Finding ritual in grief work
How intentional practices create space for healing beyond words
I didn't grow up in a house where ritual was part of our narrative. My dad was a city IT man turned school maths teacher and although my mum was interested in nearly every different spiritual expression under the sun, our home was filled with books, our weekends with activities, and our minds with logic and reason.
When I first sat in a grief ritual, I don't think I would have even been aware what part of the experience constituted as the ritual, it was all as foreign as each other. Ritual is also quite a loaded word, holding the reverberations of religious doctrine or else shrouded in so much mystery there's a spiritual elitism that feels exclusionary from the outside. I suppose I was sitting somewhere in between the two, somewhat weary and somewhat left out.
To be honest with you, it was probably four years into holding The Grief Space work that I actually began to feel confident naming what I was doing as ritual space. Now though it's fundamental to how I describe (and teach) this work. For me, it is vital that grief tending is centred around the practice and offering of ritual.
This brings us to an important question, one I'm excited to explore with you: what do I even mean by ritual?
There are so many different ways to talk about ritual. For me, ritual weaves together several important threads:
The thread of intention—our purposeful focus on healing, honouring, or creating balance
The thread of connection that recognises our kinship with all living things and our relationship to that inner wellspring we might call sacred
The invitation to the transpersonal dimension, courting the unseen realms of spirit and soul that exist beyond our everyday awareness
The engagement in symbolic actions that serve as bridges between worlds, allowing our imagination to transform abstract concepts into tangible experience.
For our Art of Grief Tending training, I shared this definition, though I appreciate it is ever shifting and evolving:
"A ritual is the practice of engaging in intentional actions—either alone or in community—that serve as bridges connecting us with ourselves, with nature and with the unseen realms to create healing, balance, and deeper meaning."
In grief work specifically, ritual invites in the understanding that you as the facilitator are not the one who is doing the healing, instead you are the guide, the container, the supporting role that creates the potent environment for someone to become their own medicine. As the space holder, incorporating ritual into your offerings is a necessary and deeply humbling act of surrender. You do not know how this ritual will move in the room, what insights it will stir and what medicine it will bring. All you can do is set the loving container, provide a structure and trust.
As author and healer Sobonfu Somé writes:
"The purpose of ritual is to connect us to our own essence, to help us tune into the collective spirit, or to mend whatever is broken, whatever wires have been pulled out of one's life, so we can start anew. Ritual is to the soul what food is to the physical body."
It's worth explaining that a ritual can be as simple or as complex as you like. Some of the most profound rituals I've held involved a simple grounding meditation and invocation, a writing prompt, a timed container and then the opportunity to be witnessed. The most complex ritual I've held might have been 5-6 hours long and included an altar, drumming, song, keening, poetry, sharing and movement.
Isla Macleod, a guest teacher on our programme, talks about rituals as a profound way to meet our sacred wounds, court our shadows, and transform difficult life experiences into something generative. Ritual invites us to meet the fullness of our experience within a contained space.
Often, people feel hesitant to engage with their grief, afraid that if they touch it, they won't be able to recover. However, ritual provides a sense of holding and structure—an experience with a clear beginning, ending, closure, and integration. This is how grief tending becomes a practice of releasing and emptying, trusting that grief will return, but knowing we can meet it when it does.
As you continue your own beautiful journey with grief work, I warmly invite you to reflect on these questions in the coming weeks:
What is my relationship with ritual?
How might I bring a simple ritual into my daily life?
I'd love to hear how these reflections unfold for you.