Remembering how to tend our grief

Coming home to being fully alive

There's a moment in every grief tending circle when time seems to slow down, when the walls between us soften, and when our collective breath creates a sanctuary for what needs to be felt. In these moments, I'm reminded that grief tending isn't something we need to learn – it's something we're remembering, deep in our bones.

To tend to grief is to approach it with the same gentle patience we might offer a wild garden or a small child. It's to kneel beside our sorrows with curiosity and compassion, to create spaces where our tears can flow as freely as laughter, where our pain can be witnessed without anyone rushing to fix it.

In the Guatemalan Tz'utujil language, grief and praise share the same word – a linguistic reminder that our capacity to feel sorrow mirrors our capacity to feel joy. When we truly understand this, grief becomes not something to push away or overcome, but rather a testament to how deeply we can love, how fully we dare to live.

Think of grief like water: when allowed to flow, it creates channels of renewal, carving riverbeds of understanding in our hearts. But when dammed up, it stagnates, losing its life-giving potential. Our culture has built many such dams – expectations to 'move on', pressure to 'stay strong', the subtle and constant message that our grief is too much, too messy, too inconvenient.

Grief tending is an invitation into alchemy. Like the dark, rich soil of a forest floor where fallen leaves transform into new life, grief has its own transformative quality. When we create containers sacred enough to hold our pain, strong enough to witness our rage, and soft enough to cradle our tenderness, something mysterious begins to happen.

We don't need to understand this mystery or name it. We simply need to trust it, as our ancestors did, as indigenous cultures still do. They knew that grief tended in community becomes compost for new life, that our tears can water the seeds of unexpected renewal.

When we gather to tend grief, we're practising a medicine our world has nearly forgotten. It's the medicine of witnessed tears, of hands held in silence, of hearts brave enough to break open together.

In a world that often feels too fast, too loud for our tender hearts, grief tending is a quiet revolution. It's a coming home to what we've always known: that our grief and our love are two wings of the same bird, that our tears can be prayers, that our breaking hearts can be doorways to belonging.

As the poet Mark Nepo writes: 'Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief.'

This is the essence of grief tending – not to solve or fix or overcome, but to honour this duet, to let both beauty and sadness sing their parts. To remember that we were never meant to carry our grief alone, that our ancestors knew how to hold both the darkness and the light, and that this wisdom lives on in our bones.

When we tend to grief this way, something shifts. The heart softens. The world feels more sacred. We discover we can hold it all – the love and the loss, the grief and the gratitude, the endings and the beginnings. We remember what it means to be fully human, fully alive, fully here.

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The Art of Grief Tending Training

A compassionate, inspiring and practical programme for those feeling called to hold space for grief in their work, family and community.

Begins May 2025

4 places left