the Underworld course more right for you at this time.

That’s all for today!

Grá mór, (big Love)

Josea & the Dark Woods Team

Long story long, here it is. 😁

Go to https://darkwoodsofgrief.com to learn more about our programs & trainings or

Click here to learn more about our Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training

Many of you are licensed practitioners — therapists, counsellors, psychologists, hospice workers, death doulas — and continuing education credits aren’t optional for your licensing.

Many of you are responsible professionals who set aside a budget every year specifically for this purpose. That makes sense, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this!

But let me be honest with you about why we don’t offer CEU’s at Dark Woods – and why I don’t plan to.

This might be challenging to read if you’ve spent years and a lot of $ in academia. I mean, I know you can read, lol, but jokes aside….

You have a continuing education budget. I get that. But here’s what I want to ask you, gently and sincerely:

What is your budget for the soul?

What is your budget for deep transformation?

For being genuinely undone and remade by the work you are called to do?

For collectively busting out of systems that – let’s be clear – that are actively harming so many, especially marginalized people, but all of us on some level, including our planet?

The mental health industrial complex is a colonized structure.

I’m not saying it doesn’t have any value, but I think it is important to recognize its limitations.

It is a structure born from the same forces driving the devastation we see in Indigenous communities, in Palestine, in our rainforests and ecosystems, in people experiencing homelessness and addiction, in every place where the logic of extraction has replaced the logic of belonging.

If you don’t believe me, read Decolonizing Therapy by Jennifer Mullan. It will rock your world.

And getting and keeping our licenses in these worlds can sometimes feel more like jumping through hoops than deepening our capacity and growth.

Let’s be real. You cannot learn how to sit with someone in the wilds of their grief from a textbook.

You cannot learn it in a classroom. Academic credentials do not guarantee ethics, depth of understanding or capacity.

I say this as someone whose training has been deeply informed by psychology, somatic work, ethics and counselling skills. That foundation matters.

I also say this as someone who has witnessed people harmed by highly trained and licensed Psychologists & Psychiatrists – just as much – if not more – than I’ve seen it happen with Ayahuescaros and Grief Ritualists.

Because what actually prepares you to be present with someone moving through grief and trauma is initiation – not book knowledge.

And initiation – real initiation – is not designed to be neatly packaged, comfortable or even safe. It is designed to be complete.

It is designed to be held ethically –  by folks who have been through their own initiations and are constantly doing the work it takes to stay in integrity.

And there is a difference.

What we aim to create at Dark Woods of Grief is safe enough – safe enough for your nervous system to open, for learning to become possible, for the kind of presence that deep grief work requires to actually take root.

Learning can’t happen when we are in shock or overwhelmed – so we hold this container carefully.

When you join our programs and trainings, I can’t promise you comfort. I can’t guarantee that you won’t be asked to let go of things you hadn’t planned to release, or to step into parts of yourself that feel unfamiliar or even frightening. Not by me, but simply by the depth of the work.

This is not a failure of the container. This is the container working.

Because here is what I know: when we experience major loss or trauma, we are at the beginning of an initiation. But initiation requires support to be complete. Without a container, the lead gets heated but doesn’t transform into gold. It just melts everywhere. No alchemy. We get burned, but we don’t rise.

Transformation needs the right conditions.

I’ve just recently picked up Elaine Alec’s newest book; Coming of Age – Overcoming Trauma to Achieve Self-determination. It has sat on my shelf for almost a year since it first came out.

I think I probably picked it up this past week intuitively because I am in the midst of my own deep initiatory process – one of many I have been blessed to go through by being deeply embedded in this work and life. I’ll tell you more about that later. ;-)

But one thing she keeps repeating in this book is that her people – the Syilx (whose name means “to dream in a spiral”) hold teachings that say that trauma and grief are a guaranteed part of life.

It is simply to be expected.

This just makes so much sense to me. It is not about what happens to us, but how it is held.

The Syilx culture has many practices – similar to Indigenous cultures worldwide – to ensure that a basket of care is woven so people are held through these experiences and their trauma and grief contribute to their growth and gifts rather than causing long-term harm.

The Syilx have been reclaiming these practices since the late ‘70s – using them to heal the extreme harm done to their communities through the residential school systems. It is a long journey.

My own people were colonized a long time before it was done here on this land.

I am not Indigenous to these lands. But I come from somewhere, and so do you. Together, we can learn to reclaim and re-dream cultural practices that weave baskets of care around each other again. This is non-negotiable, or we simply aren’t going to have a future on this planet.

Our trainings and courses at Dark Woods are developed based not only on my formal training in therapy, but also in decades of learning, gathering, reclaiming and practicing cultural skills that help us heal and step into our gifts.

I have been blessed with many incredible mentors and teachers, and most of them don’t have a degree or any connection to academia. Some of them survived academia and then recovered to become who they are now.

This is why our Levels 1 & 2 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Trainings are designed as initiation rather than a credentialed course. This is the kind of training that prepares you to walk with others through the dark woods of grief.

If you step in and allow the learning to do its work, you will leave transformed yourself.

I don’t want you to join our programs so you can tick a box. I want you to come because you are ready – or at least willing – to have your life and your work deeply and radically transformed.

That is what we’re offering here.

Not a badge. A container for transformation.

We’re deep in the dark woods right now, collectively speaking, and likely not coming out for some time. I would say this is a worthy thing to consider.

We cannot keep meeting the world with solutions that come from within the boxes we are trying to bust out of.

It’s time for a collective jailbreak, baby!!!

That said, participants in our trainings do receive a certificate of completion — and I want to be clear that this certificate does hold value. Dark Woods of Grief has reached participants across more than 15 countries, nearly every state in the US, and almost every province and territory in Canada. That reach reflects a community of people doing beautiful, powerful, soulful work.

The difference is this: our certificate marks an initiation, not a box ticked. It says something about who you are willing to become — not just what you know cognitively.

If you’re feeling the pull toward that kind of transformation, I’d love to have you explore what we offer at Dark Woods of Grief. Our Level 1 & 2 Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Trainings are currently open for enrollment.

Learn more at https://darkwoodsofgrief.com/roots-of-ritual/

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Let’s be real. Most of us would prefer not to walk through any of the gates of grief if given the choice.

We’re rarely given a choice when it comes to the first gate, and this is often the initiation required to be willing to consider the second, third and further gates.

But the sixth gate is an interesting one, because it is perhaps the easiest to never walk through in our current cultural climate. And yet it might also be the most powerful threshold we can cross.

The sixth gate is a gate of true leadership – it is where the only true reconciliation, reparation and any possibility of unity lies.

It is easier, in some ways, to grieve what we have lost — the people we have loved, the world we are watching change beyond recognition, even the ancestors whose sorrows we carry in our bones.

Those griefs, as heavy as they are, position us as the ones who have suffered. And suffering, at least, is familiar territory, and the more work we do in this way, the easier it gets.

The pain gets easier to sit with because we start to recognize that it will not be forever that we feel this way. Through practice, we develop the skills of resourcing, pendulation and titration and so we learn that we do not have to sit only in the pain forever. There can also be joy and ease.

(We teach these skills in our intro workshops at Dark Woods of Grief – check out No Way But Through if you are grieving. Or for facilitators, Sacred Body//Wild Grief.)

Before we go further, I will say this in a way that is crystal clear.

We need to have the capacity to feel shame without collapsing in order to even consider entering the 6th gate, and to differentiate between toxic shame and healthy shame.

Healthy shame supports our learning, whereas toxic shame pulls us into the trauma vortex of collapse.

There is LOVE within healthy shame, whereas toxic shame outcasts and destroys.

We learn to hold healthy shame by being told we are doing something unacceptable but still being held within a field of safety and love.

If you have not learned to navigate skillfully within the 2nd Gate of Grief, which encompasses developmental trauma from early childhood, I would not recommend attempting to navigate the 6th gate… yet.

That is not a free pass card – it’s an invitation to go back to the 2nd gate and get more support!! Stay with it – because truly – there is no way but through.

The 6th gate asks us to stand at the threshold of the harm we have done. The harm our ancestors have done. What we continue to do, even now, even when we know better. It asks us to grieve not our wounds, but our weaponry.

And yes, it asks us to feel grief in the form of shame, sorrow and perhaps rage.

This is the Sixth Gate of Grief — first named by Rachael Rice — the grief of complicity, of inherited perpetration, of harm done and harm ongoing.

I believe we are being asked to walk through this gate collectively right now in a way that has perhaps never been more urgent, more visible, or more impossible to avoid.

Here are some examples:

For seventy-eight years, the Palestinian people have been subjected to dispossession, occupation, and systematic violence. This is not new. What is new — or newer — is that we are watching it in real time.

On our phones. On our feeds. In videos filmed by the people living it, shared from the rubble of hospitals and schools and homes, uploaded in the moments between bombardments.

The Palestinian people have used every platform available to them to make sure the world cannot say we did not know.

And the world — our world, the western world — has responded largely by continuing to send weapons.

By continuing to abstain from votes for ceasefire. By continuing to ignore that even since the most recent ceasefire has been agreed upon, over 1000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including a mother blown over by a sniper with her children on her lap.

And the Western world responds by continuing to look away.

This is complicity.

And complicity, when it is felt all the way down into the body, is a form of grief.

The Truth and Reconciliation process in Canada – the ongoing reckonings with the legacy of residential schools, the slow and painful work of confronting what was done to Indigenous peoples on this land — these too are invitations into the Sixth Gate. And they are invitations that many of us, myself included, have found extraordinarily difficult to accept fully.

Most often what our governments do around these gates is perform lip service rather than true, intentional healing and repair.

Because this gate doesn’t just ask us to feel sad about what happened. It asks us to take responsibility. And that is a very different thing.

I have to admit – I didn’t truly begin to unpack my own relationship with racism until quite recently. I grew up with my family woven with Indigenous threads, as my cousin’s mom was from the Tla’amin Nation and the area I now call home.

I thought the fact that I understood the horrors of the Residential school violence and racism meant that I didn’t have any racist cells in my body.

As I know many of us were, I was moved by the reckoning with police violence that was brought to light through the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. It became common conversation in the community I was a part of, but one of my first thoughts was, “Racism is not something I’ve ever really even been aware of, therefore it is not an issue.”

Shortly after thinking this, I listened to Resmaa Menakem speak on a podcast. He said very directly, “A lot of white folks think racism isn’t an issue. The truth is, you don’t see it as an issue because you are white, and that is a part of your privileged experience of life.” [this is my paraphrase, not a direct quote]

This was a huge epiphany for me. Like, HELLO…now it seemed so obvious, and I couldn’t unsee it.

I was being called deeper.

I bought Resmaa’s book, “My Grandmother’s Hands,” and it changed my life and view of the world completely.

I started learning and really sitting with the depth and reach of systemic racism and its ongoing harm to Black and Brown people.

And then another layer began to arise for me. Instead of pure sorrow or pure accountability, what came up was a kind of defensiveness.

Me too, something in me said. My people were also harmed. I grew up in poverty. My Irish ancestors were colonized, starved, displaced, and shunned. We were not the powerful ones. We too were harmed.

And that was true. Every bit of it was true.

But here is what I had to learn — what I had to grieve my way into understanding — is that it wasn’t enough for it to be true.

Because the truth of my ancestors’ suffering does not cancel the truth of what white supremacy has done and is doing in the world.

Even carrying all of that inherited pain, even growing up with very little, the current systems still favour my white skin.

For someone who grew up with exactly the same inherited trauma and poverty as I did, but has dark skin, it is harder to survive within the systems of oppression that exist. It is more dangerous to walk alone at night.

According to Statistics Canada, the homicide rate for Indigenous women and girls is six times higher than that of their non-Indigenous counterparts. While Indigenous women make up only about 4.9% of the female population in Canada, they represent 16% of all female homicide victims. In the United States, the statistics are even worse, with Indigenous women being 10x more likely to be homicide victims than white women. And this is just one example of how systemic racism plays out to impact non-white communities.

And yet, this does not mean that I shouldn’t grieve my own ancestral colonization and trauma.

I must make space for both, because if the grief of my own history is in the way, I cannot be a compassionate and present ally for others.

And yet if I only hold my own people’s pain without acknowledging the present reality of my privilege, I can easily become someone who is using their wounds as a reason not to show up, also known as, ‘naval-gazing.’

So yes, we must always put on our own oxygen masks first and tend to our own grief.

But also we must not lose ourselves so deeply in our pain that we become blind to the suffering of those around us who have less privilege.

This work is not for the faint of heart, and yet, indeed, we were born for these times.

The path through the Sixth Gate is not about self-flagellation or collapsing into guilt.

It is about something much harder and much more freeing than that: it is about grieving fully so that we stop passing on the harm.

This past week in our Level 1 Grief Tending and Ritual Facilitation Training, we were blessed to be guided by Dr. Hana Masud, a Palestinian Psychologist who teaches Decolonial Psychology at the National Louis University. She guided us through a process she calls the Grief History Timeline — an invitation to trace our own lineage’s history of displacement, persecution, and harm, and to begin to grieve it specifically and personally.

This is not an academic exercise – it’s a somatic one. Because until that grief has moved through the body, it does not matter how much intellectual understanding we have accumulated.

Unprocessed ancestral grief will find a way to come out — sideways, defensively, as a “me too” that derails a conversation about someone else’s suffering, as a numbness that can’t quite let the reality of another’s pain land.

I want to encourage you, wherever you are in this work, to just let yourself feel this for a moment. I don’t encourage you to go into this deeply without support. But for now, just feel what is happening in your body even as you are reading my words today.

This is big work – and not terrain to be entered without a lot of care and support.

And yet it is so valuable – because when you can do this work, it means the grief living in you as an unconscious current stops distorting your ability to be present with the suffering happening now all around us.

This is the prerequisite – not the destination.

When we have genuinely grieved our own lineage’s losses, something opens. There is a spaciousness that wasn’t there before.

We stop needing the conversation about current oppression to also be about us, because we have already given our own grief the attention it deserves.

And from that spacious place, something like genuine allyship becomes possible.

This is very different from the performative allyship we see so often from our governments and influencers. This is also not guilt-management.

It becomes more like sumud — that Arabic word meaning steadfast presence, rootedness, an unshakeable commitment to remain — but turned outward, toward those who are suffering right now at the hands of the ones we are allowing to lead us.

Many years ago, before the devastation of the Guatemalan civil war – which killed and displaced many Indigenous peoples and was funded by US tax dollars –, Martin Prechtel lived for a long period of his life among the Tzutujil Maya people in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala.

In that culture, Prechtel observed, grief was held communally and taken seriously as a ritual process. And within that process, something very human would sometimes arise: the impulse toward revenge.

A person deep in their grief might suddenly rally — we must go after the people who did this, we must get justice, we must make them pay. And when this happened, the community did not shame the grieving person, nor did they ignore the impulse. Instead, they rose to meet it. They picked up their tools, their machetes, their shovels. They said, yes, let’s go! We will go!!

And no one was ever the slightest bit serious about it, nor did they ever go anywhere.

Instead, they understood that this impulse was part of the grief process — a wave within the larger movement of sorrow — and that if it was met with presence and allowed to be felt and spoken and witnessed, it would exhaust itself. It would crest and fall, and what came after was not vengeance but peace. Not retribution but reconnection. The grief, held all the way to its completion, transformed.

Now consider what happens when that ritual container is absent, or when grief is interrupted — deliberately, strategically — at precisely the moment when the impulse toward revenge is cresting.

This is the moment we see so often in our society today, when the warmongers arrive not to witness the grief but to weaponize it. When the story becomes your grief is proof that those people are your enemy, and the machetes become missiles, and the ritual impulse becomes policy.

The Israeli government’s response to the grief of October 7th didn’t give the world even a moment to breathe through it. There was no time to grieve. And I have seen this lament on many a comment thread by those whose grief was lost in that time. “But what about the horrors of October 7th. What about all the bad things Hamas did??”

Yes. That grief is valid too. But can you see how the policy didn’t allow for it? Because immediately the world’s attention was turned to the 1000x damage and horror being inflicted on Gaza.

And then many of us learned that this has been happening for 78 years, and that in fact it was not Hamas who started the fight. And that what the Palestinians have been put through and continue to be put through is, indisputably, much worse.

And yet, the number one rule of grief tending is that all grief is welcome. But where is it welcome? Who is there to hold the space for the grief, and where can we make space for it when the bombardment doesn’t stop?

Grief politicized, grief harvested, grief transformed not into peace but into the justification for unimaginable violence visited upon civilian populations. It turns into neverending war and trauma and the violence and horror only increase.

This is what happens to grief that is not held well. This is the cost of a society without grief rituals.

And this is why what we do — why what you do, if you tend grief in any form — is not peripheral work. It is not soft work.

It is some of the most genuinely revolutionary, genuinely decolonial work available to us right now. Because grief held all the way through does not produce soldiers. It produces people who want to build a world worth living in. It produces Sumud.

In our Grief Tending and Ritual Facilitation Training, we work through each of the Six Gates with our cohort — people who have already done significant grief work, who have been in this practice for a long time, who know how to resource and hold themselves and each other.

And yet still, the work we do around decolonizing grief work is the heaviest module by far. It brings up more for people than any other gate.

I say this not to frighten you, but to honour the reality of what this gate asks. If you find yourself wanting to move through it quickly, or finding reasons why it doesn’t quite apply to you, or feeling a sudden urge to change the subject — that is information. That is the gate telling you it has something for you.

And please — please — do not try to walk through this one alone. This gate in particular asks to be held in community. You need to be with people who can witness you without collapsing into their own material, who can stay present with you as you feel what there is to feel.

The grief of what we have done — what our people have done, what we continue to do — is not meant to destroy us. Held well, it is meant to free us.

I’m so grateful we can hold this work within the containers of our training. I think our team does an incredible job of holding it with integrity and love.

Even stepping across this threshold is dangerous territory. I’ve seen a lot of places and spaces where even the best intentions end up causing more harm rather than healing, because there isn’t enough loving kindness in the space and the leaders aren’t doing their own work.

It’s a huge responsibility, and I don’t take it lightly.

I’m deeply grateful for the support and friendship of Dr. Jane Spielman, who has been doing anti-racism and activism work for over 50 years. One of our interns nicknamed her Sevgi, which means ‘love’ in Turkish. Her huge heart and wisdom continue to teach me so much.

It is critical that those of us who walk with more systemic privilege in this world continue to support and teach each other. This relieves those who are already carrying the weight of oppression from having to also carry the burden of teaching us.

Thank you for reading this to the end.

You have a courageous heart if you can take in my words without needing to defend yourself.

For Your Reflection

As you sit with this gate, I invite you to consider:

• What do you know — or sense — about your own ancestors’ history of colonization? What might be waiting to be grieved there?

• Where in your body do you feel it when you sense into your complicity or apathy or collapse — around what is happening in Palestine, in what has happened on the land where you live, in the systems you move through daily? Can you let that land, just for a moment, without moving to fix or explain it?

• What would it mean to grieve the harms your people have done as fully as you grieve the harms done to your people?

• Where might unprocessed grief be showing up in you as numbness, defensiveness, or the need to make someone else’s suffering about your own story?
  

This work is hard. It is necessary. And you do not have to do it alone.

If this gate is calling to you and you’re looking for community and support, the Dark Woods Community is here. Come find us.

Grá mór,

Josea

PS I’d love to hear what landed for you, what is stirring in you, what is happening in your body, mind and soul as you integrate what I have shared here today. Please don’t let me write into a vacuum LOL…I’d love to hear your shares in the comments below.

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This is Part Six of a seven-becoming-eight part series exploring the Six Gates of Grief, a framework developed by Francis Weller and expanded through the work of Rachael Rice. If you’re new here, you can find the earlier parts in the archive.

I’m going to share some of my personal experiences of working with the 5th Gate in this article, because I think it will help you to grasp how ambiguous and strange this gate can be, relative to our normal day-to-day understanding of reality//memory & soma//psyche.

I would love to hear any personal accounts from you, dear reader, in the comments below – as well as any ah-has you might make about connections in your own soma//psyche as you journey with me through the 5th Gate of Grief.

One of my first and most obvious somatic ancestral memories revealed itself as I sat around a fire with two close friends on a low-dose psilocybin medicine journey.

I think I was around twenty-one years old, and I was just beginning to get into healing work. I was cracked open and seeking knowledge in the way you can only be when you’re young and the world is pulling you toward something larger than yourself.

We had taken a relatively small dose (about a gram each) of psilocybin mushrooms, and it was well into the night.

We had some incredible nature experiences – otters entering the beach cave we sheltered in and shuffling around – and hearing seals fishing and slapping the water just meters away from where we sat.

We had been speaking about herbalism, magic and the esoteric and telling stories for most of the night.

One of my friends had been living in this little cave for a few months – camping out while she studied herbalism with a local teacher, and my other friend and I were visiting her. She had been telling us about her sacred abode here for months, (just down from telephone pole #42) and we were excited to be in a little ceremony together here – what a spot!!

It was in that very alive space, as we brewed a tea over the fire that was, by this point in the night largely composed of a bit of milk and water but mostly ashes – that a memory began to surface.

It was sparked – very literally – by the fire cracking loudly as we added new wood and sending out hot embers that landed on my bare skin. The burning sensation triggered something in me.

A hot spark, then another and then another. Ouch, ouch, ouch…and suddenly I was burning – my whole body on fire and in agony and terror. I began to scream.

Images flooded in — nothing I could place in the timeline of my own life. More like body memories. The sensation of fire. The smell of it. A terror and horror so old it had no name.

An image of a group of people surrounding me – jeering.

Being chased down by men on horseback.

The sensation of the cool earth under my body. The sweet release and peace of death.

It was like I was getting the story through images somewhat in reverse, or in a weird non-linear order.

Understanding what I now understand about trauma and the body, this actually makes complete sense.

In that cave, my two sisters wrapped their arms around me quickly and tightly – ’it’s okay, it’s okay,’ they spoke clearly and lovingly as I came back into present moment time and realized that I was actually okay.

But I knew clearly in that moment that my body had once been charred to ash by the fire – or rather, the body I (my Soul) or my lineage (an Ancestor?) had once inhabited.

It was, synchronistically, around the same time I was learning about the witch burnings of Europe — the systematic persecution and murder of mostly women, but also some men: healers, medicine people, those who carried the old ways in their bones.

Was this “memory” simply me tapping into the collective soma, and imagining that I had experienced what over 9 million women, non-binary folks and healers went through during that time – or was I having a memory from one of my actual Ancestors?

The reality is, I can never know the answer to this question for certain. And similar to any somatic healing work, we don’t need to know if the story is true for sure. We simply believe the body and allow the body to express what it needs to express and be supported so we can release the traumatic experience on the level of the tissue.

Since then I’ve learned that the most burnings were concentrated in Germany, with many also happening in Scotland.

Ireland had almost none, as people believed in and relied heavily on the Bhean Feasa // Mna Feasa (Medicine Woman // Women). So they were not only scared to cross them because they knew their power – but also just wouldn’t ever – as they knew they’d likely be needing their help just around the corner. So this definitely wasn’t a memory from my Irish ancestry!

I have Irish, English and a wee bit of Scottish ancestry. Somewhere back in that long river of people, I believe, there were intuitive ones — the deep feelers, the medicine keepers — who would have been targeted in those times, particularly in Scotland.

My grandfather on my mother’s side carried this line. He was definitely a healer, although an Electrician by trade, he often had insight about things in a way that no one else did. He would massage my grandmother’s feet every night – mine too when I visited as a child. When I started to learn Reiki when I was 18 and explained it to him, he knew what I was talking about, saying he often felt energy coming from his hands when he worked on people. My mother carries this line too, often tapping into things in an uncanny way that goes beyond the ordinary.

That thread of knowing runs in the blood, and I sense that what was done to try to extinguish it has also left its mark, as it does.

Again, I cannot tell you with certainty that this story explains what those body memories were. I can only tell you that they felt ancient, and that they belonged to something larger than my one small life.

This is the nature of the Fifth Gate.

In his first book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller names this the gate of Ancestral Grief — the sorrows, traumas, and unprocessed losses carried across generations, encoded not just in our stories but in our bodies, our nervous systems, our reactive patterns and persistent fears. Weller writes that we do not enter this world as blank slates, but as the latest expression of long ancestral rivers — shaped by everything our people have survived, lost, endured, and sometimes perpetrated.

The Fifth Gate asks: what grief has been handed to you that was never yours alone to carry?

For myself, another major thread is my Irish lineage. It’s approximately sixty percent of who I am. Both my mother’s and father’s lines trace back to Northern Ireland and the Northwest Coast. The Caddens — my family name on my mother’s, mother’s side — were likely originally from the Ulster region of Northern Ireland, displaced west – ’to hell or to Connaught’ – as the colonization of Ireland continued, the Ulster Plantations driving Irish families from their land. Many of the Caddens ended up in County Mayo.

On March 30th, 1852, Patrick Cadden Senior — born 1812, forty years old — and Patrick Cadden Junior, just twelve years old, arrived in New York City aboard a ship called the Star of the West. They had survived An Gorta Mór — the Great Hunger — what history calls a famine, but what was, in truth, a genocide through deliberate starvation and disease. The English landlords continued to export food from Ireland while over a million people died and another million fled. When the potato crop failed in the late spring and the people of Ireland dug the ground and found only rot, cries of horror rang out across the land. They already had so little. They had been pushed onto smaller and smaller plots, forbidden from owning land, living under the rule of lords. The disease in the potatoes was not just hunger. It was the last straw for many before certain death.

Patrick and his son arrived in New York and made their way to Jessup, Pennsylvania, where three generations of Cadden men would go underground — literally — into the coal mines. It was brutal work with hardly any pay. Dark in ways that went beyond the absence of light.

My great-grandfather eventually got out. He traveled west, and in 1901, at the age of thirty-six, he married sixteen-year-old Ethel Cadden — my great-grandmother, also known as Granny Jo.

I sit with that pairing sometimes. What was her experience, this teenage girl marrying a man more than twice her age? What did she carry? What did she have no choice but to accept?

My great-grandfather, like so many Irish men of his generation, struggled with alcohol — soothing the grief of genocide and exile in perhaps the only way they could at that time. By the time John Cadden found himself in Kaslo, British Columbia – the culture and connection with the land of his people would have been but a faint echo. The Grief of Gate 4 – What We Expected But Did Not Receive – would have been like thunder in his veins, but likely with no awareness on his part.

When the Irish came to Turtle Island, they were not welcomed. They were feared, disdained, turned away from doors and establishments. Partly this was the shadow of the famine sickness that had traveled with them on the ships. Partly it was something uglier — the dark-haired Irish, the ‘Black Irish,’ especially, my mother’s line among them, were treated as a people apart. They had to hide their language, their culture, their Irishness. ‘The Great Forgetting,’ that Francis Weller names as one of the great sorrows of our time — was how they survived.

And then there is the thread from my mother’s father’s line, which carries its own weight. Several generations back, a mother — my great-great-great-grandmother — had a hoard of children, and she tried to leave her husband. Her husband accused her of theft and put an ad in the papers looking for her and demanding that none should allow her to pay for goods in his name. She was eventually arrested and transported to Australia, which at that time was a penal colony. She would never have seen her children again nor they her. One of her sons, my ancestor, was eleven years old when she was taken.

These tales were not passed down, but I’ve done a lot of digging in the archives of my families history through gathering names and stories from my grandmother, Joan Crossley n. Cadden, and then researching on ancestry.ca.

I wish I had known enough to ask for names and stories before my grandfather, my mom’s dad, died. I don’t even know the names of both of his parents. The silence is itself part of the inheritance — the shame that sealed the lips of those who came after, the grief that went unspoken, the stories buried under the weight of survival.

This is something I want to say clearly: most of us will not know our specific ancestral stories with certainty. Too much has been lost to shame, to silence, to the urgency of simply staying alive. What we can do is feel into the field — sense the patterns that don’t quite belong to our own lifetimes, the sorrows that feel older than we are, the fears that seem to have no origin in our personal experience.

This sensing is not fantasy. It is the body doing what bodies do — holding what the mind could not afford to know.

There is another layer I feel called to name — although we will touch more into this in the next gate – this is one that many of us with European ancestry must eventually sit with: the grief not only of what was done to our people, but of what our people did.

The residential school system that devastated Indigenous communities across Turtle Island did not emerge from nowhere. Its earliest model was the Irish Protestant schools, beginning in 1733 — long before my ancestors left Ireland.

Children taken from families, forbidden to speak their language, subjected to abuse, converted by force. The Irish knew this. They had lived it. And yet, when the model traveled to Canada, those who came after — perhaps exhausted, perhaps desperate to belong, perhaps simply surviving — did not stop it. Some may have been complicit. I hold this not as condemnation but as grief. The grief of what suffering does to people — how the colonized can become, in their own need to survive, entangled with the machinery of colonization.

In my mother’s line, I sense the echo of those residential school patterns — in the mental health struggles, in the particular way disconnection moves through the generations. I cannot say this with certainty, but I feel it. And I think that kind of feeling-into is part of what this gate asks of us.

It is worth pausing here to name what was lost in all of this — not just the people, but the wisdom.

Before English colonization took hold in Ireland, the Irish people lived under Breton Law — one of the oldest and most sophisticated legal systems in the world. Under Breton Law, responsibility was communal: if a person broke the law, their family and community shared in the accountability and the making-right.

Fines were proportional not only to the severity of the crime, but to the wealth of the one who had caused the harm and their family. A wealthy person paid a much higher fine than a poor person. The law understood that equal punishment is not just punishment in an unequal world.

And the law protected the living world. It was forbidden to cut the branches of Oak, Hawthorn and other sacred trees. To pollute a river would have been a serious offense. The ecosystem was held within the circle of moral consideration — not just as a resource, but also as kin.

When I learned this during my time in Ireland this past fall, I pressed my face to the ground by the river Boyne and wept. Not just for what was lost to my ancestors, but for what the world lost when this system was crushed under colonization. The grief of Breton Law is a Fourth as well as Fifth Gate grief — the grief of severed wisdom, of ways of being that once held life in wholeness and were deliberately dismantled.

This, too, is ancestral grief: the grief of what our people knew that we have forgotten.

Francis Weller teaches us that Fifth Gate grief often manifests not as something we can name, but as something we feel — a persistent heaviness, a reactive pattern that seems older than our own lives, a sorrow that arrives from no known source. The body holds what the conscious mind could not process. And because these griefs were rarely tended collectively — because our ancestors often had no space to metabolize what they survived — the unfinished mourning gets passed forward.

One of the things I’ve noticed in the past few years is that I can get pretty emotional about wasted food. I can be almost obsessive about not wasting anything, and it has started more than one fight between my husband and I, who comes from a fairly abundant German farmer family line.

I’m pretty sure my mom was the same way, as she always insisted I finish every last morsel on my plate as a child.

While not wasting food is a very pragmatic and useful strategy when living on a small income with kids, I’ve been feeling into it more deeply since going to Ireland last fall and getting to meet the ones who stayed through the famine. I’ve also read a few books about the lives of people who lived through famine and what it was like.

Based on the level of emotion that comes up in me around food, I am guessing that it is more than likely related to having Ancestors who lived through An Gorta Mór. How could it not be? Of course the echo of this kind of trauma lives in the body for many generations.

So what do we do to resolve these things – how do we tend this gate and give dignity and compassion to that which was pushed aside or numbed for survival by our Ancestors?

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs from her (amazing!!!) book: Dub – Finding Ceremony

if you gathered them they would be everyone. gather them. recognize in them your jawline, your wet eyes, your long-fingered hands, seeking what but this multitude. if you gathered them they would not fit on this island. they would spill back into the ocean whence they came. when you gather them they will have fins and claws and names you do not know. gather them anyway. some will look you in the eye, some are too microscopic to see. if you don’t gather them all you will never be free. if you gathered them you could not hold them, scold them, demand back what you think is lost. gather them today or your soul is the cost. gather the ones who sold and who bought and who tossed overboard. gather the erstwhile children in the name of the lord. gather the unclaimed fathers, the ones with guns and with swords. gather them up. with your hands. with your relationship to land. with your chin set. you are not done yet. you never will. gather them more. gather them still. they will unfound you and surround you unfind you and unwind you travel to you unravel through your own needle. gather the thread. collect your dead.

The healing of this gate is not about fixing the past. It is about completing the mourning that was interrupted. It is about gathering the dead, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes — all of them, the ones with guns and swords alongside the ones who were tossed overboard or starved to near death. It is about grieving what our ancestors had to do to survive, as well as the fact that many of them didn’t. It is about turning toward our lineage with enough tenderness to hold both the harm and the humanity of those who came before.

Working with the Fifth Gate might involve researching your family history — tools like ancestry.ca can open doors that silence closed. It might involve sitting with what you find there, feeling into it rather than just cataloguing it.

It might involve working with a practitioner in soul retrieval, drum journeying or family constellation work — all of which offer ways of making contact with ancestral patterns that go deeper than what research alone can reach. And it will almost certainly involve sitting with uncertainty, sensing into what you cannot know for sure, trusting the body’s knowing even when the stories and documents are lost.

The silence in our family stories is not empty. It is full. Full of what could not be said, what was too dangerous to carry forward in words. Part of the work of this gate is learning to listen to that silence — with the kind of open, embodied attention that grief tends to ask of us.

As I sat in Ireland last fall, walking the land my ancestors must have made the almost impossible decision to leave, I felt something settle in me that I didn’t have words for then. Something like: I see you. I am here. I have not forgotten. I love you.

That, perhaps, is the simplest medicine for the Fifth Gate — the willingness to turn toward those who came before and say: I am listening. I will carry the grief you could not carry. I will finish what you could not finish. And I will try to bring forward the wisdom you were not allowed to keep.

The ancestors are not far. They live in our bodies, in our patterns, in our fears and our gifts and our bone-deep knowing of things we were never taught. The work of this gate is learning to receive them — all of them, with all their complexity — and to grieve well on their behalf, so that what has been stuck can finally move on.

I would love to know what stirs in you as you read this.

Do you know your ancestral stories? Have you felt the presence of grief or trauma patterns that seem older than your own life? Have you begun to feel into your lineage — through research, through dreams, through the body’s knowing?

If you haven’t yet explored your family history, ancestry.ca (or ancestry.com) can be a profound doorway. Soul Retrieval, Drum Journeying & Family Constellation work are also powerful paths into ancestral healing for those who feel called to go deeper.

And if much of your history is lost — if silence is the inheritance you received — know that the silence itself is information. The body feels what the documents no longer hold, and our collective stories are something that all of us can access in this way.

I always love to hear from you. Your reflections, your stories, your questions nourish this community and nourish me. Please share in the comments below — what does your ancestral river carry? What grief might be asking to be tended? What kind of support and tools would be helpful for you?

Grá mór, (big love!)

Josea

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This is Part Four of a seven-part series exploring the Six Gates of Grief, a framework developed by Francis Weller and expanded through the work of Rachael Rice. If you’re new here, you can find the earlier parts in the archive.

Mother by Chelan Harkin, from her book, “Susceptible to Light”

Expand the word, “Mother”.
Let it encompass the hills,
the morning,
that which feeds you.
Mother is much too big a word
for one person alone to hold.
Take it off her shoulders.
Hand it to community,
warm baths,
anything that soothes and restores.
Healing is learning to know
where to find Mother
in her myriad forms
whenever you need her.

There is a grief that doesn’t have a date to point to or a moment of rupture you can name. It doesn’t arrive on the heels of a loss you can explain to someone else over coffee. It lives instead as a kind of background ache – a persistent, bone-deep loneliness that follows you even into rooms full of the people who love you.

A hunger that remains even when you are fed.

This is the grief of the Fourth Gate, and it may be the most pervasive grief of our time.

Francis Weller calls it what we expected and did not receive — and the particular cruelty of this gate is that we often don’t know what we’re grieving.

You cannot mourn what you never knew you were supposed to have.

When something is missing for one generation, it becomes invisible to the next.

By the third generation, the absence has been so thoroughly normalized that it simply becomes “the way things are.”

We inherit the wound without inheriting the memory of what was lost.

And here is something we don’t often consider: your nervous system doesn’t know you live in the twenty-first century.

Deep in the architecture of your body – in the way your nervous system regulates, the way you scan a room for belonging, the way you feel most fully alive when you are genuinely witnessed – you are still a creature built for village life.

Your psyche and physiology developed over tens of thousands of years inside webs of communal connection: multi-generational households, shared ritual, elders who knew your name and your gifts, and a community that held your grief so you didn’t have to carry it alone.

We were not designed to navigate loss – or life at all – in isolation. Grief was never meant to be a private event. In every intact traditional earth-based culture, grief was a communal practice – held, witnessed, and metabolized by the whole community together.

The idea that we should grieve alone, in the privacy of our own homes, moving through it quickly so as not to burden others – is a symptom of the very loss this gate points to.

And so we find ourselves in a strange predicament: trying to do alone what was designed to be done together, and then wondering why it doesn’t work.

The Fourth Gate holds a painful irony. It is both a source of grief and, as Weller names, also the reason we struggle to grieve at all.

Without community, without the village, without Elders, ritual and the kind of multi-layered witnessing our ancestors took for granted, we lack the very container that makes grieving as a regenerative process possible.

We approach the other Gates — the losses of what we love, the parts of ourselves left unloved, the sorrows of the world, the weight of ancestral pain, the harms we’ve done – and we try to move through them with nervous systems that are under-resourced, in bodies that are under-held, without the community structures that would make such movement safe enough.

This isn’t a personal failing.

It is a cultural one, and it isn’t an accident. It is caused by colonization, which kills culture.

Naming it is part of how we begin to not just heal but also dismantle it.

So let us count the ways:

The grief of not being truly seen in your gifts – not merely praised or approved of, but known, the way a village elder might have recognized in a child some particular medicine they were carrying, and named it, and helped shape a life around it.

The grief of isolation – not just loneliness, but the structural isolation of modern individualistic living, where we are expected to be self-sufficient, where asking for help is seen as weakness, where the nuclear family or the ‘single mother’ – a radical and recent invention – is somehow supposed to provide everything a whole village once did.

The grief of missing eldership – not just the absence of older people, but the absence of Elders. People who have passed through their own initiations and come back with something to offer, who know how to hold a younger person’s becoming without needing anything from them in return are integral to culture. Like real sourdough bread, which is also hard to come by these days, true Elders are made through the support and culture of the ones before them.

The grief of rituals unmade – the ceremonies that would have marked our passages, our transitions, our losses, our becoming. The ones no one taught us because no one taught them either.

One of the most disorienting things about Fourth Gate grief is its invisibility. Because most of us grew up without these communal structures, we have no reference point for what’s missing. We may have a vague sense that something is wrong – a persistent restlessness, a hunger that modern life keeps trying to fill with consumption and stimulation and productivity – but we rarely name it correctly.

We are birds who have never seen the sky, grieving a vast openness we can’t quite articulate. Can we feel the full breadth of our wings without the architecture of community around us?

Francis Weller speaks of this as the grief of what was expected that we did not receive – an expectation encoded not in memory but in the body itself, in the oldest parts of our nervous system.

This isn’t nostalgia and this deep longing isn’t pathology. It is not neediness or weakness or something to be managed with the right productivity system or social media habit. It’s a deep hunger for micronutrients we need to survive. It’s your body telling the truth about what humans require to live and to flourish, rather than self-destruct.

“This is a 200 year project,” said Lakota Elder and Medicine Man, Gilbert Walking Bull, to my teacher, Jon Young – many years ago when Jon was young and ambitious about changing the world. (Now he’s old-ish and still ambitious about changing the world lol) …

I won’t offer you a tidy solution here, because there isn’t one. Rebuilding the kinds of community structures that would truly tend this gate is, indeed, a two-hundred-year project. It is the work of generations, not something we will do in a weekend retreat.

But we can begin. We can begin by naming the grief rather than pathologizing it. We can begin by creating, even imperfectly, even partially, the kinds of spaces where authentic belonging becomes possible – where we are witnessed in our full humanity, including our sorrow, rage and despair.

We can begin by understanding grief work itself as a radical act of community repair. Every time we gather to grieve together – every time we create a container where real sorrow can move, where tears are not rushed toward resolution, where the ache of living is held rather than fixed – we are rebuilding something ancient.

We are practicing, in small ways, what it means to be a village again.

This is what I understand grief tending to be, at its roots: not just helping individuals through loss, but slowly, carefully, lovingly re-weaving the communal fabric that makes grief – and therefore life – possible.

Accepting This - by Mark Nepo

Yes, it is true. I confess,
I have thought great thoughts,
and sung great songs—all of it
rehearsal for the majesty
of being held.

The dream is awakened
when thinking I love you
and life begins
when saying I love you
and joy moves like blood
when embracing others with love.

My efforts now turn
from trying to outrun suffering
to accepting love wherever
I can find it.

Stripped of causes and plans
and things to strive for,
I have discovered everything
I could need or ask for
is right here—
in flawed abundance.

We cannot eliminate hunger,
but we can feed each other.
We cannot eliminate loneliness,
but we can hold each other.
We cannot eliminate pain,
but we can live a life
of compassion.

Ultimately,
we are small living things
awakened in the stream,
not gods who carve out rivers.

Like human fish,
we are asked to experience
meaning in the life that moves
through the gill of our heart.

There is nothing to do
and nowhere to go.
Accepting this,
we can do everything
and go anywhere.

For Your Reflection

Before you close this letter, I invite you to let this land in your body rather than just your mind. Take a breath. Feel the contact of the seat beneath you. Attune to the Sacred inside yourself and in all life.

And then sit with one or more of these:

• Is there a loneliness in you that has never quite found its name? What does it feel like in your body right now, as you consider it?

• Can you recall a moment – even a brief one – when you felt truly seen, truly held, truly belonging somewhere? What was present in that moment that made it possible?

• What would it mean for you to take your longing for community seriously – not as a personal failing to be overcome, but as a sacred human need to be honoured?

You don’t have to be alone with your answers – in fact – I’d love to hear them below.

Please share your reflections in the comments so we can hear and see each other. I would love to hear from you and will read and respond to each and every comment. And if you’d like more support, consider joining our Dark Woods Community.

And whether you are a paid subscriber (supports Dark Woods of Grief Scholarship Fund so we can offer solidarity pricing to People of Colour, single mamas, limited income folks etc for our trainings and programs!) or here for free, please know that I while $ is really helpful and I am deeply honoured & grateful when anyone decides to support my writing & work financially, I am also deeply fed by your responses, your questions, your reflections.

We can be here and remind each other that we are not alone in this. The circle, even a digital one, can begin to be a tiny village of the heart.

Grá mór, Josea

This is Part Four of a seven-part series exploring the Six Gates of Grief, a framework developed by Francis Weller and expanded through the work of Rachael Rice. If you’re new here, you can find the earlier parts in the archive.

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Not writer’s block exactly. Something heavier. A bone-deep exhaustion, a resistance I couldn’t quite name.

I found myself consulting my dog (he’s ever-available, being a herding-type dog and always looking for work). Should I eat chocolate and drink green tea and push on through, or lay down and take a nap. Simply by being a dog, it seemed that he suggested the nap — dogs are allergic to chocolate and deeply committed to naps as a spiritual practice.

So I listened. I laid down on my yoga mat. And as I began to drift, something became clear to me: the resistance I was feeling wasn’t writer’s block or normal fatigue. It was the gate itself, weighing down on me before I’d even begun to write.

Francis Weller names this gate The Sorrows of the World — the grief we carry not just for our own losses, but for the suffering of all beings, for the wounds of the Earth, for injustice and devastation that extends far beyond our personal lives. In our expanded community framework here, we work with Six Gates (the sixth added through the work of Rachael Rice), and this third gate may be the heaviet — because it is, in this moment in time on Earth, almost too vast to hold.

I’ve been in contact with this gate for most of my life. Growing up with a mother who was aware of the Indian Residential School system in Canada and not great at understanding what was developmentally appropriate for kids to be exposed to — I knew about it by the time I was four or five years old. As an eight year old, II watched the protests in Clayoquot Sound as logging companies moved in to clear the old growth forests. I have spent decades trying to stay present to the sorrows of the world without being broken open by them.

But today, in 2026, there is a next-level weight to this gate. Not because something entirely new is happening — the suffering was always there — but because the curtain is being pulled back for the world to see.

Deforestation and mining destroying ecosystems and the lives of so many people, animals and entire ecosystems around the globe.

The genocide & annexation of Gaza and now the West Bank that is destroying so much, all available to see via people who are actually there sharing live on social media. Hundreds of reporters and medical professionals targeted. Epstein & Maxwell, who we now know worked for the Massad. (I’m still like woah about that one…anyone else??!). ICE causing terror in the US, and the defunding and banning of all of the DEI work that had been done in previous years to make things slightly more equitable.

I could go on. You probably already know at least some of it. And even if you aren’t consciously aware of the details, you’re still most likely feeling it too, at least on some level.

As I allowed myself to rest and contemplate writing about this third gate, I felt an extra burden. It is a great responsibility to have thousands of people reading what I write, because I have the power to direct your awareness and attention.

I aim to carry that responsibility with great care.

And there’s a risk here that I want to name directly. When we open the Third Gate outside of a ritual container — when pain is named without a circle to hold it, without a container designed to metabolize it — that pain can move laterally rather than through. It can spin. It can multiply.

It can get projected and twisted and passed around in ways that can cause more harm than healing.

We are right to feel it. But naming it without a place to land it can feel like opening a wound in a sandstorm. There is so much damage happening via social media right now because of this. So much is being named, and yet there is no holding, no togetherness, no containment and ritual for us to collectively process all of the pain.

What I want, if I’m being honest, is to be in circle with you for this one. I want us to be sitting together, in a room, with our feet on the ground and our hands in our laps and someone holding the edges of the space. That is what this gate deserves.

And yet — here we are. So let me try to hold the edges as best I can through these words.

The tendency with this gate is to go one of two directions: we either turn away entirely — dissociate, focus on the positive, consume more content, move faster — or we fall in and become immobilized, unable to function under the weight of it.

The suffering is too vast, and we are too small, and nothing we do seems to matter, so we either numb out or shut down.

What I’ve been practicing very intentionally in the almost three years since October 7, is something harder and more subtle than either of those options.

I’ve been making it my practice to stay in contact — to remain present to what is happening to the people of Gaza, partly because we have friends there, and partly because I believe, deeply, that the heart of humanity is alive in that region. The birth of civilization happened here. The wound and the gifts that are at the center of everything. The history and the culture is deep and beyond what most people know, and it is being systematically destroyed right now.

Staying present to that level of suffering, without a regular grief ritual to process it in, without community holding me — it has been very, very difficult.

It is hard not to hate the oppressors many days – I won’t pretend otherwise.

Yet, I’ve also found a tremendous amount of depth and inspiration through this practice.And here is something I learned from a training on Decolonial Mental Health Practice I did with Dr. Samah Jabr, a Psychiatrist who lives and works with her people in the West Bank. She named a concept I hadn’t encountered before: Vicarious Resilience.

We talk a lot about vicarious trauma — the way that bearing witness to others’ suffering can wound us, dysregulate our nervous systems, leave us carrying pain that wasn’t originally ours. And that is real. But Dr. Jabr named the other side of that coin: when we stay in genuine connection with people and communities on the front lines of suffering, we also receive something from them. We receive their resilience. Their creativity. Their refusal to stop living.

The Gaza Skateboarding Team. Abed Muin Abu Amsha, a music teacher in Gaza, teaching his class to harmonize with the sound of the Israeli war drones overhead and make a beautiful song out of it. Dancing the Dabke in the streets. Harvesting their olives despite risking being shot while doing so. Palestinian mothers in the West Bank taking care to connect with the Israeli settler children in order to ameliorate the escalation of violence. The sunsets over desert and beauty of children playing shared by Bisan Owda mixed into her reporting on the genocide . The children playing in the ocean and parents encouraging them to feel that little bit of joy despite the constant bombing, even during the so-called ceasfire.

These are not small things. These are the glimmers that remind us that the human spirit is genuinely inextinguishable, and that joy is not a betrayal of grief but its companion.

And so here, I will not write to you about all the pain and suffering, although it is massive and monstrous and seems indefeatable. I will not tell you about the depth of horror I’ve seen as a witness, because we are not in ritual space and there is nowhere for you to take this pain.

So, instead, I will only tell you about my Lebanese friend and all of her old aunties “evacuated” from homes that had been in their families for generations. Their husbands long dead, they have hardly any income and subsisted only off what they grow in their gardens and trade in their villages. Now their homes have been intentionally bombed so they will not return. Where do they go?

Instead, I will only tell you that there is hardly any 2000 year old trees left on Earth, and once upon a time all of the forests were full of 2000 year old trees and the people took only what they needed and there was enough.

Instead, I will only tell you that there is a young doctor named Ali in Gaza who I have been following his journey for several years, and that he is so exhausted from treating people in his every waking hour with no proper medical supplies and there are many days now where he wants only the peace of death or to leave (which he could) but that he will not leave his people especially the children and so instead he writes to us, sometimes poetry, to help us feel what it is to be there. (Israel won’t let medical supplies through the borders and for some reason America keeps giving Israel weapons to enforce this rather than sending aid to Gaza).

Instead, I will only tell you of my friend and student, Hana Masud, a professor at the University of Chicago, who hasn’t made it to our class for the last two weeks because two members of her family were killed by Israeli settlers last week, and now this week there are ongoing attacks on the school and her village and she is trying to support all the mothers and aunties who are grieving while their men, unarmed, try in vain to protect the village and their homes.

And yet also I will tell you that there are thousands of people from many different countries right now on boats, sailing to Gaza as a humanitarian flotilla to bring aid and food. These people will likely be stopped by Israel and put in prison with no charges and not given water for days and many of them will be severely beaten. We know this because it happened already several times this past few years with other flotillas.
And yet they sail, knowing all this, because they believe in a different world.
“Featuring more than 70 boats and 3,000 participants from 100 countries, the Spring 2026 mission includes a dedicated medical fleet of 1,000 healthcare professionals, carrying vital supplies to help Gaza’s decimated healthcare system. The mission seeks to deliver assistance to Palestinians enduring Israel’s ongoing genocide and decades of cruel apartheid.” Learn more HERE at the Global Sumud Flotilla and follow them on Instagram HERE.

Sumud (صمود) is an Arabic word meaning steadfastness – a core concept in Palestinian culture that has no perfect translation in English, because it carries within it something we have largely forgotten in the West. It is not passive endurance. It is the active, defiant refusal to leave, to despair, to stop living with dignity. It is embodied in the olive tree, whose roots go so deep that even when the tree is cut down, it grows back. It is practiced in the everyday – rebuilding a home, harvesting a crop, teaching children to sing, sailing a boat toward a blockade knowing full well what awaits. Sumud is living as resistance. And it may be one of the most powerful teachings this gate of grief has to offer us right now: that to keep tending what is ours to tend, even in the face of devastation, is itself a sacred act.

And so, I will also tell you that I am, again this year, planting not just vegetables but flowers in my garden.

And the birds are singing – and the Wysteria from my neighbours yard sends the scent of heaven through our yard in the evenings right now. And despite it being dry and hot already in late April, the creeks are full and the water is cool and crisp on my face when I kneel down to pray there.

This is how we survive carrying this gate — we keep one hand reaching toward justice and one hand pressing into the earth.

This is what Francis Weller has always taught: grief and joy are not opposites. They are the two faces of love. And the Third Gate asks us to hold both — to feel the enormity of the world’s sorrow without losing contact with the world’s beauty.

I want to say one more thing, and it is perhaps the most important thing:

This gate is too heavy to carry alone. It was never designed to be carried alone. The grief of the world was always meant to be metabolized by community — held in circle, witnessed in ceremony, processed through ritual that the whole village participated in.

The reason it feels so crushing in our time is precisely because we are trying to do alone what was always meant to be done together.

You are not too sensitive. You are not broken. You are carrying something real, something that deserves to be held — by more than just you.

This is why the work of building community grief spaces is not optional right now. It is, I believe, among the most important work of our time.

A reflection prompt for you:

Where does the Third Gate live in your body right now — as you read these words, as you move through these days – where do you feel it in your body and what does it feel like? Is there a particular sorrow of the world that you’ve been carrying alone, that hasn’t had anywhere to land?

How do you hold it? Do you find yourself numbing or turning away in order to function, or feeling overwhelmed and frozen? Do you have little rituals you do on a daily or weekly basis to help you hold it?

I would love to hear from you and will read and respond to each and every comment.

And whether you are a paid subscriber (supports Dark Woods of Grief Scholarship Fund so we can offer solidarity pricing to People of Colour, single mamas, limited income folks etc for our trainings and programs!) or here for free, please know that I while $ is really helpful and I am deeply honoured & grateful when anyone decides to support my writing & work financially, I am also deeply fed by your responses, your questions, your reflections.

We can be here and remind each other that we are not alone in this. That the circle, even a digital one, can begin to connect us and hold the depths of our hearts.

And if you are able to let yourself feel any of this, thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining me in this deep care – for both the human and More-Than-Human world.

It’s gonna take a lot of love – both love that nourishes and love that locks arms and says no to this ongoing oppression and injustice. Another world is possible – and only by moving through our grief can we begin to see the vision and create it – together.

Grá mór! (Big Love!)

Josea

The Six Gates of Grief is a seven-part series exploring the territory of grief through a framework developed by Francis Weller in The Wild Edge of Sorrow*, expanded to Six Gates through the work of Rachael Rice. Next time, we step through the Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive.*

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ps ~ in case you need a bit of levity after reading this, here is a picture of Arlo, at the ready to help in any way needed. And if you are looking for more support come check out our programs and trainings at https://darkwoodsofgrief.com

I understand it too well.

The Second Gate was absolutely my first initiation into grief — the wound that became the doorway.

And writing about it means standing at the threshold of my own conception, birth and childhood, which was both extraordinarily beautiful and profoundly difficult, often in the same afternoon, sometimes in the same breath.

My mother had/has Borderline Personality Disorder and possibly undiagnosed Bipoloar or DID as well. She was a parent who was suffering — and this suffering shaped the entire weather system of our home. I grew up inside that weather. And like any child born into a house with a climate of mental illness, I learned early which parts of me were safe to bring into the light, and which ones needed to stay hidden.

The parts that were too vulnerable, too tender, too sad, too needy – those learned to disappear.

Many of these parts I am still coaxing back from hiding, as they are absolutely needed in healthy adult relationships.

Because my earliest most primal relationship couldn’t hold them, they got buried deep.

Children are incredibly adaptive, but those adaptive strategies that help us survive hellscapes as children quickly become barriers to connection in the greater world.

This is the Second Gate of Grief.

Francis Weller, whose framework of the Five Gates of Grief has shaped so much of how I understand this work, says it plainly:

“We cannot grieve what we deem outside of the circle of worth.”

It can be a long, slow process to help these parts of self feel safe enough that they can show themselves, so we can grieve them. We must cultivate an inner space where we can receive them, and this is a relational process that necessarily involves the mirroring of compassion from mentors, friends and companions along the way.

We are wounded in relationship, and we heal in relationship.

We need each other.

The Second Gate is the grief of the unloved places — the parts of ourselves that were rejected, shamed, exiled, or simply never welcomed in the first place.

These aren’t just the obviously wounded places.

They are the authentic, alive, beautiful parts that learned to make themselves small because the world around them — a parent, a culture, a religion, a classroom — didn’t have the capacity to receive them.

Yet these parts don’t disappear when they are banished. They go deep underground.

And from underground, they quietly shape our lives…

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”

Here is the paradox I carry when I write about my mother: she was also the one who planted the garden.

Our yard was extraordinary. She had an eye for beauty that I can only describe as a kind of genius — layered flower beds, roses, strawberries and beds of herbs full of butterflies and bees.

And at the back of the property, there was a hawthorn hedge. This hedge must have been at least 20-30 years old, so this was not planted by her. But still, she chose it. Dense, thorned, ancient-feeling, it formed a border between our yard and the world beyond.

As a child, I would hear Towhee’s scratching the ground for bugs in the hedge, and I would say, “Momee, there is a cougar in the bush!” She would laugh and say, “No, that isn’t a cougar, it is the birds.” Thus we dubbed them “Cougar-birds.”

It wasn’t all bad, it was more like consistently temporal extremes of sometimes humour & connection – and sometimes violent rage.

And within those extremes, the hedge and the garden held me. All my various found, rescued and adopted cats and dogs held me. The land itself held me in ways that the house sometimes could not.

It took me a long time to be able to even see and remember these more positive parts of my childhood. A lot of somatic therapy and a really powerful psilocybin journey eventually allowed me to see that there was some beauty.

When I went to Ireland this past fall and reconnected with the sacred Hua, or Hawthorne, I remembered my connection with the hedge behind my childhood home.

That hedge is still alive in me. Reflecting on it now, I can see and feel that even in the most difficult of childhoods, if there is enough grace present — enough other adults who can mirror health, enough connection to the living world, enough of nature’s steady presence — the soul finds what it needs to survive and eventually, to heal.

I was lucky. I had grandparents, neighbors, teachers, mentors. I had trees. I had the particular mercy of a mother whose love for the natural world passed directly onto me, even when so much else about her was beyond what a child should have had to navigate.

But the parts of me that were exiled in those years — the ones that were too sensitive, too intense, too hungry for depth and meaning — those went into the underground.

And there they waited, exiled and alone.

The work of the Second Gate is the work of return & welcoming back these lost parts.

These exiled parts of us aren’t damaged goods. They are not the wrong parts, or something we need to get rid of. They are often, as Weller suggests, where some of our greatest gifts are hidden — the vitality, the creativity, the intuition or exuberance that got buried when it became unsafe to be fully ourselves.

The grief of this gate is subtle and pervasive. It doesn’t always announce itself as grief. It shows up as depression, as a vague sense of incompleteness, as the feeling that you are always performing some slightly more acceptable version of yourself while the real one waits patiently in the back.. It shows up as either overachieving or quitting before you start. It shows up as shame — that deep, body-level conviction that something about you is fundamentally wrong or damaged.

That shame is not truth. It is historical trauma that likely belonged to someone else before you.

When I work with people in grief tending circles, this gate often opens in a subtle way. Someone will say, almost as an aside, “I’ve never really been able to let myself feel that” — and in those words, you can hear the whole architecture of exile. The grief isn’t only for what was lost. It’s for the years spent not being able to feel it. For the child who learned to manage, to perform, to make themselves acceptable.

This is also a collective grief. In a culture that has pathologized sensitivity, monetized performance, and mistaken emotional armoring for strength, we have all exiled something. We have all, in one way or another, learned which parts of ourselves are welcome at the table and which are not. Which parts of ourselves will be celebrated and which ones will be pathologized.

The Second Gate invites us to set another place at the table and begin to welcome back these exiled parts.

In my opinion, we all have a responsibility to do this – for our world and for the future generations, and there are very real consequences when we choose not to.

Let me tell you a story that brought this home for me in such a deep way this week.

Yesterday one of my students had to miss our facilitator training class. I received a text from her shortly before we were due to meet.

Two of her family members were killed in the morning (including a 12 year old boy) and three others left in critical condition after an attack on the school in her village in the West Bank. She had to miss class in order to do some very real grief tending.

Later in the day, she sent me video footage of the killer – an Israeli settler – bragging to a crowd of people about killing her 12 year old cousin. He had posted this online for all to see. In his speech, he shared that he was especially proud because he had killed this boy’s dad ten years prior. From the expressions on his face, you would think he was bragging about winning a gold medal in the Olympics. You would think he had made his mother proud. 💔

I wonder what it would be like for this man to be held accountable, rather than celebrated by his family and community for this horrific crime. Of course, this speaks to a collective grief that we will address more fully as we move through some of the other gates of grief. But let me ask you, what parts of self must someone bury in order to kill a 12 year old child with pride?

I am guessing if this man was held accountable, he would struggle and dissociate from the terror, grief, pain and shame he would have to feel that is likely generations old.

How do we even begin to heal that level of dissociated shame????

What happens when a whole society celebrates killing and domination rather than vulnerability and accountability?

What happens when there is no space to grieve the buried parts of self – often the parts of self that allow us to connect deeply with other humans and feel empathy for the pain of each other?

I could go on and on about this – and we will get into this more deeply as we move through the gates, but for now…

There is nothing we can do about what has already happened.

What is done is done.

But to recognize the impact of NOT doing our personal work, and how our pain can pass down through the generations if we don’t, is crucial.

Growing up with a mother who never did any of this inner work and therefore left 100% of the burden to me showed me this so clearly.

I believe this perspective has deeply fed my commitment to my own integrity and to supporting others with this work.

One powerful thing we CAN do – for our own family and community –  for the world and for the future generations – is START NOW with the only healing journey we can truly take into our hands – OUR OWN.

So for now, I’ll ask you, gently, the question this gate always asks:

What parts of you learned to hide?

Don’t try to figure it out. Just let the question settle into your body and see what stirs. There may be a tightening somewhere, a small ache, a flicker of something that wants to be seen.

That flicker is not a problem to be solved. It’s a part of you that has been waiting, maybe for a very long time, to be welcomed home.

Wild things at the edge of our awareness are not always dangerous.

Sometimes, like my Hawthorne hedge, they are protective. Sometimes they are tiny and full of song like the Towhee, but seem terrifying like a large predator when we first sense them.

Regardless of how we perceive these exiled parts of self, they aren’t going anywhere, and are waiting to be known and welcomed home to make our lives so much richer.

This is the third in a series exploring the Six Gates of Grief, first articulated by Francis Weller (5 Gates) & Rachael Rice (6th Gate). If you’re new here, I’d suggest checking out the first two bits Rough Initiation and the Six Gates of Grief and We’re All Going to Die, and Here We Are Now.

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Dark Woods Grief Support Group

One last quick note ~ enrollment is currently open for our Dark Woods Grief Support Group…

If you are seeking a space to work with your grief where all the parts of you are welcome, and where we hold collective sorrow alongside our personal grief, come check it out!

We are hosting a free Q & A // Open House this coming Monday, April 27th on Zoom. Register for the Q & A HERE

down on the earth

she’s got a poem

for your grieving heart

and open palms.

Release your back

into her soft folds

open up your chest

and pour yourself

all the way

out.

Let the gods sing secrets to you

through the throat

of the red-winged black bird

listen closely

as they shiver up your neck

calling you back home.

Drop deep into your belly

relax your jaw

and surrender your gravity

to the wind.

Slither down low

even lower than that

undulating ribs and scales

until your spine unravels

back into dirt and dust.

Become the ground

that grinds us

bone and stardust

into everything and nothing

all at once.

Eat the silence that’s left

once everything else is gone

chase it down with the hum

of what is being born

and suck on the grace and honey

it leaves underneath your tongue.

Let loose the song that begins

to pour from your mouth

gushing with nectar

gushing with saltwater

because even in the dry season

water always finds a way

to spill.

Everything and everyone you love

is going to die soon

and so will you

so let’s throw another log

on the funeral pyre

weep and wail

dance and sing

cackle and yawp

and toast to the good fortune

that we’ve all had this moment

here

together

now

even though

this moment

is already gone.

— Moments, by Gina Puorro

Last week, we talked about initiation — the rough, unwitnessed kind that life delivers without warning or preparation. We talked about what it means to cross a threshold alone, and why community grief tending is not a luxury but a lifeline. If you’d like to read that first and haven’t yet, you can find it here Part One – Rough Initiation & the Six Gates of Grief,

This week, take a step with me into the first gate of grief ~ Everything We Love, We Will Lose.

And let’s take a pause here – take a breath with me – let’s sink in here.

Because the mind will want to argue with this truth, soften it, find the exception.

And yet when we can let this truth really land in our bodies, we become so much more present to life.

This gate is the most universally recognized face of grief — the loss of someone or something we love. A death. The end of a relationship. A home left behind or destroyed through natural disaster, war or genocide. A chapter of life that has quietly – or not so quietly – closed.

The passing of time itself, which takes everything with it eventually, including us.

In his essential book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, my teacher Francis Weller maps the terrain of grief through what he calls the Five Gates of Grief — a framework I have worked with, taught, and returned to for years. (As I mentioned in ‘Initiation’, our community works with Six Gates, honoring a sixth gate articulated through the work of Rachael Rice, which we’ll explore later in this series.)

What the First Gate asks of us is a particular kind of courage: the willingness to love knowing that loss is woven into the very fabric of that love. To open our hands rather than clutch. To stay present with what is precious, precisely because it is not permanent.

As Francis Weller writes: “Grief and joy are not only not opposite emotions, they are companion emotions. Each time we welcome our grief, we deepen our capacity for joy.”

This is the paradox at the heart of the First Gate. Grief is not the enemy of a beautiful life. It is the proof of one. The depth of what we feel when something is lost is a direct measure of how fully we allowed ourselves to love it.

Our tears are, as Martin Prechtel says, a form of praise.

And yet — in a culture that rushes us past loss, that hands us platitudes when what we need is witness, that expects us to “move on” before we have even fully arrived at what happened — many of us have learned to preemptively protect ourselves. To love a little less fully. To hold back. To keep one foot outside the door of our own lives, just in case.

The First Gate invites us back inside. All the way inside.

It asks us to grieve what we have lost — fully, without rushing — so that we can love what remains with our whole hearts.

Because everything and everyone we love is going to die soon. And so will we. And that, somehow, is not only the saddest thing. It is also the most enlightening.

Lastly, a quick story of my bonus daughters hypochondria, which has gotten a lot better since I’ve started making fun of her.

Before you decide that I’m a horrible parent LOL…hear me out. Humour is a cure for a lot of things.

She would have some kind of weird random symptom, and panic. “Josea, am I going to die???” After sitting and breathing with her through quite a few of these moments, I was exasperated one day and instead responded, “Yes, yes you are going to die. We are all going to die. AT SOME POINT.”
She rolled her eyes at me and laughed, “Joseeeee-aaaaaaaaaaa!!! But seriously!!”
”No dude, you are fine right now. But we are all going to die eventually.”
”Are you sure?” she pressed…
”Absolutely. It is the only guarantee in life,” I responded.
Her: “No, I mean….Joseeeeeee-aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!”

I told this story at one of our retreats once and the group decided we needed to make, “We’re All Going to Die” Dark Woods of Grief t-shirts. I haven’t done it yet but it’s on our to-do list – let me know if you want one LOL.

Because it’s true, isn’t it? And if we are terrified of life, what better thing to reflect on than the inevitable end we will all experience. What more potent medicine to bring us into complete reverence of what we have in front of us, right now, in this moment.

Even though this moment is already gone…

I’d love to hear from you this week.

What have you loved and lost? And is there a loss that has never been fully witnessed — one that is still waiting to be seen?

Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you and I will read every single comment.

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Stay tuned next week as we will continue our exploration into the second gate of grief.

Grá mór,

Josea

I’m sitting in the sun on our deck as I write this, and my dog is vigilantly making sure that no pigeons get near our bird feeder. (His self-assigned job.)

I hope this message finds you somewhere with a little glimmer of warmth & humour as well. Sometimes that is all we have.

The last few months, I’ve been deep in the beautiful, demanding work of gathering the circle for the Spring cohort of our Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training — and we just began a few weeks ago.

Our first module in the training is the Six Gates of Grief, and having held space last week for a conversation around this material, I’m feeling inspired to share more about these foundational teachings of our community.

Over the coming weeks I will be sharing with you a series on the Six Gates of Grief.

I was first introduced to the Five Gates of Grief through my teacher, Francis Weller, whose articulation of this framework can be found in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow — a profound and necessary work that I return to again and again, and I highly recommend.

The Sixth Gate came through the work of Rachael Rice, who encountered Francis’s book and felt called to articulate a sixth gate, which we will explore later in this series.

But before we step across the threshold into the first gate, it seems necessary to say something about what it is to cross a threshold.

As we prepared for last weeks live call, I kept using the word, “initiation,” and Jane, our team elder, said to me, “I think you need to explain to people what you mean by that.”

Since I’ve been in the work for so many years, sometimes I can be like a fish in water, forgetting that some of the baseline understandings I live with are actually not so common in Western Society.

Alas, this lead us into a conversation about the age-old process of culturally held, ritualized initiation vs. what Weller describes as the “Rough Initiation,” of trauma and major loss.

What does it mean to be initiated?

And what do I mean when I say that grief and trauma can be a form of initiation?

In traditional cultures across the world, initiation was not left to chance. It was one of the most carefully tended acts a community could offer its members — a deliberate, structured passage from one way of being into another.

It was held, witnessed, and considered sacred.

And yet, many of us have been initiated anyway — not by ceremony, but by life itself.

By loss. By trauma.

By the (often shocking) arrival of a threshold we never asked to cross.

This is what Francis Weller calls rough initiation — and understanding it may be one of the most important things we can do to make sense of our suffering, and to find our way back to each other and to life.

But to understand this more fully, let’s begin by looking at the hallmarks of traditional, community-held initiation.

Initiation is traditionally tied to the natural stages of life and development — a crossing from one way of being into another, such as from childhood to adulthood, or adulthood into eldership.

These thresholds are real, and in traditional cultures, they were honoured as such.

To cross one without acknowledgment, preparation & ritual was considered dangerous — not just to the individual, but to the community.

Side note: the fact that this is missing in Western Society could be the reason that it currently appears that our world is being run by angry toddlers.

Uninitiated men with too much power is, indeed, proving to be a dangerous thing.

But that is a conversation for another time –  let’s find our way back to the topic at hand.

The Three Phases of Initiation.

The first phase of initiation is preparation.

Before the initiate ever crossed the threshold, there would be an extensive preparation process. Elders who had walked that road before offered guidance, mentoring, and presence. The initiate did not approach the crossing uninformed or alone — this process could not take place without deep holding from the community and culture

The second phase was the crossing of the threshold – the send off and the initiation itself.

The community gathered to witness and ceremonially release the initiate. This was an act of collective intention — a way of saying: we see you, we are sending you with our love. We will miss you tremendously.

It is important to understand that this moment contained tremendous grief – it was understood that the person who crossed the threshold would not return.

IF they were fortunate to return in body, they would be vastly changed by their experience – they would not be the same person.

For a coming-of-age ritual, for example, the child would die, and an adult would return in their place.

Solitude is often central to initiation — the initiate must face what they face alone.

And yet, they were never truly abandoned. The community held vigil. They tended the fire. There was a container around the darkness, even if the initiate could not always feel it.

Yet, despite the community holding, survival could not be guaranteed.

A true initiation carried the real possibility of not surviving. This is not metaphor in the traditional sense — it is the very condition that makes transformation possible.

Therefore, a hallmark of initiation is that it must be life and death.

There must be a very real risk of not making it through.

Now, if you have been through major loss or trauma, that might feel familiar.

Remember, however, that we are still talking about traditional, culturally-held initiation.

Now, the third phase is the welcoming back.

Upon return, the initiate was welcomed back. Celebrated. Given space to share their story and what they had encountered in their journey.

But this sharing was not just personal — it was understood that what the initiate brought back was a gift for the community. The medicine – the insights, knowing and wisdom brought back by the one who survived their quest was not for their personal glorification or enrichment.

It wasn’t so they could feel good.

It was to help the culture and the community to evolve, adapt, and meet the challenges of its time.

So while having meaning and purpose built into our lives is a deep human need, ultimately the gifts we carry are not for us, but for the world.

Trauma & Grief as Rough Initiation

Trauma and major loss share one critical quality of initiation: the life-or-death stakes.

When we are in the depths of grief, or in the aftermath of something that has shattered our world, we often genuinely do not know if we will survive — emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes physically.

That is very real, and that is when we know we have crossed the threshold.

But what is almost always missing is everything else.

Particularly in the isolated landscape of Western society — a society, notably, without a shared culture in the traditional sense – there is no preparation for these experiences.

No mentoring. No community gathered to hold us with love and intention.

When the threshold arrives — uninvited, unannounced — we almost always cross it alone. Unwitnessed. And too often, there is no one waiting on the other side to welcome us home.

This is the wound beneath the wound. Not just what happened, but the absence of any container to hold what happened.

This is why grief ritual & community grief spaces matter so deeply.

Not as therapy, but as a genuine act of communal tending — an attempt to restore some semblance of cultural holding around these rough initiations so many of us have experienced.

In grief ritual & community grief circles, our experience can finally be named out loud without anyone trying to fix it or minimize it.

We can speak what we survived – and are surviving – into a circle of witnesses who are deeply present, and who understand exactly what we are talking about.

Although the specifics of everyone’s experience may be vastly different, everyone there has crossed that threshold, in some way or another.

We can be welcomed back — perhaps for the first time — from a threshold we likely crossed alone.

And here, something important must be said clearly: when we say, “Grief is an initiation,” this is not about finding a silver lining.

It is not “everything happens for a reason.”

It is not a reframe, or a spiritual bypassing of real pain & suffering.

The loss is real. The trauma is real.

None of us would have chosen it, and nothing can erase that.

What grief ritual & community grief space offers instead is the possibility of transformation — the slow, sacred alchemy of wounds into gifts.

And what I will say next can be hard to hold, so please slow down as you read this.

Take a breath. Notice your body.

This won’t make you feel better, but it also will.

Because, you see, a part of becoming a full adult is recognizing that your life is not only yours.

Your life is for the future generations – it’s for your great-grandchildren – and for ‘The Happiness of All Beings Everywhere.’

Your life is a beautiful, messy collaboration between you and God.

(Side note: For me, God is definitely a woman or non-binary maybe – but feel free to replace that word with Goddess, Divine, Creator, Allah, the Spirit That Flows Through All Things….WhatEVER you want to name it, insert that there!)

Life is, if nothing else, a great paradox.

You are not in charge – and yet you are 100% responsible for yourself.

You are 100% responsible for yourself, and yet you can’t do it alone – we all need to be held in deep relationships and community.

Your grief is deeply personal – and yet grief & suffering unites us as humans.

Our deepest wounds contain our greatest gifts.

Again, this is why we need community grief work, at scale, ahorita.

This is why we need to grieve together. This is why it matters who holds the space. And this is why the act of being truly witnessed — of being welcomed back — is not a luxury.

It might literally be the only thing that can save our collective asses.

Each of us carries losses that have never been properly witnessed. Initiations we crossed without preparation, without ceremony, without anyone waiting on the other side.

Community grief tending & ritual work is at the heart of repairing culture.

And cuulture is not something that is nice to observe in other places and hang souvenirs on our walls from.

Culture is integral to our survival as a species.

The Five Gates of Grief, as articulated by Francis Weller — with the sixth gate offered through the work of Rachael Rice — give us a map to the heart of the terrain.

Not a map out of grief, but a map into it.

A way of understanding the many forms that loss takes, and the many ways it can be met — with truth, with Love, with ritual, and with community.

Because we all have to go there at some point – and if you’re reading this, my guess is you have already crossed the threshold.

As we move through this series, we will walk through each gate together. We will name what lives there. And in the naming, perhaps, we can begin the welcome home.

I’d love to hear from you. How did this land with you? What moved you? What rough initiations has life brought you into?

Leave a comment

Surely, I thought, the robins should be singing by now. Where have they all gone?

And sure enough, in the last two weeks they have begun to return to the ground and have joined the Spring chorus of birdsong.

There is a pair who have claimed our pear trees as their territory.

(they flock in the treetops in the winter and return to the ground and nesting pairs in spring, in case you aren’t familiar with Robins!)

In a few weeks, I will turn 44 years old.

Every year for at least the last ten, I have felt astonished by the miracle of birdsong in Spring.

I’m not sure if it is my own maturing, or the state of the world, or some combination of both, but the older I get, the less I take it for granted.

Alas, in the world of Greek Mythology, we are also in the season of Persephone’s return from the underworld.

And what perfect timing ~ tomorrow (Friday) our next round of our Return from the Underworld course begins.

I created this course several years ago now, and sometimes I forget what I put in there LOL...so it is always a delightful surprise when I hear comments like Jennifer shared a few days ago on one of our live calls.

She said, “I just did the final closing ritual for the course yesterday, the ritual with the stones. A friend and I went down to the water and did it together, and it was SO POWERFUL - that is SUCH a POWERFUL RITUAL!!!”

Ya, so it’s still pretty good I think!! :)

This course is designed for grievers who would love an independent 12-week journey, merging ancient wisdom with modern research to cultivate practices that bring solace and healing. When you enroll, you can also choose to also join our ongoing Grief Support Group for extra support at a discounted rate.

Learn more about Return from the Underworld & register HERE

Also, if you have taken the Return from the Underworld Course in the past and would love to go through it again, you can do so for free!! All you have to do is reply to this email with the words, “I’m ready to return!” (and that also goes for if you take it now and want to take it again later - you basically just let us know!)

Lastly, Return from the Underworld is also a prerequisite for our Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Level 1 Training (formerly Roots of Ritual), next cohort begins Sept 15th, ‘26.

If you’d like more info about that, hit reply to this email or comment below and let us know, and we will add you to the list to be the first to know when early bird registration opens!

Happy Spring ~ May you be in awe of the smallest of miracles each day.

Grá mór,
Josea & the Dark Woods Team

PS ~ one of my greatest joys is hearing from you, dear reader! Click this button to leave a comment - I will respond to every single one!!

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If you have ever said that you ‘don’t have time’ for the self care you know you need, this episode is for you.

If you’ve ever wondered how your nervous system will navigate holding the bigger energy of group work or the intensity of ritual, this episode is for you.

If you’d love a perspective shift on how you view time-space & reality, this episode is for you!

Because it’s critical with this work that we are Serving from a place of wholeness rather than depletion & burn out.

I’d love to know what you think - leave a comment below!

Leave a comment

Join us on Tuesday March 3rd for A Wake for Our Collective Sorrows ~ a Community Grief & Praise Session

In the Irish tradition, a wake (faire) is a gathering after death to honour life –with tears and laughter, stories and songs, and wild humor (craic) being integral parts.

It’s a grief ritual – but not somber mourning – instead, it’s a celebration that feeds life itself.

This event is by donation to our scholarship fund. Learn more & REGISTER HERE

2026✨ Roots of Ritual Grief Tending Foundations Training 🌀 begins MARCH 24th ✨

This program is our 4 month professional level 1 training designed to support you to grow your capacity to tend grief & trauma with confidence in both 1:1 and group settings.

For $3000 usd (payment plans available) gets you weekly live discussion calls, pre-recorded learning material, small groups for somatic practice & discussion. Solidarity pricing available for Black, Indigenous & People of Colour.

Learn more and apply at https://darkwoodsofgrief.com/roots-of-ritual/

Dark Woods of Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thanks for reading Dark Woods of Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

What is the reality of making a living in this sacred work ~ is it possible to do what you love and thrive?? The answer is YES, and in this episode, we’re going to talk about HOW.

…You came to this path because you were called.

Because you walked through your own dark woods and you know in your bones what it means to have someone hold a lantern for you.

The idea of turning that into marketing can feel…yucky.

And marketing CAN be gross. We’ve all seen and felt it - the sleazy door-to-door vacuum salesman vibe ….and that has very much translated into the online world in the last 15 years.

But here’s what I want to offer you today: there is a way to build a sustainable livelihood as a grief tender that doesn’t require you to betray the work or sell your soul. In fact, done with integrity, your marketing becomes an extension of the work itself.

Listen to the full episode for the how.

ALSO…

Join us on Tuesday March 3rd for A Wake for Our Collective Sorrows ~ a Community Grief & Praise Session

In the Irish tradition, a wake (faire) is a gathering after death to honour life – with tears and laughter, stories and songs, and wild humor (craic) being integral parts.

It’s a grief ritual – but not somber mourning – instead, it’s a celebration that feeds life itself.

This event is by donation to our scholarship fund. Learn more & REGISTER HERE

2026✨ Roots of Ritual Grief Tending Foundations Training 🌀 begins MARCH 24th ✨

This program is our 4 month professional level 1 training designed to support you to grow your capacity to tend grief & trauma with confidence in both 1:1 and group settings.

For $3000 usd (payment plans available) gets you weekly live discussion calls, pre-recorded learning material, small groups for somatic practice & discussion. Solidarity pricing available for Black, Indigenous & People of Colour.

Learn more and apply at https://darkwoodsofgrief.com/roots-of-ritual/

I love to hear from you…please let me know what you thought of this episode by leaving a comment!

Leave a comment

Hi Loves,

I’ve been in bed with the flu most of this past 8 days.

It’s been one of those weird ones where you think your getting better and then it moves to a different area of your body.

Without to many graphic details, the word for the last 3 days has been gastrointestinal.

Not fun, but I’m also not complaining as I feel so grateful to have a warm cozy place to rest and work as I recover.

Needless to say, I was delighted to get outside for a short walk (in the sun, on the beach, with the dogs) yesterday, and then to prop myself up in bed enough to make you this - 5th episode of Rooted in Thriving ~ Grief Tending for Collective Liberation podcast series.

If you’ve ever worried about what will happen if your clients/participants go “too fast” or “too deep” into their grief - this episode is for you.

If you or your clients are struggling to cope with the intensity of the collective grief moving through our world right now - this episode is for you.

In this episode, I talk about the most important skill you need for grief tending work.

It’s absolutely foundational - so don’t miss it!

Episode #5 ~ Grief Tending Foundations ~ the most important skill you need to facilitate soulful spaces while living within colonial systems & structures that are falling.

Find it on Youtube HERE or on Spotify HEREor

I hope you enjoy it and I’d love to hear what you think. :)

Leave a comment

Join us on Tuesday March 3rd for A Wake for Our Collective Sorrows ~ a Community Grief & Praise Session

In the Irish tradition, a wake (faire) is a gathering after death to honour life – with tears and laughter, stories and songs, and wild humor (craic) being integral parts.

It’s a grief ritual – but not somber mourning – instead, it’s a celebration that feeds life itself.

This event is by donation to our scholarship fund. Learn more & REGISTER HERE

2026✨ Roots of Ritual Grief Tending Foundations Training 🌀 begins MARCH 24th ✨

This program is our 4 month professional level 1 training designed to support you to grow your capacity to tend grief & trauma with confidence in both 1:1 and group settings.

For $3000 usd (payment plans available) gets you weekly live discussion calls, pre-recorded learning material, small groups for somatic practice & discussion. Solidarity pricing available for Black, Indigenous & People of Colour.

Learn more and apply at https://darkwoodsofgrief.com/roots-of-ritual/

Thanks for reading Dark Woods of Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Dark Woods of Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In the Irish tradition, a wake (faire) is a gathering after death to honour life – with tears and laughter, stories and songs, and wild humor (craic) being integral parts.

It’s a grief ritual – but not somber mourning – instead, it’s a celebration that feeds life itself.

This event is by donation to our scholarship fund. Learn more & REGISTER HERE

Adeline is a wild woman and lover of nature and big adventures. She came to Canada in 2018 to complete the Wisdom of the Earth Wilderness School Immersion program. Through this training she became a mentor for children in deep nature connection and discovered that grieving is necessarily a part of healing and coming into deeper connection with nature, each other and ourselves.

Upon returning to her home in France, she lost her dear mother. The depth of this grief led her return to the path of grief work and to Canada to complete the 2024 Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training. She has held grief circles both online and in person, and is currently home living in France.

In this episode, we talk about all of this, plus we go deep into the horse-back riding accident she had as a teen that left her physically disabled and how this has impacted her view of human vulnerability and the realities of disenfranchised grief.

She is a facilitator on our Dark Woods Grief Support Group team and you can also find her in France at lefebvre.adeline14@gmail.com

2026✨ Roots of Ritual Grief Tending Foundations Training 🌀 begins MARCH 24th ✨

This program is our 4 month professional level 1 training designed to support you to grow your capacity to tend grief & trauma with confidence in both 1:1 and group settings.

For $3000 usd (payment plans available) gets you weekly live discussion calls, pre-recorded learning material, small groups for somatic practice & discussion. Solidarity pricing available for Black, Indigenous & People of Colour.

Learn more and apply at https://darkwoodsofgrief.com/roots-of-ritual/

At Dark Woods of Grief, we have been feeling into the collective moment, and how much tremendous rage & sorrow is rising as so many horrific truths are coming into the light to be reckoned with.

And yet, as our known world seemingly falls apart, it is also more vital than ever to remember that gratitude, joy & celebration are what feeds life itself, alongside our tears & sacred rage.

We cannot allow the forces of cruelty, division & oppression to govern our emotional state and our focus.

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨ It is time for some deep magic of our own. ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

REGISTER HERE NOW

In times past, the power of healing and grief tending belonged to the people.

I say, it is time we take it back. 🌀

In the Irish tradition, a wake (faire) is a gathering after death to honour life – with tears and laughter, stories and songs, and wild humour (craic) being integral parts.

It’s a grief ritual – but not somber mourning – instead, it’s a place where grief is welcome, but it is also a celebration that feeds the life itself.

Spaces where we honour grief have always been a part of traditional cultures worldwide.

We need these spaces now more than ever...and yet in Western culture they have been forced underground for many years.

But not anymore - it is TIME, and the old Ways of Knowing are rising to support humanity through this collective moment.

Thus, on Tuesday, March 3rd, @ 4pm pacific // 7pm EST // 12am in Ireland, we gather for a community Grief & Praise Ritual to mourn what is dying in our world, and to feed life with our full-hearted presence and celebration.

This ritual is open to everyone & will be modelled after the Grief & Praise sessions we regularly hold inside of our Dark Woods Grief Support Group Community.

We will offer a collective (non-denominational) prayer & meditation, writing & somatic practices, followed by a somatic movement practice, aka, dance.

You do not need to FEEL celebratory to attend.

You are welcome to bring your despair, sorrow, sacred rage, anxiety & heaviness.

The point is, we will hold it, together, and it will alchemize into something else.

Because that is the nature of energy ~ it wants to transform.

There will be opportunities to share, express & be witnessed.

Each person is invited to share & participate to the degree that is right for them – all practices are invitational.

This is a by donation event & all proceeds go to our scholarship fund to support solidarity pricing for our programs & trainings for folks living & working in underserved communities…(primarily Black, Indigenous & People of Colour, single parents, disabled & caregivers living on limited income etc)

REGISTER HERE NOW

At the end of the ritual process, we will share about our current programs open for enrolment, including our Roots of Ritual Grief Tending Foundations Training & our Grief Support Groups

Grá mór, (Big Love)

Josea & the Dark Woods Team

PS ~ Do you agree? How are you holding up with so much coming to light in the US & globally right now? What is supporting you to get through each day right now??

I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

PSS ~ APPLICATIONS ARE OPEN for ✨ Roots of Ritual Grief Tending Foundations Training 🌀 begins MARCH 24th ✨

We also still have a few more solidarity pricing spots available for Black & Indigneous folks, People of Colour & folks working in underserved communities. If that’s you, I also encourage you to apply asap as these spots are filling fast.

THERE IS PRE-COURSE WORK YOU CAN DIVE INTO AS SOON AS YOU REGISTER

✨✨✨ MORE ABOUT THE TRAINING ✨✨✨

This program is our 4 month professional training designed to support you to grow your capacity to tend grief & trauma with confidence in both 1:1 and group settings.

This is a 4 month initiatory journey designed to:

• Build your capacity to stay present when grief intensifies - learning to recognize the signs when someone is moving deeper, and developing somatic skills to hold space with confidence

• Tend your own ancestral and personal grief so it stops getting activated when you’re holding space for others - learning to differentiate between what’s yours and what’s theirs

• Trust yourself to hold the full spectrum of human emotion - rage, despair, terror, ecstasy - without needing to fix, soothe, or manage it

• Understand the difference between grief and trauma - and know precisely how to work with each in the moment, reading the signals in someone’s nervous system

• Build sustainable practices for staying grounded and vital while doing deep work - so you can serve from overflow rather than depletion

• Be held in a circle of practitioners who understand this work intimately - where you can bring your own grief, your questions, your edges, and be met with fierce compassion

• Bring these essential healing practices to your community - knowing you’re part of a growing network restoring grief literacy for this and future generations
  
  Weekly live discussion calls, pre-recorded learning material, small groups for somatic practice & discussion & includes access to our other programs & courses.
  
  Max 40 participants ~ we are almost half full ~ LEARN MORE & APPLY HERE NOW ~
  
  Note: This training is a prerequisite to our Level 2 Advanced Ritual Training which will take place in person in Spring 2027.
  
  

Questions? Simply hit “reply” to this email and we will get back to you. xx

When I first heard about it, I noticed a lack of emotional response in myself. “Oh yeah, more violence. No surprise,” I heard my inner voice say.

As someone who is a professional grief tender, who does this for a living, who has significant capacity to feel my feelings, I think it is significant that this was my first response and really speaks to what ongoing intense violence does to our nervous systems as humans.

The more I’ve been sitting with this tragedy, the more I’ve been contacting my own emotional body and my grief.

But my grief goes far deeper than this isolated incident, and I’m sure that is true for so many of us.

This deeper grief is what I want to speak to today. Because we, collectively, are mourning so much and grappling with so much ongoing trauma in our communities.

When a young person dies from suicide, drug poisoning or something like what happened in Tumbler Ridge, I think this is an opportunity for us to look deeper and acknowledge the polluted river that is running under the ground we are walking on.

The West African Dagara lineage has had tremendous influence on grief ritual and the lineages of understanding how to work with grief in North America, but there are many parts of this lineage that are not widely understood.

Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé (Dagara) were called, actually, sent by their community elders in Burkina Faso. Their elders had the vision that they were meant to bring grief ritual here, to North America, because they saw how much unprocessed grief there was here and that we needed help.

Why would they want to help us when they are on the other side of the world?

This is a very good question and one worth sitting with.

Now, Malidoma & Sobonfu came here and met people and began to teach and hold grief rituals. They are a significant part of the lineage of my teacher Francis Weller, and many other teachers in the grief tending space. Through their blessing comes a very significant part of the teachings that I carry, although I never had the privilege to meet either of them personally before they died.

One of the less known teachings that came from them is this, and it perhaps answers the question of why the Dagara people would want to help us from across the world.

In the Dagara village, there’s a clear understanding: if one person has an illness or sickness or disease, this is not a personal thing impacting only that one person. There is no such thing as a personal problem. They see any problem with one person as a symptom of imbalance or disease in the whole village. The responsibility to tend to this disease, to do ritual around it, to discover what’s happening—this belongs to the village as well as the person who has the issue. So it is not to say that that person is “off the hook,” but more to say that it is also a village problem.

As we witness so many different crises converging, particularly in our youth in North America - suicide rates off the charts, especially among young men; gun violence and school shootings that have been escalating for years; mental health crisis; fentanyl poisoning deaths that are devastating communities across British Columbia - I think it’s essential that we consider the global connections.

These crises are not isolated from the rest of the world. The pain of our youth, whether they and we are aware of it or not, is unquestionably connected to systemic issues. We are living in a time of the ‘global’ village, and the village is not well.

So many of our lives in North America appear to be ‘comfortable’ - we have cars, food, comfortable or even luxurious homes, and yet are we truly, deeply happy?

The truth is that much of the comfort and luxury that we experience in the West is at the cost of the suffering of people globally, and at the cost of those (Indigenous) who originally inhabited the land we now call home.

Whether you agree with me or not, consider this possibility for a moment…

If we’re living on stolen land, benefiting from the suffering of those from whom it was stolen, benefiting from the suffering of people globally—how can that not impact the mental health of our youth?

Do you not think that, like living in a family where there are dark hidden secrets, living in a society with dark hidden secrets probably affects how we feel??

Even if they (and we older ones) are not consciously aware of it, this reality—that our comfort is built on others’ suffering- that we are a part of systems of oppression that seemingly benefit the global middle class and the global elite, but when it comes to truly deep well-being, no one is really thriving within these systems.

We cannot get away from the fact that we are all connected. And when you start to look deeper into global systems of oppression, you very quickly see that it doesn’t need to be this way - and that the people directing these systems have mostly lost connection with their humanity and probably shouldn’t be in charge of deciding anything, let alone the fate of our collective Earth home.

Tending the Roots, Not Just the Symptoms

When we look at an incident like what happened in Tumbler Ridge, that community is going to need tremendous support—support to process the grief of those kids who are never coming home again, those innocent children. Support for the trauma of the ones who survived. They’re going to need a lot of care to process all of this, and most likely they won’t get even close to the level of support that is needed, because it just isn’t available within our current systems.

Most likely, they won’t get adequate support to process this current trauma, let alone to start to address the intergenerational, systemic & global issues that are underneath this crisis.

And I say this not to defer the accountability of the individual—of course not. Of course the person who committed this crime had deep mental health issues that should have been addressed long ago.

And this is rampant everywhere - we are in a crisis of mental health without even half the tools we need to address it. Most people want to look away, which leaves those who are willing to face it in the trenches without the systemic support that they need to do their jobs well.

I think we know that. I think that’s why communities all over the region are reeling—because we know this could have just as easily been one of our communities. We know there are what feel like unsolvable problems in our communities.

This is a systemic issue - a Western society issue. And it’s not without a solution, but the solution is layered, complex and it is difficult to imagine from the place we are currently in.

The Medicine of Grief Ritual

This is why we need to dramatically scale the availability of grief tending spaces. Spaces where people can not only tend to the immediate, current major loss or trauma they’re experiencing, but where they can go deeper and get to the roots of the places where we’re all interconnected.

And this is actually the beauty of grief ritual: when we grieve together in community, we recognize almost immediately that we’re all interconnected.

When we grieve together, we recognize common threads that run through all of our grief. There’s a common humanity that runs through all of us.

And when we can see that common humanity, then we can’t help but fall in love with each other and want to support each other—rather than go to war with each other, to harm each other or to separate ourselves from the places that feel uncomfortable.

For Those Who Tend

For those of us who hold space professionally for grief—therapists, counselors, death doulas, hospice workers, transformational facilitators—the Dagara village wisdom offers us a framework that I believe is essential right now:

See the individual symptom as collective disease. When someone comes to you struggling with depression, anxiety, addiction, suicidal ideation—yes, tend to their individual experience with all the care and skill you have. And also hold the awareness that their suffering is pointing to something larger. Their pain is speaking about the village, about the systems, about the collective imbalances we’re all swimming in. Hold also the pain of their Ancestors and the systems of oppression they may have been impacted by for generations.

Understand your role as village medicine. You are not fixing broken individuals in isolation. You are helping to restore balance to the whole. This means your work has ripple effects beyond the person in front of you. It means the grief you help someone process contributes to the healing of the collective field we all share. Sometimes, it’s helpful for our clients and participants to see this perspective as well, especially during the parts of healing that almost feel not worth doing.

Create spaces for connection, not just individual healing. While one-on-one work is vital, consider how you might create opportunities for people to grieve together, to witness their common humanity, to fall in love with each other through shared grief rather than isolate in their pain.

Don’t separate “personal” grief from “collective” grief. The person grieving their divorce or their parent’s death or their own chronic illness—their grief is connected to the grief of the world. Not metaphorically. Actually connected. When we create space for the full depth of personal grief, we often find that it opens into the larger griefs we’re all carrying.

Tend your own numbness. Notice when you go numb to the violence, to the suffering, to the “another one” moments. This isn’t a failure—it’s a human protective response to overwhelm. But it’s also information. It’s telling you something about the collective field, about what we’re all trying to manage. Your own grief work, your own processing, your own ritual practice—this is not separate from your professional work. It is your professional work.

Remember: we are the village too. In a culture that has largely lost village structure, those of us who do this work are creating villages. We are becoming the medicine the Dagara elders saw was needed here. Not because we have all the answers, but because we’re willing to tend the grief, to hold the space, to recognize the connections, to fall in love with our common humanity even in—especially in—the face of violence and loss.

The Tumbler Ridge community will need support for a long time. So will Gaza, and the Congo, and Indigenous & Black communities all over this continent and many others. So with the Latino & immigrant communities in the US who are currently suffering so much terror under the Trump regime. And so will the next community, and the next. Because until we tend the roots—the intergenerational trauma, the systemic oppression, the extractive colonial processes, the unprocessed collective grief that makes this violence possible—we will keep reeling from these crises.

But here’s what I also know: every grief space you create, every person you help to process their pain, every moment you hold for someone to touch their common humanity with others—this is tending the roots. This is village medicine. This is how the healing happens.

Not quickly. Not easily. But truly & deeply. And when we heal, we regenerate our ability to envision a different world ~ a beautiful world where compassion and welcoming are the Keynotes, rather than violence, fear, oppression & despair.

With tenderness,

Josea

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In the Irish tradition, a wake (faire) is a gathering after death to honour life – with tears and laughter, stories and songs, and wild humor (craic) being integral parts.

It’s a grief ritual – but not somber mourning – instead, it’s a celebration that feeds life itself.

This event is by donation to our scholarship fund. Learn more & REGISTER HERE

In today’s episode, I’m talking to Susan Adamson ~ graduate of our 2025 Advanced Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training. Susan brings a unique depth to grief work, drawing from decades as a Registered Nurse specializing in newborn intensive care and lactation, combined with advanced training in pre and perinatal somatic psychology, energy medicine, and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy.

Her own grief journey began in 2023 with the dissolution of her 33-year marriage, followed six months later by the sudden death of her ex-husband from long-term alcohol abuse. Navigating this complex terrain of loss, Susan discovered The Dark Woods of Grief, where weekly somatic support groups offered her the tools and witnessing she desperately needed. After attending the 2025 winter Grief Retreat, she knew she wanted better tools to help others find their way through grief.

Susan’s work sits at a powerful intersection: she understands that how we navigate grief is deeply rooted in our earliest experiences. For years, she has helped new mothers and babies heal from challenging births and medical interventions, using somatic tools to create safety for overwhelmed nervous systems. When babies are given space to tell their birth stories—to express frustration, rage, or sadness—they develop resilient coping mechanisms that shape how they’ll process trauma and loss throughout their lives.

This foundational understanding informs Susan’s grief facilitation work. She knows that when we experience traumatic loss later in life, those early imprinted patterns resurface. Just as newborns need safe, attuned holding to process their birth trauma, grieving adults need safety and security in their holding and witnessing. Susan creates that compassionate container where grief stories can be shared, emotions can move through the body, and the whole self can be honored through the pain of sorrow.

Susan is passionate about bringing her somatic expertise to those walking the often lonely and misunderstood path of grief, offering the same deep presence and nervous system attunement she has long provided to the newest and most vulnerable among us.

She is a facilitator on our Dark Woods Grief Support Group team and you can also find her at https://mothertrees.com

2026✨ Roots of Ritual Grief Tending Foundations Training 🌀 begins MARCH 24th ✨

This program is our 4 month professional level 1 training designed to support you to grow your capacity to tend grief & trauma with confidence in both 1:1 and group settings.

For $3000 usd or 6 payments of $500 usd you get weekly live discussion calls, pre-recorded learning material, small groups for somatic practice & discussion. Solidarity pricing available for Black, Indigenous & People of Colour

Learn more and apply at https://darkwoodsofgrief.com/roots-of-ritual/