Community Grief Ritual
Weeping in the Arms of the Earth and Re-membering our Human Wholeness.
June 13, 9:30 am – 7:30 (includes dinner)
Earthaven Ecovillage
Near Asheville, NC
So many of us yearn to be seen and known, to feel that we belong… yet we hide away our sorrows and struggles, carrying them as lonely burdens. The truth is, loss is one of the most universal human experiences.
Coming together to grieve our losses, our hurts, our heartbreaks, can be a profoundly connective antidote to the epidemic of loneliness and despair plaguing our world.
Grieving together can clear the way for joy and belonging to spring forth.
Join us for an all-day ritual of guided practice, community care, collective release, music and song, and Earth connection.
In a beautiful, secluded forest valley within Earthaven Ecovillage, we’ll gently and carefully open the gates of grief together. Caring, experienced guides will hold us, along with powerful ritual allies: elemental beings, altars, music, and ancestors, all working together to support our collective healing.
By being vulnerable and speaking our grief, we realized we were not alone. In some sense, speaking the grief transformed the grief into a strengthening of the bonds/threads that weave community together. The burden on the individual was lessened and the community glue was strengthened.
What to Expect
We’ll begin by building connections with each other through facilitated practices. Then, we’ll spend time in reflection and solo communion with the Earth, add our offerings to collective altars, and together journey into the heart of our griefs through a ceremony supported by music. Group singing will be peppered throughout the day, and everyone will have the option to rest as needed. At the end of the day we’ll share a dinner together.
A preparatory call will be available on Tuesday, May 26, 7 – 9 pm. During the call we will offer context around grief rituals (both in general, and within this container) and help create safety for those wanting a supported entry into this deep work. We encourage everyone to come to the call who is able; a recording will be sent out to everyone.
The evening dinner will be provided. Please bring your own lunch and snacks.
Communal grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves. Through validation, acknowledgement and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing.
Imagine…
Laying down the weight of shame, regret, sadness and self-doubt, giving it to the Earth where it can compost into something lifegiving. Imagine bringing the lump that lives in your throat, your chest, or your belly to the altar as an honorable offering. Imagine allowing fear or anger to melt into tears that will help the flower of your heart to flourish. Imagine being seen in your pain, and witnessing others in theirs. This courageous exposure can quench our deep thirst for real, authentic connection — with ourselves, each other, and the living Earth.
Honoring grief collectively can unburden us. It can liberate the energy we need to bring our whole hearts into this beautiful, sorrowful world. When we grieve together, we make space for our aliveness and a zest for life to return and ignite us with joy and love.
Facilitators
Mirna McWilliams
Facilitator
Mirna is a resident of Earthaven Ecovillage, where she is learning what it means to live together in Village. She is a lifelong artist who has spent many years of study and practice in various lineages of theater, dance, and music, now turning these capacities toward the possibility of healing, liberation, and cultural transformation. In all that she studies, offers, and practices, she is devoted to moving through the complexity of these times in the spirit of prayer, pleasure, and deep play.
NikiAnne Feinberg
Founder, Facilitator
Throughout the last two decades, NikiAnne has dedicated much of her life energy to facilitating transformative learning journeys, particularly in community settings, and with folks in transition — between vocations; stages of life, including death; and those working to live into new, more life-giving stories of the world and themselves. In all her work, NikiAnne partners with the ancestors, the natural world, the power of ritual, and others to best serve the whole.
Chloe Lieberman
Facilitator
Chloe (she/her) is a student and steward of the living mystery that is this generative Earth body. Throughout her life, Chloe has explored and engaged the intersections of food, environment, community, and spirituality. She has long yearned to understand how and why we humans have gotten into such a dysfunctional relationship with the sources of our sustenance, and how we can heal and thrive. Her nurturing and natural curiosity lead her into deep, attentive connection with the people around her, humans and others.
About Your Facilitators
Chloe, NikiAnne, and Mirna believe deeply in the human potential to live in connection and reciprocity with the rest of life. They’ve each spent years studying different lineages, philosophies, and modalities of spiritual and psychological healing. Along with the treasures collected along these paths, they’ve also found profound medicine in the simple practice of bringing authentic presence to the day-to-day reality of being human.
Big love for people and the planet, and big grief for the suffering and violence in the world has led them to create spaces and offerings to support others (and themselves) in finding a sense of belonging and connection. They’ve noticed that when people can truly be open and authentic, they usually make kinder, more loving choices for themselves and their fellow beings.
Their shared intention is to support such healing and opening through gentle, caring guidance and facilitation. This work is rooted in the various lineages that they’ve learned from, but adapted to be accessible and relevant to modern folks who may be orphaned from intact spiritual traditions.
Our Beloved Teachers
It is with respect and reverence that we thank some of the people who have taught or inspired us in how and why to hold rituals honoring grief. In a culture with a serious deficiency of true elders, we feel privileged to have received the guidance and wisdom of those who came before us.
Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé came to the West from the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, West Africa, with explicit guidance from their elders to teach spirituality, rituals, and community-building to people who had lost those essential threads of life. They shared the importance of community grief rituals, and NikiAnne had the good fortune of studying directly with Sobonfu. Some of the ritual elements we include are inspired from these teachings.
Martín Prechtel is an “avid student of indigenous eloquence, innovative language and thought.” He brings together years of living and practicing Indigenous ritual traditions, along with an impossibly hopeful creativity toward planting the seeds of such rituals in the infertile-seeming soils of modernity. His teachings on honoring grief, and on the relationship between grief and praise, are infused in the heart of this ritual. Chloe had the good fortune of studying directly with Martín at his school, Bolad’s Kitchen, for several years.
We’ve been inspired by the writings and teachings of several other heartfelt visionaries working to revitalize the sacredness of and fluency with grief in our Western world. Thank you Toko-pa Turner, John O’Donohue, Francis Weller, and Joanna Macy. There are threads of your work woven into this ritual.
Logistics
Food
A post-ritual dinner will be prepared by talented culinary artists from the Earthaven community. Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and dairy-free options available. Participants are invited to help with meal clean-up. Many hands make light work.
As much food as possible is sourced from Earthaven and its surrounding farms and gardens, with some ingredients sourced from grocery stores. Our meals are created with seasonal, local, fresh, wildcrafted, humanely-raised, and organic ingredients.
***If you have dietary needs beyond the ones listed here, please be prepared to bring supplemental food to support your nourishment and well-being. Our kitchen cannot accommodate all diets.
*** Although we would like to know if you have any allergies, we cannot provide an anaphylactic safe meal. There is always the chance of cross contamination.
Click here for more information about food.
Program Specific Info
Saturday dinner is the only meal provided. No additional food is available at Earthaven. Please bring your own lunch and snacks. If you are camping, you will need to bring food for any additional meals during your stay.
Financial Co-responsibility and Scholarships
Because some people have more financial means than others, we have created a sliding-scale fee system to accommodate a range of economic realities. We offer several price tiers and leave it to you to select the most appropriate tier. The price range aims to take into consideration economic disparities, historical injustices, and personal circumstances. The system is designed for those with more resources to support those with less.
At Earthaven and through the School of Integrated Living (SOIL), we strive to practice a culture of financial transparency, authenticity, and generosity. Trusting each other to assess their needs, what is within their ability, and when to ask for help. We are excited to include you in our experiment with financial co-responsibility.
We are now offering self-selected scholarships for many of our programs. No proof of need, no questions asked. Just the clear intention of trust that registrants can assess whether the cost of a program is truly a barrier to attendance and the growth of self and community our programs seek to foster.
In addition, we offer partial scholarships (50% of the middle of the sliding scale) to black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) with financial needs who otherwise would not be able to afford to attend, even with the self-selected scholarships. We understand that BIPOC may experience more financial and institutional barriers to participation, and this is one way we are able to create more access. If you identify as BIPOC with financial needs and would like to receive a deeper scholarship, please contact us.
SOIL endeavors to support the healthy flow of all resources; whether that be monetary or the skills and information that seed cultural change; and widen the doors of accessibility to what we offer.
Join Us
If you’re feeling moved to come together in this way, we welcome you! If you’re feeling nervous or unsure, please reach out and we can help you decide if it’s a good fit for you at this time. While we ask for a registration fee to cover our expenses, we also offer several sliding scale and scholarship options to help make this ritual more accessible.
Camping
Skip the early morning drive and enjoy the post-ritual feast withough worrying about the drive home. The Earthaven campground, including the campground cabin, are open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.
Earthaven Ecovillage Tour
Make it a weekend and learn more about Earthaven by taking a Sunday morning tour.
Cost
Ritual with feast: $100 – 200
General Scholarship: $50
BIPOC rate: $50
Camping and the Sunday morning Earthaven tour are available for an additional fee.
Note: We are seeking donations to support additional scholarships. If you would like to support making this ritual accessible to anyone without cost, please contact us.
Registration
Complete the registration form once per participant. It takes 5-10 minutes, and you will complete your enrollment with a credit card authorization.
After your enrollment is processed, you will receive several confirmations…
- An automatic confirmation of receiving your registration form
- A payment confirmation from our card processor
- Confirmation that your registration has been processed
Please contact us before registering if any of these apply:
- You have a service animal.
- You are bringing a trailer or vehicle longer than 25′. There are limited spaces to park large vehicles at Earthaven.
- You plan to camp and need access to electricity over night.