Grief Constellations

Our culture often requires us to conceal grief and bear it privately. This workshop offers a different possibility: gathering in community to witness one another's grief and practice care through attention, creativity, and presence.

In this three-hour workshop, participants are invited to bring a grief they would like witnessed, honored, and held in community. Through guided reflection, writing, conversation, and collage-play, we will explore how creative practice can become a form of communal care.

Participants will begin by reflecting on a grief they carry and distilling their experience into a single sentence. These anonymous grief statements will then be exchanged throughout the group, and each participant will create a collage in response to another person's words. Through this process, grief becomes something shared and held briefly by another's attention, imagination, and care.

The workshop concludes with a communal witnessing circle in which participants share their artwork, reveal the grief that inspired it, and gift the collage to the person whose words they received. Each participant leaves with a handmade artifact created in response to their grief - a tangible reminder that loss can be witnessed, held, and transformed through connection.

No artistic experience is necessary. All materials will be provided.

Facilitated by Shandra Bauer + Meghan Allynn Johnson

Shandra Bauer is a grief tender, yoga teacher, and group facilitator whose work centers loss, transition, and the human longing for connection and belonging. She creates spaces where grief can be honored, witnessed, and held through community practice, ritual, and compassionate accompaniment.

Meghan Allynn Johnson is an artist, death doula, and founder of Madison Death Studio, an artist-led space exploring grief, mortality, and creative practice. She designs workshops and rituals that invite people into meaningful conversations about loss, care, and what it means to be human.