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What our culture has forgotten about grief, thresholds, and becoming fully human The moment you hear the news that someone you love has died, or you receive a life-changing diagnosis, everything changes. Your whole world flips upside down. Priorities shift. The future you imagined disappears, and suddenly everything looks and feels different. Fear, shock, confusion, and grief often arrive all at once. It can be an incredibly overwhelming time, especially when there is so litt

How my own experience of grief shaped the way I accompany others through theirs Photo credit: Hazel Volk Before I began accompanying others through grief, I spent years exploring what it means to support people through difficult times. My master’s research focused on practitioner process in wilderness therapy. Together with my colleagues, I explored the question: what does it mean to thrive in our work and lives? The title of my thesis emerged from that inquiry: Practicing Wh

How grief reconnects us to ourselves, each other, and the living world. Photo credit: Johannes Plenio from Pexels I remember during my master’s program, we went on a two-week spiral of Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects. We moved, layer by layer, together into the depths of our despair. There was something almost disorienting about how far we were willing to go. And then something opened. It felt like each of us, in our own way, cracked our hearts wide enough to let ourselves

The power of shared presence and ritual in reconnecting with ourselves, each other, and the earth. Grief is powerful medicine. But much of our culture tells us to avoid it, get over it, or deal with it alone. When that happens, grief often gets stuck because it has nowhere to go. Francis Weller often says that grief needs two things: containment and release. It needs somewhere to be held, and it desperately needs to be felt. When we come together in shared presence — in ritua

How slowing down, noticing the body, and connecting with the land brings us home. Remembering often begins subtly and simply. It might be a slow walk outside, noticing how your feet meet the ground. Or sitting quietly on the land, feeling your senses awaken. You might notice a sigh or a yawn as your breath deepens naturally. Or a softening of the tension in your shoulders. Maybe a tear comes, or your face opens into a smile. Perhaps it’s a shift in your chest that lets you fe

Understanding the quiet ache of disconnection and why it isn’t a flaw. Many people I work with come to me feeling disconnected — from their bodies, their emotions, other people, and the land beneath their feet. They sense that something is off. There’s a quiet ache, but they can’t quite name it. They feel lonely even when surrounded by the people they love. They move through their days with a kind of numbness. I don’t see this as something broken that needs fixing. I see it a

An invitation into relational healing. Healing the wound of separation does not begin with ideas. It begins with the body, place, and grief. Through somatic practice, we learn to listen again — to sensation, to rhythm, to the inherent wisdom of our bodies. Through relationship with land, we remember that we are not separate from the living world, but shaped by it. Through griefwork, we make space for what has been lost and allow it to reorder our priorities. This is the groun

On grief, responsibility, and remembering why we are here. The ache many of us carry is not a personal failure or something to fix. It is the pain of separation — a sense of being apart from land, body, community, or meaning. Yet this wound is not a fixed reality, but a forgetting: a perception shaped by culture, history, and the ways we have been taught to live as if disconnected from the living world. This space is for those who feel that ache and are willing to listen to i