An introduction
What is grief tending?
Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is something we tend, and it is tended in company.
Most of what we are offered when we are suffering points upward. Contemporary psychology and spirituality alike emphasise growth, ascension and the progression of the psyche. Grief tending moves in the other direction. It is a turning toward, rather than a rising above, and this is important so that you can truly transform and experience more vitality and aliveness.
It’s important to recognise that grief arrives in far more forms than the one that follows a death. There is the sorrow that comes with endings and impermanence, and there is also the grief of what we disowned in ourselves in order to be acceptable, of what we were shamed for, of what never came, of sorrow older than we are, and of a living world coming apart. Most of what we carry has never been called grief at all, which is precisely why it has stayed with us.
In alchemy no transformation occurs without a strong vessel, and the same is true of grief and sorrow. It needs a space in which emotion can emerge, unfold and change. That is what grief tending builds: a container with a clear intention, a marked opening, support called in, room for what needs to move, and a deliberate closing with time to integrate.
This work is not linear and it is not finished. It moves like a spiral, or like the peeling back of layers, each return revealing what the previous turn could not yet hold.
Why this matters
Because what we ignore doesn’t go away
We spend a vast amount of energy holding down what we have disowned, and the cost arrives as physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. Unacknowledged grief does not resolve; it goes underground and quietly shapes our behaviour and our relationships from there.
Ascent without descent is ungrounded.
Any psychospiritual development that excludes the deeper, darker aspects of ourselves is unstable. Without a relationship to soul and to shadow, the desire to ascend becomes egoic striving dressed in spiritual language, which is what John Welwood named spiritual bypassing.
The light is born out of what we sit with in the dark.
Shadow work brings into awareness not only what we fear in ourselves but the golden shadow, the creativity, power and strength we exiled alongside it. What we recover in the descent is not merely relief from pain. It is vitality, authenticity, and the capacity to be present to our own lives.
There is wisdom in not knowing yet.
We are trained to solve, to fix, to resolve. But there is a particular wisdom in remaining in the liminal space rather than forcing clarity, and this mirrors how transformation happens in the natural world, where the lotus grows out of the mud and nothing is hurried into flower.
Grief and gratitude go hand in hand
Our ability to feel into our grief, pain and suffering is directly related to our capacity to feel alive. Vitality, life-force, awe, gratitude and the love of an open heart happen when we can dive into our grief; it is grief that cracks us open.
The many faces of grief
Most of what we grieve has never been called grief
We are taught to recognise only one type of grief, the kind that follows a death. But grief arrives in many forms, and the ones we have no language for are often the ones we have carried longest. Here are some of the many types and forms of grief.
Losses & bereavement
Everything we love, in time. Bereavement, endings, impermanence.
Changes & transitions
Health, role, identity, work. The living losses nobody sends cards for.
What we have disowned
The parts of ourselves we exiled in order to be acceptable. What was named as too much, too emotional, not strong enough.
What lives in shadow
Anger, guilt, envy, relief. The feelings we were not allowed to have, and the untapped potential and gifts that went down with them.
Trauma & intergenerational trauma
The parts that withdrew when experience exceeded what could be borne, and the parts carrying what was never ours but was passed down the family line.
What never came
Belonging, safety, being met. Grief for what we needed and did not receive.
Crisis & awakening
When meaning, faith or identity collapses, and awakening arrives as disorientation.
What we lost touch with
Our severance from soul and from the sacred, felt as numbness or emptiness.
What the world is losing
Species, habitats, cultures, traditions. Sorrow for a living world coming apart, and for the collective fields that feed on fear and separation and turn us against life.
The harm we have caused
Grief for the harm we brought to ourselves, to others and to the world, from the awareness we were operating from at the time.
There is no order here and no hierarchy. Each face is a grief in its own right, and most of us are carrying several at once.
Who this work is inspired by
This approach is my own synthesis, developed through years of practice, but it stands on the shoulders of others.
My biggest inspiration is Francis Weller, whose gates of grief gave language to the sorrows we carry but had never been taught to name. I attended his grief ritual training, and his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow is the one I return to again and again. I went on to complete Apprenticing to Grief, a training programme with Sophy Banks and others for those wanting to gain the skills and confidence to hold space for grief. Alongside this sits the work of Joanna Macy, whose Work That Reconnects showed that despair for the world is not pathology, but the measure of our belonging to it.
Running underneath all of it is depth psychology, and Carl Jung's insight that we do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Trauma-informed practice keeps the work paced, safe and led by the nervous system, drawing on Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, Janina Fisher and Deb Dana. It is held within Transpersonal Coaching Psychology, the tradition I trained and teach within alongside my colleague and teacher Jevon Dangeli, which meets grief from an expanded, open awareness of the Self, and it is informed by shamanic traditions, which recognise soul loss, the way parts of us withdraw in the face of sorrow, and the possibility of their return. I trained in these practices at the Centre for Shamanic Studies in London, in the lineage of Michael Harner.
Where to begin
You do not have to carry this alone.
Grief tending can happen through a monthly gathering, online or here in Brighton, through our online course, or one to one. Get in touch to explore your options.
