Blessing What’s Broken

Tending personal and collective grief in community 

What happens when we don’t honor our own personal sorrows, if we don’t register what’s moving in the terrains of our own hearts? 

If we don’t recognize the personal grief, the personal loss, the heart will shut down. 

And then there will be no one left to register the sorrows of the world…What the [soul] wants is the full encounter with what our lives are holding.

—Francis Weller

With human be-ing comes all manner of rupture and loss. It sounds tragic, but it’s just the way it is. Loss is embedded in life. 

Personally, we lose people, beloved pets, and relationships. We leave one job or home or community for another. Our bodily resources ebb and flow, and ultimately cease. 

Collectively, we witness the loss of species and forest and clean air. Greed and polarization threaten our sense of belonging. As technology and consumerism advance the distracted and consumptive pace of our lives, it’s easy to lose contact with meaning and peace. 

Loss is real, and inevitable. And the pain of loss is only compounded by our inability to grieve. 

While grief is a natural and necessary expression of loss, culturally we don’t know how to do it. If we do grieve our losses, we do so in private. And even then, grief can be selective. Only certain losses are deemed worthy of such care. 

Many who have experienced grief, who understand its necessity and rhythms, see grief as love. We grieve what we’ve cherished. Grief shows us what matters to our hearts. 

It’s easy to feel heartbroken by our personal and collective losses. But being brokenhearted isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

When adequately tended, a broken heart is an open heart, and an open heart is available for healing, connecting, and living. 

LOGISTICS

In weekly circles over six weeks, we’ll cultivate a safe, communal space for our grief. Together, we’ll witness and tend what we’re holding individually, and as a collective. 

  • Six two-hour sessions

  • Dates TBD

  • $287 for the series

We’ll have many tools and traditions available to us for sharing and processing, from nature and ritual to verbal storytelling, poetry, and song. 

You’ll come away from our time together: 

  • With a sense of aliveness from having expressed what’s true in your heart and released pent-up emotion

  • In touch with your own humility, resilience, and compassion 

  • More connected to yourself and the world

Tending grief in community: you are not alone. 

While grief circles are places that welcome deep, and often difficult, emotion, they are also places of great celebration. 

When the truth of our broken hearts is witnessed and tended with care and respect, energy moves. Our hearts are opened to more expression and life.

So if you…

  • Feel like you can’t carry any more sorrow

  • Have grown weary or rigid from holding your grief alone

  • Long to break out of cultural norms of numbness, distraction, alienation, and isolation around loss and grief

…please join a Blessing What’s Broken circle. Your wholeness is welcome here. 

Again, you can see upcoming dates and register here. 

Slow down, uncenter and forget about yourself for a moment, let the world find you, love what is nearby, share your grief (and gifts), say thank you, learn from the stories from where you live and where your ancestors came, be a wee bit wild in your imagination, and come home.

—Francis Weller