Grieving
Grieving is a skill that is often undeveloped and overlooked. In this compassionate program, we will learn together and journey through the dimensions of grieving and mourning to open the flow of burdened life-force and emerge full-heartedly.
Fully Grieving
“What if grief is a skill, in the same way that love is a skill, something that must be learned and cultivated and taught?
What if grief is the natural order of things, a way of loving life anyway?”
- Stephen Jenkinson
Life’s constant stream of endings, losses, changes naturally arouses our feelings. Often a wide range of feelings and experiences, including sorrow, regret, devastation, elation, anger, relief, resentment. We may suddenly become flooded with memories, with what if’s. Our psyche, our physiology, our perspective on life is altered. We grieve. And yet our powerful capacity for grieving is largely undeveloped, overlooked, undervalued and misunderstood in our culture.
Ongoing life experiences of attachment and separation, situations of helplessness and disappointment naturally arouse grief that we tend to suppress. We experience separations, losses and endings through deaths, relationship and friendship breakups, aging, career changes, geographical moves, children growing up and leaving home, discrimination, failed dreams, interruptions in life through illness, injury or trauma. Our personal grief is further fuelled by grieving consciously or unconsciously for our planet, our environment or the state of our world.
Whether transitions are planned or unpredicted, whether changes are chosen or beyond our control, these endings demand that we leave people, things, places, or a way of life behind.
Whether grieving, suppressing grief or stuck in grieving it is possible to learn the skill of grieving fully and responsively.
Through a range of experiential forms, including the creative use of ceremony, it is possible to release the grip that the impact of loss has on your heart, your mind, your body, your feelings, your life and create a map toward strengthening your core and renewing your wholeness in order to step forward and embrace the rest of your life.
We don’t often make time to grieve. Sometimes we just don’t give ourselves the permission and space — we keep a ‘brave face’ or ‘stay strong’ thinking that’s what’s best for us and those around us.
Other times the endings, losses, or changes are not one acute event or episode, but a gradual shift with no clear time to mourn. In such cases, we may not know how to actually process our grief.
When we don’t grieve fully and responsively, we carry the experience(s) with us and hold them in our bodies. This can have difficult implications for our physical, mental and emotional health and wellbeing in the short and long terms.
Join me…
Grieving
Endings, Losses & Change
February 28 - March 3, 2025
the Haven, Gabriola Island
"When my partner died suddenly, my world collapsed in an instant. I had no idea how to grieve or how to face the future. I just knew I was in so much pain..
One of the best things I did for myself in those early months, was returning to the Haven, having had, over the past twenty years, many positive learning and personal growth experiences in various courses.
I arrived at the Grieving workshop led by Linda Nicholls, feeling very lonely, anxious and struggling with intense pain – both emotional and physical.
I left three days later, still in pain (which I expected) however, I felt much more capable of being with my grief, however it manifested and most importantly, I was no longer alone...
What had been so beautifully created over the three days, was a community of supporting and caring humans, other participants who were also facing their own personal, unique grief journeys whether related to death, or other losses (health, relationships or careers) or even grief related to the state of the planet.
Being together with others in grief and experiencing the many offerings designed to help us in processing our losses, had me feeling, at the end, much more courageous, resourced, and capable of facing the journey I was on. Linda Nicholls is an exceptionally wise, skilled and compassionate leader.
She brings warmth, profound caring, humour, significant experience and a solid stance of having “both feet on the ground” despite having had her own profound, personal journey of grief. As an elder, she instills confidence and faith that, we too, can learn how to grieve fully and in that, find our way back to “living fully” too.
This program was a significant step for me on my healing journey. I am profoundly grateful that the Haven still exists, and to Linda and the interns, for creating such a sacred healing space." - Ali Bowden
