WWC2P presents - Grief & Hope: Tending our hearts in Turbulent Times

Facilitators: Tamara L. Hanna and Luna Ray

Event Description:

We are living in turbulent times, as a local community surviving and recovering from hurricane Helene and as a larger community in the wake of political polarization and change. We are also still navigating the long-reaching impact of the Covid epidemic, the distress of the global world, and the myriad of things impacting your own individual lives.

This event will be a soft place for you to land to tend to your nervous system, heart, and soul in the company and support of the community. We will nurture simple rituals together–ways of embodiment that help us cultivate presence and meaning. Then we will share an embodied listening musical experience that will invite you on a journey to explore the landscape of grief you may be carrying. The structure of the music will help us take a deep dive and also come up for air, learning to trust that very process again and again.

Wails: Songs for Grief is a new album designed with this community purpose by Ahlay Blakely, a song leader and grief ritual tender. The album follows an arc informed by Francis Weller’s 5 Gates of Grief from his work, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. We are also bringing forward the influence of other teachers of various intersectional cultural identities such as Sobonfu Somé, Malidoma Somé, MartÍn Prechtel, Resmaa Menakem, and Joanna Macy.

You will have permission and support to enter into the experience according to the ways that feel best to your body and mind. Nothing is required beyond honoring yourself and others. A few things that will be offered for you to stretch and try:

* Space to practice somatic exercises such as breathing, humming, rocking, meditative listening, movement, vocalizing sorrow and anger, and singing

* Opportunities for self-reflection, writing prompts, small group and large group sharing

* Resources that can be helpful for cultivating hope, meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and approaching conflict with resilience and self-care. (You will be invited to share ones that have helped you as well!)

Tamara L. Hanna, LCMHC has been a licensed clinical mental health counselor for 19 years, a grief specialist since 2011, and is also certified in Spiritually integrated Psychotherapy and trained in The Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music. She continues to be a student of peace-building strategies for activism and social justice. Her private practice, Love & Loss Counseling, is the space where she helps adults face and navigate all types of loss and change including estrangement, existential struggles, and confronting mortality, uncertainty, and not having control. Living in these deep waters has taught her to cultivate hope, joy, and rest in order to be sustained through life’s difficulty and as subversive acts of resisting the overculture.

SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE:

Please contact [email protected] to inquire about scholarship availability.

Host or Publisher Luna Ray