Community Grief Tending

“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” -Oscar Wilde

First Sundays | 5-7pm

Campbell Mesa Trailhead • Forest Service Rd 790, Flagstaff, AZ 86004

These rituals are donation based. Donations are not required, but are deeply appreciated to support the sustainability of these offerings.

We are remade in times of grief.

Growing our capacity to grieve well is an essential skill for our personal and communal well-being because it keeps our hearts permeable to beauty, resilient in times of despair, and open to love despite life’s challenges and losses.

These monthly grief rituals are not limited to those experiencing acute loss.

In our culture, we are taught to grieve in solitude, in silence, only when we lose a loved one, or sometimes not at all.

When we deprive ourselves the process of moving, feeling and experiencing grief—when we push it away or lock it down—we are denying ourselves an essential human process.

Grief, left untended and unfelt, calcifies the heart. It leads to numbness and apathy. It limits our capacity to love.

Grief, when felt, moved, expressed and made holy, brings us home into our aliveness and vitality. It leads us to our joy. It guides us toward a soulful life. It reminds us how to love again.

There are many doorways to our grief:

  • Personal loss of that which we love.

  • The places within ourselves that have not known love.

  • The collective loss of species & wild places

  • Despair in times of war, injustice, and uncertainty

  • The things that we expected but did not receive.

  • Ancestral grief

We truly honor and make holy that which we love and lose by grieving them well.

We cherish the diverse hearts and perspectives of those who choose to gather together to bravely tend to their sorrows in community. We welcome all humans to join, regardless of age, gender, race, sexual orientation, or cultural background. This space is explicitly trans and gender affirming.

We also acknowledge the disproportional weight of collective and ancestral grief carried by the global majority who have been—and continue to be—deeply impacted and wounded by systems of oppression, colonization and racism. While this space is not led by black, brown or indigenous facilitators, this is an explicitly anti-racist space where we hold these nuances to the best of our abilities.

We ask participants to practice courage, compassion, and curiosity so that we can create an intentional space by being mindful of our edges, our privilege, and awareness around internalized bias that we all carry.

Guidelines for Participation

  • Please arrive early or on time. Participants who arrive late may not be admitted to preserve the integrity of the intentional container we are co-creating.

    These rituals take place outdoors. Please come prepared with:

    • something to sit on (blanket, cushion, camp chair, etc)

    • warm layers

    • water

    • Altar items to represent your grief.

    • Journal & pen

  • You can expect to walk for 5-10 minutes to a location off trail where we will have privacy.

    These rituals will vary in structure, theme, and expression month to month. However, you can expect the facilitators to hold a consistently high standard of support to participants.

    You will be invited to be with your grief to the degree you are capable of in the moment. This can look different person to person, month to month. Tears, crying, wailing, silence, movement, and singing are all welcome expressions that you might encounter.

    Our time will be structured, and you will be guided every step of the way by trained and experienced facilitators.

  • Come to this space with mindfulness, openness and curiosity.

    Set the intention to walk the edge of your comfort zone and show up bravely, knowing that holding your grief or the grief of others may feel challenging but incredibly rewarding.

    Trust yourself. Know that grief is not always predictable, and that there are no expectations for what it will look like for you.

    Set the intention to be of support to your community. This means showing up with compassion. This means holding mindfulness around privilege and internalized biased. This means slowing down and being curious when feeling triggered or defensive. This means communicating your needs and checking in with others.

Your Facilitators

Lance Huffman

Apprentice Grief tender • Certified Breathwork Teacher through David Elliott • Trained Immunity to Change Coach • Doctorate in Education Leadership with an emphasis on adult development, Harvard University

Lance is a skilled facilitator who believes that sacred masculinity and sacred femininity, both of which we all possess, regardless of the bodies we inhabit, are necessary for the human transformation this moment demands. He has been a leadership facilitator for young people, for educators, and for system-level leaders, and fundamentally, he helps people feel more deeply into their humanness and their more-than-humanness.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out by emailing jacqueline@wildwayfarer.com

Trained Grief Ritual Leader • Board Certified Holistic Sexologist • 5-Element Tibetan Tantra Practitioner • Earth-Based Ritual Artist & Ceremonialist • Wilderness Rites of Passage Guide

Jacqueline Thompson

Jacqueline is devoted to the path making holy the forbidden and forgotten places of our humanness in service of helping herself and others become a little bit more whole, real, and rewoven into the web of life. She does this through her work with the Erotic, the art of Ritual, and tending Grief in these times of collective unravelling and uncertainty. You can learn more about Jacqueline here.