Grief & Somatics
A 12 week offering to develop a personal grief tending practice
5th February 2025 – 30th April 2025 | Wednesdays, 7pm – 9pm CET / 1pm – 3pm ET
Context
Grief is often a visceral and embodied experience that impacts us physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Despite increasing conversation about grief in the Global North, there are few spaces to publicly express grief, or practices we can rely upon to help us move through it. As a result, many of us can feel isolated when grieving because there is little space for our emotions to be welcomed and our loved ones often don’t know how to support us in meaningful ways.
With so much collective grief and violence present at this time, it is important that we re-learn ways to be with grief so it can become a generative force in our lives, rather than something which constricts us. Unprocessed grief can impact us in negative ways, for example, stifling our ability to feel and creating harmful dynamics in our relationships.
Learning to befriend our grief can help us to grow around it, cultivate agency and get clear on our values. Regular somatic practice can support us to develop increased bandwidth to be with discomfort, stay in alignment under pressure, pace our energy and rest effectively.
The Journey
Grief & Somatics is a 12 week, online offering that will support participants to develop a personal grief tending practice, alongside somatic tools that support stress reduction. The approach and practices are rooted in the book Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community. This process will aim to create a soft, nourishing space for Black and queer folks, as well as those who have recent ancestral histories of colonisation, migration and displacement.
Participants will explore their own relationship between grief and rest, getting clear on how to cultivate more choice when difficult experiences are taking place. The group will also experiment with grief rituals to help them to befriend their grief, so they can lovingly accompany themselves when challenging feelings arise.
Every session will include a somatic practice to open and close the time together. Throughout the 12 weeks there will be three grief rituals facilitated by Camille alongside self-guided explorations. Participants will be guided through a series of grief rituals and somatic techniques that encourage them to notice what works for them so they can begin to cultivate a personal practice by the end of the 12 weeks. This process involves a time commitment of two hours per week.
This offering includes:
- Somatic practices using the Resilience Toolkit framework.
- 3 facilitated grief rituals.
- Self guided practices.
- Podcasts, articles and media to support learning.
- Nervous system education.
- Grief & Harm Reduction strategies.
- Ideas for community support while grieving.
- Peer support pods.
Facilitated Sessions
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Date
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Content
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Wednesday 5th February
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Connection & Orientation | Why tend grief in this moment?
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Thursday 6th February
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Intro to Somatics & The Resilience Toolkit
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Wednesday 19th February
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Libations ritual
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Wednesday 5th March
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Rest | Music & other supports to access feeling
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Wednesday 19th March
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Dance your grief ritual
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Wednesday 2nd April
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Grief & Harm Reduction Strategies
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Wednesday 16th April
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Pillow screaming ritual
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Wednesday 30th April
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Integration, evaluation & intention setting
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This is for you if:
- You would like to have more tools to befriend your grief and support yourself to move through challenging emotions.
- You would like to develop and commit to a regular, self directed grief tending practice.
- You are committed to supporting the web of life and creating liberatory cultures of care.
- You need tools to reduce stress as well as build capacity to support your community.
- You love Tending Grief and are looking for a community of peers to deepen practice with grief rituals and somatics.
- You want to find somatic tools that work for you to use in daily life.
- You would like to learn more about the nervous system, how this relates to grief and harm reduction.
- You are already exploring the intersections between power, the body and the unseen.
This is not:
- Group therapy.
- A course to learn how to facilitate grief spaces.
- A bereavement support group.
→ It may not be the right container if you have experienced a major bereavement within the last six months.
Guiding principles
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All people have embodied wisdom that can be accessed to re-pattern trauma, and offer medicine that can support the web of life.
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In order to create new cultures of care around grief, we all have to take an active role in tending our grief and making space for this in daily life.
→ Participants will be encouraged to engage in bi-weekly, self directed practices to support this.
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The intention of this process is to support people to sense deeply, feel agency and build capacity to dismantle the systems that create harm in our lives, as well as the wider world.
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This process is in service of efforts to end all forms of oppression, while supporting the Earth and the diversity of all life.
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Participants are invited to respect the different lived experiences in the space and move with compassion, dismantling systems rather than people. → However, any behaviours that perpetuate discrimination such as ableism, sexism or racism will not be tolerated and if this behaviour does not shift (after a check in), participants will be asked to leave the process.
Application Process
- Applications will be open until Monday 30th December 2024 at 6pm CET.
→ Apply soon to avoid disappointment as participants will be invited to join from early December. Once the 30 places are taken, the process for 2025 is full.
→ If the process is supportive, Camille intends to run it again in winter 2026.
- To express your interest, please fill out this google form. This will ask you some short questions about yourself and why you wish to be a part of this process.
→ There is an invitation to record and upload a 5 minute maximum voice note to answer the last question.
→ Hopefully the entire form will take no longer than 20 – 30 mins to complete.
- Camille will invite applicants who feel like a good fit to have a short online meeting (discovery call).
→ The discovery call is an informal conversation, lasting no more than 20 minutes.
→ This is an opportunity to ask questions, get clarity and feel if this is an aligned fit for all involved.
→ Participants will be invited for a discovery call by Wednesday 27th November for Round 1 (& Friday 3rd January TBC for Round 2).
- There will be two rounds of discovery calls:
→ Round 1: Tuesday 3rd December 2024 or Thursday 5th December 2024
→ Round 2: Tuesday 7th January 2025 or Thursday 9th January 2025
→ Please save these dates!
- ** Please note, if 30 people have been selected after Round 1 in December then there will not be any discovery calls in January ***
- Within a week of the discovery calls, Camille will send email confirmations to confirm who is invited to attend the course. All invited participants will be asked to pay the full amount or a €50 deposit (non-refundable) to confirm their place.
→ A 3 part payment plan is available after the €50 deposit.
Cost
- Tier 1 : €650 or €200 a month (Stable Income / Savings or family support / Pay it Forward)
- Tier 2: €400 or €116.67 a month (Regular Income / Able to afford therapy or personal development)
- Tier 3*: €230 or €60 a month (Low income / From systemically under resourced communities)
→ *Black, queer and disabled folks will be prioritised for the tier 3 places (10 available). Please indicate on the form, if you’d like to apply for one of these places.
About Camille
Camille Sapara Barton is a Social Imagineer, artist and somatic practitioner interested in co-creating networks of care and liveable futures. Their debut book, Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community was published in April 2024 by North Atlantic Books. Camille’s approach to grief tending is inspired both by Dagara thinking about grief and the Resilience Toolkit, which they are certified in.
