“What might it be like to devote a liberating awareness to investigating the pathways grief takes within the body, instead of turning away from them?”

Stephen Levine, Unattended Sorrow

  
Moving with the Tides of Grief is the first in a series of four seasonal grief workshops throughout 2025. 

For winter, heart and breath will be the focus for exploring our relationship with grief, through somatic movement, meditation, creative arts practices and ritual.

Body Mind Centring ® practitioner Jamus Wood, meditation and Qigong teacher Claire Greenland and interdisciplinary dance-maker Yolande Snaith will hold a safe and compassionate container for participants to navigate their feelings and experiences around grief for the loss of a loved one.

Focus on breath and softening.

Gentle guided practices of somatic movement will cultivate deep listening into the internal landscape of our bodies, tuning into where we might be holding our sorrow. Through embodied visualisation and directed breathing, we will encourage softening, releasing, and self compassion, opening space for more joyful and expansive sensory experiencing. When we are grieving the loss of a loved one, we are often overcome with a sense of their absence, a haunting emptiness, deep longing or just numbness. We will playfully explore the notion of inhabiting and creatively transforming absence, emptiness, numbness and longing through movement and images, finding spontaneity, flow, and self expression. When we become absorbed in our creative movement, and feel the support of the shared energy of the group, we can channel our grief and sorrow through pathways within our bodies, transforming our feelings into poetic moving images and dance. With the knowledge that we cannot bring back our loved ones, this compassionately guided practice may open space and a sense of release between ourselves and our grief, and cultivate a heightened sense of loving presence and hope within each of us, and with each other. There will be time for reflection, writing, drawing, witnessing and sharing.

The Grief Ritual

Our grief ritual will be a collective creation of a three dimensional mandala, incorporating simple offerings from each participant in honour of their loved ones, accompanied by music and voice or song. Without following any particular spiritual practice, faith or established religion, but including and embracing the diversity of beliefs within the group, a simple guided structure will hold a loving space for each individual to participate in a way that feels meaningful or symbolic in their own personal way. Each person can make this ritual what it needs to be for their own grief journey.
Through the creation of offerings in the form of writing, drawing, small collages / assemblages or found elements from nature, we will create a unique Mandala installation to celebrate and honor our loved ones.

The grief ritual can invite different, and multiple intentions such as; messages of love, gratitude, forgiveness, acceptance or treasured memories; objects, images, poems we may want to give as offerings; feelings, thoughts and emotions we may need to let go of, to help free ourselves and our loved ones from the pain of our profound loss.