Community Grief Ritual
Tending to the Sorrows of the World
“The more I Grieve, the more I Love and I have never loved so much in my Life”
I have always been sensitive. As a child, I felt the world in my body — the moods of others, the sorrows in the room, the ache of things unspoken. I was the cryer of the family, the one who felt everything. This too included immense joy and the fullness of delight and wonder. The extreme living arc of up and down, light and dark. For most of my life I thought this made me strange. I felt different. Too porous. Too much. It wasn’t until I found the profound work of the Five Gates of Grief that I realised I had been walking these through these gates all along — I simply needed a ground, a map, a lineage to hold what I had always known.
Our psyches, our bodies are porous. We are entangled with the sorrows of the world because we are the world — our flesh is made of earth, our breath is shared with trees, our hearts beat in rhythm with the more‑than‑human. How could we not feel the grief of a planet in upheaval?
These turbulent times we are living have been described by many as the Long Dark — a prolonged season of descent, unraveling, and endings. Systems are wobbling, structures are crumbling, and the soul of the earth is calling us to the edges. We live in an ascension culture that worships progress, success and upward movement. Modern societies fear descent, endings, death and decay. But grief brings us down — to the ground, to our knees, into the fertile soil where soul life can emerge.
And yet, in this time of great unraveling, grief has been privatized. Technology promised connection, but loneliness is rising exponentially whilst mental health is declining rapidly. People tell me they feel they have no purpose, no belonging — especially young people, with suicide being the number cause of death for children in Australia. Neighborhoods are more or less non-existent. We have lost the communal vessels that once held sorrow. The obstacles to grief are everywhere: privatized pain, fear, flatline culture, self-consciousness and shame, and lack of communal spaces. We are being asked to carry, what was never meant to be carried alone.
I now acknowledge that grief is not a collapse, it is a descent. And descent is Holy Ground.
Grief breaks the heart open so we know what we care about. What we love. It awakens protest, compassion, tenderness, and fierce protection. It will be Grief that will be the keynote of the decades ahead — the medicine that keeps us human in a time of great unraveling. When we keep a deep register of grief, joy and wonder remain possible. Grief keeps the material warm. It keeps the heart soft. If we don’t, the heart hardens and congeals leaving our grief untouched and suppressed, and feelings of oppression rise and symptoms of depression appear.
And because grief is immense, we cannot do this work alone all the time. Our ancestors knew this — they gathered communally to tend sorrow, in ritual, to create a vessel large enough to hold what one person could not. We are remembering this now: grief belongs to the people and the larger responsibility that is being asked of us is to show up for each-other in this big, wonderous, onerous, Dreaming earth that we share.
The Grief spaces and rituals I offer arise from this lineage — shaped by Francis Weller’s teachings and trainings, by my own apprenticeship with sorrow, and by the deep feminine current that moves through all my work. The more I grieve, the more I love and I have never loved so much in my life.
The Five Gates of Grief
This foundational workshop explores the Five Gates of Grief - the pathways through which sorrow enters our lives and shapes us.
Gate 1: Everything we love, we will lose.
Gate 2: The places within us that have not known love.
Gate 3: The sorrows of the world.
Gate 4: What we expected and did not receive.
Gate 5: Ancestral grief.
Each gate carries both mystery and medicine — vulnerability, compassion, sacred entanglement, belonging, and wisdom. Together we walk these gates slowly, listening for how grief shows up in the body, in memory, in dreams, in the unloved places and in our relationship with the wider world.
This work helps us come into right relationship with grief — neither drowning in it nor pushing it away. It restores grief to the commons of the soul, returning us to communal practices that soften the heart and deepen our belonging.
Singing Over the Bones
Singing Over the Bones is a deeper immersion into each of the Five Gates — a place where sorrow, love and gratitude braid themselves into prayer. Here we enter the fertile ground of grief, where the bones of what we’ve carried begin to speak and where deep ritual becomes a way of tending what is ancient within us.
In this space, grief is not an affliction but a generative force — a softening agent for the hardened places, a teacher of devotion, a companion that keeps us awake to the world.
We cultivate practices that steady us: silence, solitude, self‑compassion, ritual, and the threads of connection that bind us to the wider world. These threads — subtle, living, and enduring — remind us that we are never meant to walk grief alone. They tether us to community, to land, to ancestry and to the great web of belonging that holds us when sorrow feels too vast.
Singing Over the Bones is for those who feel called to walk with grief as a companion — to honour its teachings, to let it deepen their capacity for love and to participate in the collective tending of sorrow that our times require.
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