Community Grief Rituals

Tending the River: A Community Grief Ritual

In intact cultures with active grief practices, grieving is a communal activity. A community grief ritual is an opportunity to gather and open together to that which is too much to feel on your own. To experience the love that you are and release the unavoidable grief involved in being human.

We live in a grief-heavy culture, land, and world. We have lost much of the traditional wisdom about how to move our sorrow, express our losses, mourn what we loved, or ritually praise the life giving places and relationships that connect us into deeper peace and innate belonging. 

There is no other way but through. Grief is the price we pay for loving. The opportunity to surrender to life, allow grief to move through our bodies, and alchemize our losses in a community and ritual container is a healing and kind act towards ourselves and the world we live in .

These rituals create a portal for the members of the community to enter a liminal space to access their open hearts, connect to the presence of helping & healing ancestors, and to release the burden of aloneness: These rituals are engaged regularly at times of:

• loss

• death

• transition

• unmet needs

• unfulfilled dreams

• illness

• change

• failure

• betrayal

• ancestral traumas

• environmental change

• social injustice

• rupture and violence in our personal relationships, communities, and world.

This community grief ritual revolves around a beautiful co-created grief altar, live drumming, and community singing. Inspired by the grief rituals from the Dagara peoples of Burkino Faso brought to the U.S. by Sobonfu Some and infused with the wisdom of Francis Weller and the esoteric shamanic spiritual traditions of the East.

Our 3 day event includes embodied practices that allow each member of the community to open to their personal relationship with their grief and loving presence.

These include:

• Co-create a safe and sacred space in community to honor individual and collective grief and joy

• Learn about different types of grief and ways to identify how it may be showing up in your life.

• Expand perspectives on how grief is held in wisdom traditions and indigenous ways.

• Connect with and express your grief and joy through writing, movement and embodiment, song, and time in nature.

• Experience the healing power of honoring grief by being witnessed and witnessing others grieving without trying to change, fix or solve the grief process.

• Open your heart and increase vitality through the liberating energy of forgiveness and embodiment

• Integration practices such as breath work, meditation, cultivating joy, and being in nature

• Communal connection

• Opening the pathways for deep connection with the well ancestors and elements

• Cultivate a renewed intimacy with yourself and recover the aliveness that is awakened from choosing to honour and embrace grief and joy in your daily life. Practices to take back into your daily life for integration and further deepening.

Come to the grief altar with us and join us as we recover our inherent resiliency, capacity for joy, and the freedom of being fully alive!

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Sliding Scale $300-$600

Limited partial scholarships available, apply here. Limited recieve/reparations tickets available for those in financial need, $240. Register now to receive.

Space is limited to 24 registrants. Registration closes Friday September 9th at midnight to give us time and space to prepare for the ritual.

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Friday Sept 12th, 5:00pm - 9:15 pm

Saturday Sept 13th, 9:15 am - 6:00 pm

Sunday Sept 14th, 9:15 am - 6:00 pm

After Ritual Integration Circle (virtual): Dates TBA, Sept 2025

Held at TaoSatva, El Prado, NM

Bring your own lunch for Saturday and Sunday. A refrigerator will be available. There may be a local, organic catering option to purchase

Register by using the Eventbrite payment system, or by sending payment via Venmo to @Mikyo-Black-6 with an email to subrosasanto@gmail.com.