8-Week Online Journey
The Alchemy of Descent
For those called towards personal healing and collective transformation through grief tending, shadow work and embracing the sacred.
The next cohort is being planned. Join the waitlist to hear first when dates are set.
Who this is for
Many of us are carrying grief we were never given room to feel
Grief related to what we needed as children and did not receive. Grief for the parts of ourselves we were taught to reject. Grief for a world coming apart. And beneath it, a longing for connection, purpose and belonging that modern life does not provide. Instead of being supported in this depth, most of us were told to get over it, or to return to being productive as quickly as possible.
This journey is for you if some of the following feel true.
- You feel the beauty and the suffering of the world with equal intensity
- You are moving through an ending, a loss, or a change of identity that has no clear map
- You have done a great deal of inner work and something still feels unmet
- You suspect that parts of you went missing along the way
- You want to learn how to hold space for grief, your own and other people’s
- You have been told, gently or otherwise, that you should be over it by now
You do not need to have suffered a bereavement, and you do not need to know what your grief is about yet. Most people arrive with several griefs at once and discover the names for them along the way.
Why this matters
Three things I have come to believe about grief
Grief is a natural part of being human, a response to loss, change and any transition that touches us deeply. It is also profoundly misunderstood, and the way we misunderstand it is costing us. This course rests on three convictions.
I
Grief is not a pathology
It is a normal and healthy response to life’s inevitable transitions, and it reaches far beyond bereavement: changes in relationship, loss of identity, illness, the state of the world. Met rather than managed, grief becomes a teacher, offering insight into our capacity to love, to connect and to endure.
II
Grief is relational
We have been taught to attend to our grief alone, and yet it is not something we are meant to carry alone. When we grieve in community and learn to witness others in theirs, we find belonging, validation and a kind of support that is essential for anything to move.
III
Grief and joy share one spectrum
Our capacity to feel deeply into grief is intimately tied to our capacity for joy. Avoid one, through distraction, denial or spiritual bypassing, and we blunt the other. Turning towards grief, paradoxically, is how we recover our aliveness.
The liminal space
Grief places us on a threshold between what was and what is yet to come. That in-between can feel disorienting, and it is also where the deepest transformation happens. Much of this journey is about learning to trust that ground rather than rushing to leave it.
Why I created this
A container for grief, shadow and soul together
The more I worked with people in transition, the more I saw grief sitting underneath what they had come with: the burnout, the anxiety, the loss of direction, the sense of living a smaller life than the one they were meant for. Almost none of them had been given anywhere to put it.
I trained in grief ritual leadership with Francis Weller and completed the Apprenticing to Grief programme, and I began holding grief tending spaces of my own. What I noticed was that grief, shadow and soul kept arriving together. The parts we disown carry their own grief. The sorrow we feel for the world is a form of love. And underneath both is a longing for the sacred that most of us have no language for.
This course grew out of earlier versions I have run online, and it is the container I wished had existed when I needed it: paced for the nervous system, held in a small group, and honest about the fact that transformation asks us to go down before it lets us rise.
What you will learn
The Journey
I invite you into an exploration that honours your wounds, welcomes home your disowned parts, and connects you with soul and the sacred, so that there is room for transformation to happen.
Tend to your grief
Move beyond the idea that grief needs to be fixed or quickly overcome. Learn how to stay in relationship with it, and to honour it as a gateway to healing rather than an obstacle to it.
Engage with your shadow
Reclaim the disowned parts of yourself and explore your personal shadow, for deeper self-awareness and for the gifts that were exiled alongside the pain.
Connect with your soul
Through ritual, creative expression and mindfulness, cultivate a living connection to your soul’s calling and to the sacred dimension of your life.
Alchemise collective grief
Learn to carry the weight of the world’s suffering in an empowered way, turning it into a force for healing and action rather than letting it overwhelm you.
The 8-Weeks
Week one
Introduction to grief tending and the journey
What we mean by grief tending, and how soul work belongs alongside it. We set the container and our group agreements, create a grief shrine to anchor the work at home, and build a self-care toolbox for resourcing ourselves in the terrain ahead.
Week two
Stages and types of grief
An introduction to the theory: Kübler-Ross and the limits of her model, Francis Weller’s five gates of grief, and a sixth gate I have added from my own work, spiritual crisis. We begin to expand our definition of grief far beyond bereavement.
Week three
Deepening and tending to our grief
We turn towards our personal grief and engage in a grief tending process with the group, through writing and witnessing. We learn the SACRED practice, a way of staying with grief without getting stuck, lost or drowning in its intensity.
Week four
Welcoming home the lost parts of ourselves
Exiled and disowned parts, and the soul loss that so often sits behind them. We engage in a ritual to grieve the parts of us that were lost or pushed away, with the possibility of inviting them home and beginning to unburden them.
Week five
Ritual and the liminal space
The depths of the journey. Ritual is how grief has always been held, and this week we create one together: a clear opening, support called in, room for what needs to move, and a deliberate closing that allows the work to integrate.
Week six
The sorrows of the world
We turn towards the grief that arises from our connection to the world around us, for the planet, for humanity, for the suffering of our time. Through writing and the Tonglen practice we meet it with compassion and courage, and begin to turn it into resilience and purpose.
Week seven
Ancestral grief
The sorrow we carry from the wounds, traumas and unfinished business of our ancestors, often unacknowledged and deeply embedded in the psyche. What ancestral wounds have shaped my life? What patterns recur in my lineage? And how do we honour a lineage honestly, calling on the well ancestors as allies.
Week eight
Can we find meaning through grief?
The wounded healer, psycho-spiritual transformation and post-traumatic growth. Can grief be a catalyst for who we are becoming? We move through a guided process to see whether a gift, an offering or a meaning project has emerged from the journey, and close the container together.
What you receive
What is included when you join
Eight live 2-hour sessions
Weekly gatherings on Zoom where we share with each other, engage in embodied practice, and tend to grief in community.
Eight online modules
Written lessons, additional reading, meditations and resources for each week, to work through in your own time and keep afterwards.
Guided practices
Creative writing, meditation and ritual for processing grief, including recorded practices you can return to long after the eight weeks.
Frameworks for understanding grief
Maps for personal, collective and ancestral grief, so that the terrain you are moving through has language and shape.
Embodied practices
Ways of navigating difficult emotion through the body and nervous system, and of reconnecting with your authentic self.
A small, intimate community
Deep emotional support from a group of like-minded people, held in a trauma-informed space where you are never required to share more than feels right.
Eight weeks
One live session each week, with the module released alongside it.
Two hours
Long enough to arrive, go deep and close properly, every time.
Small group
Numbers are kept low so that everyone can be witnessed.
What it can lead to
What can grow when grief is tended
There is no outcome you need to reach here, and nothing about you that needs fixing. What I hope you leave with is the capacity to stay in relationship with your grief, to turn towards it with support and with curiosity, and to trust the process even when it feels uncertain. For many people that capacity is the gift in itself, and life becomes fuller for it. Over time, and in its own way, some people also find that meaning or a sense of purpose begins to grow out of what they have tended.
When that growth comes, it tends to show itself in a few recognisable ways.
I
Appreciation for life
A new gratitude for being here at all, and an ability to savour what is small and ordinary.
II
Deeper relationships
More empathy, more compassion, and a felt sense of connection with others who have also been through something.
III
Personal strength
The discovery of resources and resilience you did not know were there.
IV
Spiritual development
A reassessment of what you believe about life, death and meaning, and often a deepening of it.
V
New possibilities
Paths, interests and callings that would not have opened otherwise.
For some, by the end of the eight weeks, a gift, an offering, or what we might call a meaning project has quietly emerged from the journey.
Before you join
What this is, and what it is not
This is
- A small group where you can be witnessed
- Grounded in trauma awareness and the nervous system
- Open to grief of every kind, named or not yet named
- Rooted in lineages
This is not
- Therapy, or a substitute for it if you are in acute crisis
- A promise that grief will be resolved, finished or fixed
- A place where you will be asked to perform or share your pain
- A course only for people who have been bereaved
If your loss is very recent or you are currently in crisis, this may not be the right moment, and I am glad to talk it through with you first.
Join the waitlist
Hear first when the next cohort opens
Dates for the next eight weeks are being set. Join the waitlist and you will be the first to know, along with occasional reflections on grief tending. Nothing frequent, and you can leave at any time.
Joining the waitlist places you under no obligation.
Not sure whether the course or one-to-one work is the better place to begin? Email me and we can talk it through.
