


Europe Online Grief Ritual & Training
Hybrid | Small Pods | Online | Experiential
in Adaptive Response to the COVID 19 Pandemic 2020

Hardship, confusion, loss in these most extraordinary of times calls forth the need for water wisdom even more than usual.
The old way is to come together for speaking and listening to grief.
If you are ready to speak grief, you are needed as a listener in these times—
and if you are a natural listener, you also need the "care of ears."
If this calls to you, call in. Join us.
Let's Proceed as if we are needed:
On Grief—
Free Introduction
Zoom Session
Thursday | May 21 | 2020
London | 20h00 to 21h00
British Summer Time
Berlin | 21h00 to 22h00
New York | 15h00 to 16h00
Honolulu | 09h00 to 10h00
Vancouver | 12h00 noon to 13h00
Below on this page:
Sharing the Weight
Saturday | May 2 | 2020
Pay What You Can
£15—£20—£25 GBP
Full Weekend
Saturday | May 2 &
Sunday | May 3 | 2020
Pay What You Can
£40—£60—£80 GBP
Indigenous wisdom says that we are meant to grieve together, and that grieving properly is a skill of culture. When grief is held back, nothing can be properly praised, and life withers as if in a drought.

RESOURCES
Stay Informed
We're setting up a secure online tribe so friends and colleagues can collaborate.
For now, join the secure email list, (managed by Mailchimp), and we will stay in touch with a weekly blog and announcements.
And thanks for the work you do in the world. It is needed and vital. Keep going!
One on One Sessions
Do you need some particular grief support?
I call my sessions "Parleys."
You can book one here:
In Your Time Zone?
Does this online hybrid event look good, but the times don't work that well?
Get in touch to discuss the possibility of another series like this suited to Europe or Oceania or elsewhere.
Free Download From
Medicine Without an Expiry Date: Indigenous Remedy for Modern Trouble
Episode 8
Confusion Presses In:
Emotional Work
Head over to BOOK—under the RESUMÉ menu and you can find four more chapters from my book, all free downloads.

Suggested Listening
This talk by Martín Prechtel is the best introduction to an indigenous perspective on grief I have found.
On Grief—Free Introduction Zoom Session
Thursday May 21 8:00pm to 9:00pm London UK
Isolating, the verb, is good and necessary.
Becoming isolated, the adjective, is unwarranted and deadly.
Oceania Grief Ritual & Grief Training
Full Weekend [Includes Sharing the Weight Saturday AM ]
Scaled to "Pay What You Can" £40—£60—£80 GBP
1. Sharing the Weight—A Step Toward Grief Work
The Call of Grief in This Time • Mythtelling • Longing for Better
| Saturday May 2
| 9:00 -
| London UK time
11:30 am
2. Woebegone Turmoil—Allies & Ancestors—Sat Aft
Guided Ritual Work • Break Outs • Music & Dance
| Saturday May 2
| 12:30 -
| London UK time
3:00 pm
3. Praise & Training—Sunday Morning
The Skill of Blessings • Dreams and Fears • Each for Each
| Sunday May 3
| 9:00 -
| London UK time
11:30 am
4. Journey Unknown Onward—Sunday Afternoon
Ancestors Argument • Nature's Fortune • Expedition Behaviour
| Sunday May 3
| 12:30 -
3:00 pm
| London UK time
Scaled to "Pay What You Can" £40—£60—£80 GBP
Sharing the Weight—A Step Toward Grief Work
Saturday, May 30, 2020 4:00pm to 6:30pm London UK
[may register independently of full series]
Checking in • The Call of Grief in This Time • Longing for Better
Scaled to "Pay What You Can" £15—£20—£25 GBP
Oceania Grief Ritual & Grief Training
Hybrid | Small Pods | Online | Details

"My sense is that there is great need today for more personal and interpersonal transmythic avenues for present event perception and communication among ourselves; for increased ways for people to more directly experience themselves and each other across boundaries of age, race, sex, and culture etc."
David MacMurray Smith
Fantastic Space
The Intelligence of Grief and Praise — Water Element

Stephen Jenkinson
"“Grief is not a feeling it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you, we are not on the receiving end of grief we are on the practising end of grief.”

Our time is a time of ongoing obliteration against anything wild, and almost every cultural practice that dares to defy the supremacy of this project of repression and domestication. We also carry the toxicity of inherited grief from the injuries and violence of the past. In turn, this toxicity gets acted out again in the current generation.
A world that hungers from the lack of knowledge and understanding about grief will seek to erase anything old—cultures, traditional knowledge, even Eldership itself. In the place of Eldership we are left with simply "olders," unvalued, uninitiated, unfit to lead culture, concentrated on the modern fantasy of the "forever young." It is an understandable damage, because there has been no visible way to deal with the grief of our times. We have lost initiation processes that could make olders into Elders, just as there has been a loss of initiations for young people.
An almost unrelenting grief. And it is dealt with, by and large, through distractions, or by ignoring it, or suppressing it. We don't have the old ritual ways of dealing with it, so it can end up being carried in people's bodies as a toxic monster. Positive thinking and spiritual bypassing are understandable in a place that has lost the traditions of dealing with grief. Yet many old cultures see grief as an essential guide for community.
Dealing with grief is to both release toxicity and to join with a sense of purpose to reform injustice. There is a toxic part of grief which needs to get out and be expressed. There is another aspect of grief that gets picked up and carried as a wisdom of experience. The real knowledge about how to deal with grief is not to be found in psychology, but rather in the indigenous understanding of the cyclic nature of life and the reciprocity that necessitates that grief and praise are two sides of the same coin. Martín Prechtel's talk on the subject [above on this page] is the best introduction I've found on the topic. I highly recommend it, and in fact, request that you invest the time to listen to it if you are attending one of my events.
"Everybody has to die. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die."
Nawal El Saadawi
Often people wonder if anger is part of a Grief Ritual work. And yes, it must be. The setting of a ritual context is to point the energy of the grief and anger away from people, where it can do damage, and instead let the powerful composting energies of the Elemental Forces take it and transform it. Some people even wonder if they are "too sad" or weeping, or angry to come to a grief ritual. This is the time to let your ancestors carry you in the old way back toward the caring heart of the village. Don't listen to the old hungry ghosts who might be inside saying that protection is found in isolation.
Deep Scholarship
"The Smell of Rain on Dust"
Martín Prechtel
Written with Martín's unique poetic voice, his musings and instructions on this most keystone need for healing of the modern dystopia.
Buy direct from author:
The grief work always depends upon some creating of the conditions that allow for the truth to be told. Grief comes in many guises, and many forms. People wonder if personal grief can be shared, if ecological grief, or grief about the state of the world can be shared, if old grief can be shared, if new grief can be shared, if the grief of empathy can be shared and on and on. In the Dagara tribe, once a grief ritual is called, it is understood that all the various kinds of grief are welcome to be expressed, and seen as a blessing for the village. This is the old way of understanding that grief is properly meant to be a navigation guidance system for the human community.
In the act of proper grieving, both communities and people reconnect more strongly with what is still alive, and know the difference between a thing that should be let go and a thing that should be fought for. Grief is a community situation for that reason. There is a lot of work to be done.