Meeting at the River of Life and Loss

Metabolising loss requires grieving. And yet, how, when, even if to grief, remains elusive. Think of loosing loved ones, shattering dreams and certainties, challenges to your worldview, displacement, or finally descrying that nurturing, protection, and guidance in our childhood were sorely missing. All that needs grief imagination and skills. Most off us, alas, fall short of knowing how to metabolise complex and time consuming aftermath of (many!) losses.

Finitudes (plurals!) beset us with heartbreak. Bodily and emotional pain spells the preciousness of what is lost and the demand to live with what is missing. All too often, though, the pain is muted, relegated to invisibility, bound by family traditions and our modern cultures’ impoverished relationship to grief. In the words of the late Norman Wright, we are left with a ‘tangled ball of emotions’.

Grief needs communal engagement, intimate companionship, and the shared breath of lament. While it requires our respectful and ceremonial withnessing we revert over and over to our habitual management of emotions –the styles, learned in infancy and childhood– and contracted adaptations to what was/is ‘too-much-not-enough-and too painful’. The ever present ‘just-get-over-it’ enforces social isolation and loneliness were, as said before, connected lamentation and goodness would ease.

This Systems Constellation Werkstatt offers

• Heartfelt presence to all you never received, nor grieved
• Mutual support in feeling abysses of anger & sadness
• Deep dive into grief, held by tender companionship
• Sincerely receiving each other’s lament and despair
• Sharing world sorrow, too large to feel alone
• Invoking grief imagination and possibilities
• Mending frayed family and ancestral fabrics
• Co-creation of ceremonial presence
• Disarming of age-old loneliness
• The gift of fierce kindness

* The late Norman Wright, Ph.D , imagined grief as a “tangled ball of emotions.”