To honour our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfil a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.
― Francis Weller
We all know that we will experience losses, big and small, throughout our lives.
When we try not to feel it, it can go beneath the surface and surreptitiously run our lives. We might subtly tell ourselves that it’s not safe to feel, or we’d rather just be happy, or other people couldn’t cope with our grief, perhaps that we shouldn’t still be feeling old griefs.
But it IS safe to feel our grief, and it’s vital to include it in order to live our full rich lives. This weekend is to support this natural need more and more simply and authentically.
Two years ago we held a rich, powerful weekend, gathering and dancing in order to strengthen our capacity for including our inevitable grief in our lives.
This time we will make space to begin or to keep strengthening our capacity for meeting grief healthily.
We will also dedicate space to honour our losses, individually and together.
And, even though loss will still visit us, we will also tend to what we need in order to live our precious lives fully and freely.
It can be hard to be alive to anything in a body that is asleep, so we will gently wake our bodies, and dance our hearts awake too. Our imaginations will step up and our intuition will deepen…. We can do this alone, but oh! It is so much healthier to do it together.
It is the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human.
― Francis Weller
