Moving with the Tides of Grief
Sun 16 Feb 2025 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Caddaford Barns Studio Buckfastleigh, TQ11 0JT
Description
“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.
This workshop will be small and intimate, there are 12 places available.
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.
Jamus Wood is a dancer, somatic researcher and wanderer.With an innate curiosity for life and a deep interest in the processes of how growing up into ourselves can unfold. Much of his work attends to resourcing and locating ourselves into these ever changing environments that we live in today. Explorations of the relational body and letting relationships grow us are questions that he brings everyday. Alongside qualities of presence, textures of the heart, listening, softness and trusting life, he feels a deep commitment through the practice of Body Mind Centring ®, outdoor movement and Contact Improvisation. These practices create intimate relationship with life, and an unfolding of deep reflection and inner transformation.
Claire Greenland teaches Qigong, movements that are calming, centering and connecting to our natural world. This practice combined with meditation has gradually brought her to a different kind of being, a different sense of embodiment and view of the world that comes from a less entangled place. Claire is also trained in Watsu (water shiatsu), which is a therapy practiced in very warm water and offers an opportunity of complete relaxation and surrendering to compassionate holding. Her motivation in life is for us to truly feel at peace within ourselves while trusting in the support of our beautiful planet.
Yolande Snaith is an interdisciplinary dance-maker and educator, exploring the connections between movement and dance, image making, video, writing and spoken word. Her training in visual art, dance and theatre in the late 1970’s and early 80’s laid the foundations for a lengthy career as an internationally recognized choreographer, and dance professor at the University of California San Diego 2002 - 2023. Yolande now focusses on research and creative practices as an independent artist, developing new pathways within her own artistic work and teaching methodologies. Yolande’s recent works have focussed on the ‘alchemical transformation of grief ‘ within dance theatre performance, writing and videography, as cathartic media of expression and human connection.
Waiver
This workshop is for anyone who is experiencing personal life changing loss. It is not talking based, but offers an embodiment, movement and creative process of living through grief. We will not be addressing political, war, global or climate related issues.
We are experienced space holders and will be creating an environment of support and love. However, please ensure that you have enough psychological resilience to be responsible for supporting yourself during the workshop. This is a group event and therefore individual attention will not be possible.
By buying a ticket, you are agreeing that you have the emotional resources to tend to your own needs.
What the day will include…
Guided Metta Meditation
The purpose of Metta meditation is to help gather resources to stay in touch with the body during the workshop and to learn another method of self nourishment. Metta practices can be incredibly helpful after loosing close members of the family.
What Is Metta?
When we are with ourselves in the spirit of friendliness and allowing and when we are being present with our true feelings, whatever the feeling is, we are welcoming ourselves. This is called Metta.
Embryological Heart And The Grieving Heart
The heart is an amazing organ of perception. In this process of grieving we will touch back into the embodied experience of our own embryological heart and its forming, from here through movement and touch we will embrace the grieving heart and let its expression touch and move us.
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, inspired by the concept of a prayer tree, incorporating simple offerings from each participant in honor 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 honour 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.
Location
Caddaford Barns Studio Buckfastleigh, TQ11 0JT