This workshop is for you if you are ready to tend to areas in your life that are tender, chronic, and even festering. 

Some ways we experience grief and loss are: 

Death of a loved one 

Loss of relationship 

Infertility 

Miscarriage 

Divorce 

Separation

Loss of business

Moving

Loss of job 

Empty nest

Health

Caregiving  

Ageing —mobility, agility, strength 

Injury 

Ancestral wounds 

Collective Pain (environmental, violence, war, child trafficking, abduction)

and the list goes on…  

In our time together, we will learn about the touch points of grief through the lens of the 5-element cycle and body mapping system. 

The elements give us a language for our energy body. We can begin to understand how unmet grief shows up as emotional expressions, behavioral patterns, physical symptoms as our way of being in response to difficult life experiences.

The elements give us a foundation to learn how grief can express itself as: 

FEAR ~ ANGER ~ WORRY ~ ANXIETY ~ IMPATIENCE ~ DEPRESSION ~ SADNESS ~ UNCERTAINTY & MORE

When we experience difficult losses or situations in our lives, all the layers of our body are influenced. We hold grief in the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and energetic layers of our being. This can bring our body into a disharmonious state of being.

When this happens, we may experience symptoms from our grief that are outwardly expressing or hidden from our conscious awareness. We get set in ways of self protection, isolation, fearfulness and rumination about our circumstance that render us immobile or rigid and immune deficient. This protection and withdrawal is perfectly normal and important, over the short term. When we don’t address long running grief, we risk getting “stuck” in what becomes limiting patterns of behavior. Sometimes we need to help the energy of the body to flow again.

As a spiritual director, Lauren offers an approach to grief tending which is a merging of contemplative care (sacred witnessing, allowing ourselves to just be with what is) and advanced somatic practices where we begin to interface with our emotions where they reside within the body. 

The elements within our environment are also expressed within us. The elemental cycle is also mirrored in our own lived experience as we flow through times of life, death, and rebirth. Deepening self awareness, to the level of our subtle anatomy, can empower us to change our energy from inside out, so we can glean wisdom from our grief and in the right timing choose our lived experience.

Working through the body to process challenging emotions, offers us a chance to return to a state of harmony. This is nervous system regulation, resiliency, purification and rejuvenation. Embodied Grief is an invitation to navigate the grief initiation and begin the healing journey, even moving from grief to purpose which I call sovereign grief.