What if we learnt to grieve together?
In the west, we live in a largely grief-phobic culture. Society tells us who has permission to have grief, and what about. That grief is one-dimensional, linear, with an endpoint, and we must do it alone. That grieving is for others, and to be avoided, especially in a work context – it’s too loud, too messy, irrelevant; something to be cleaned up, fixed, hidden.
As practitioners, we see a deep connection between grief and creativity, grief and love, grief and compassion, grief and imagination. Our experience of grief could not be further from these stories – and it’s this incongruence that can often be one of the most painful parts of grieving in our culture.
Building on the work of elders, poets and practitioners such as Sophy Banks, Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, Francis Weller, Camille Sapara Barton, Joanna Macy, Vanessa Andreotti, adrienne maree brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Andrea Gibson and many others, we believe, that grieving together is an essential part of what it means to live and work in these times. Our grief, when acknowledged and tended to together, can be a truly creative and connecting force that allows us to explore the deeper parts of ourselves, access our soul-work, and reshape the ways we understand and move in the world.
Lucy and Christina invite you to ‘grow ivy into the cracks’ with us in this hopeful and grief-ful action inquiry. We’ll come together to explore the expansiveness of grief through the lens of six different creative practices – Hands, Time, Embodiment, Relationship, Poetics, and Ritual (see below for more detail). Together we’ll have space to be fallow, existential and messy, and imagine and feel into more creative, ritualised and communal ways of tending to grief, loss and endings.
We offer a space for slowing down enough to feel, for dancing between learning, unlearning, reflection and creative practice, and for opening up enough to imagine alternatives. Our hope is for you to leave with a sense of what’s needed and what’s possible, and to bring fresh ways of thinking, being and doing into the way that you live and work.
The details
After a powerful first cohort in 2024, we are excited to be offering this action inquiry as a fully in-person experience, with 6 sessions over 13 weeks. Each session will focus on a different creative practice, helping us unravel a range of ways into this work. We’ll explore the expansiveness of grief, what it means to grieve as a practice, the potential of grief as a portal for imagining and world building, and be invited to play with ideas in creative, experimental and thought/feel-provoking ways.
Sessions will be held from 11am-3pm across a number of indoor/outdoor venues in London, on the following dates:
Thursday 20th March 2025
Thursday 3rd April 2025
Thursday 17th April 2025
Thursday 1st May 2025
Thursday 15th May 2025
Thursday 5th June 2025
Exact locations to be confirmed closer to the time, but accessibility and ease of travel will be high on our criteria! We will be asking about needs and preferences along with your expression of interest. Click the button below to express interest in joining us, and we’ll be in touch!
“Thank you Lucy and Christina for the action inquiry into grief. I loved the space you held, so safe and so tender, the richness of offerings, the ways in to exploring such a topic, and so much creativity and wisdom. I highly recommend doing the next one – you will only leave richer in your soul and heart.”
“I loved being part of Christina and Lucy’s griefy group! They left a lot of space for us to explore where in life we held grief and gave us useful tools to support ourselves and each other in this journey. Whether online or in-person, each session was like a warm bath. I would recommend anybody to become part of this community of deep care and listening.”
Is this action inquiry for you?
You might:
Have lived experience of grief of any kind and be longing for a space to explore this creatively and collectively
Be supporting others with grief, loss or endings, or bringing people together around grief, either personally or professionally
See the potential for grief of all kinds to be a guide and source of deep wisdom and learning, in different contexts
Be itching to disrupt the way our culture currently faces grief and loss
Sense that grief could be a ‘way in’ for you or your work in the world
Be drawn to cyclicality (cycles of life and death) as a response / resistance to living and working in systems of linearity, extraction and growth
In this journey, we will:
Engage with grief kaleidoscopically through different creative practices
Have space and permission to be with and welcome in grief, and to listen to what our grief wants to say
Explore how living and working in a grief/death-phobic culture has affected the way we move and feel in the world
Have space to imagine and practise more creative, ritualised and communal ways of tending to grief, loss and endings
Hear, share stories, and be inspired by others doing 'quietly rebellious' things in this space
Explore what grieving as a practice means for our selves, lives and work, and think about how we can nurture the 'sore bits' where new ways of being hit up against the status quo
If you’re curious but still unsure, please do pop us an expression of interest anyway, and we’d be very happy to have a chat.
The journey flow
Our approach to action inquiry is not about crystallising answers, but rather to help us hold questions as guides for living, moving and feeling in the world. Each week will be guided by a question or questions, and centred around a different creative practice. The invitation is to live into these questions and practices with us, and to explore what arises as a response to the various activities, images, frameworks and provocations we offer throughout.
Week 1– Thursday 20th March, 11am-3pm
Holding question:
How might we notice where grief is showing up in our lives and work?
Creative practice:
HANDS: We’ll be making, drawing, crafting, using our hands to make our grief visual.
Week 2 – Thursday 3rd April, 11am-3pm
Holding question:
How might we slow down enough to feel? What can the world around us teach us about grief?
Creative practice:
TIME: We’ll be recalibrating time, dropping into cyclicality, and seeking guidance from the more-than-human world.
Week 3 – Thursday 17th April, 11am-3pm
Holding question:
What is unacknowledged and individualised grief doing to our bodies, each other, the world?
Creative practice:
EMBODIMENT: We’ll be tuning into embodied knowing, and accessing the wisdom of movement, music and song.
Week 4 – Thursday 1st May, 11am-3pm
Holding question:
What does our grief want to say?
Creative practice:
RELATIONSHIP: We’ll be exploring our relationship with grief through the eyes of our inner child, our hidden parts, and characterisation work.
Week 5 – Thursday 15th May, 11am-3pm
Holding question:
What if we fell apart?
Creative practice:
POETICS: We’ll be using storytelling, imagery and metaphor to step into the excellent dark together, and dance with the poetics of grief.
Week 6 – Thursday 5th June, 11am-3pm
Holding question:
What does our grief need?
Creative practice:
RITUAL: We’ll explore ceremony and ritual as ways of being with and alchemising our grief communally.
Pricing
This journey is priced between £275-£850 per person joining, with the following suggested pricing structure::
£275 – low income / reduced price
£450 – medium income / standard price
£600 – high income / abundance price
£850 – place paid for by organisation or other institution
We ask you to self-select a payment that honours your capacity and doesn’t leave you feeling resentful. Higher payments will go towards providing a bursary place/places. We don’t want cost to be a barrier, so please get in touch if you’re unable to pay the reduced price or any amount – let’s chat.
This action inquiry will be capped at 12 places to ensure that there is enough intimacy and spaciousness for it to be meaningful.