Community Grief Ritual

In these times of immense collective grief, coming together to feel is a radical act. Join us in these ancient ways of ritual and ceremony, as we walk each other home. As we stretch our capacity to feel the sorrow, we also stretch the capacity to take in joy. This is a day-long workshop, where we will be using multiple trauma-informed techniques to allow grief to rise and overflow, witness each other, and finish with a ritual inspired by the Dagara people in West Africa.

This grief ritual intends to serve as a safe space specifically for women and those assigned female at birth who seek a container for their grieving. To maintain the integrity of the space, cisgender men are respectfully asked not to participate in this ritual. This is a nonbinary and trans inclusive space.

This Daylong Event Includes:

• Personal sharing and witnessing in large and small circles

• Complete welcoming of your pain, rage, sorrows and anger

• Creation of a community grief shrine + support altars

• 30-40 minute break for lunch

• Dagara-inspired ritual that includes drumming, dancing, grieving, and joyful celebration

• Soft integration circle + with optional on-going support beyond the closing of the container

Your Facilitators

Dani Stormes has facilitated ceremonies and supported women through birth and pregnancy loss for 13 years. Her work as a grief tender is informed by her own personal journey with death, pregnancy loss and ceremonies sat with elders like Laurence Cole, who carries the roots of the Dagara-inspired ritual that gives life to this offering. While Dani carries wisdom from numerous teachers, she feels that the knowing of grief finds home in her bones beyond this lifetime. She delights in life's thresholds; the places where our capacities to be with all of life expand and the vast spectrums of joy and pain can be felt.

Willow Sat Narayan  shows up with reverence for life and the unseen threads that connect us. A Mother, Death and Soul Doula, Grief Tender, Licensed Psilocybin Facilitator, and Healing Artist, Willow companions those crossing thresholds—shaped by journeys with the elements as transformative ancestors, healers, and guides. Through sound, movement, and ritual, they honor grief as a spiral of creative expression and ancient prayer—a precious portal to ancestral healing and soul liberation. Rooted in consent, brave space, and reverence for the living web of relations, Willow tends spaces where presence listens, boundaries breathe, and all unfolds in its own authentic time, witnessed in its dignified becoming. Learn more at willowsatnarayan.com

Reciprocity:

$55-111 sliding scale Work trade and scholarship options available

Space is limited. To inquire about work trade or scholarships, please contact Willow Sat Narayan at starryrootz11@gmail.com or Dani Stormes at danielle.stormes@gmail.com

About the Lineage

The core of this Dagara-inspired grief ritual was introduced to the Western world by Sobonfu and Malidoma Patrice Somé, Dagara elders from Burkina Faso, West Africa. Their life's work was deeply rooted in sharing the ancestral wisdom of the Dagara people, a people who understand deeply how to ritualize emotion and connect to the animate world. Their teachings aimed to alleviate many of the ills caused by modernity within and beyond the Western world. It is with the upmost respect and humility that we are sharing their gifts within this container.

If you wish to give back in some way to the Dagara people, please consider financially supporting the sonder project which continues to carry another of Sobonfu's life works to bring clear accessible water to the Dagara and Burkina Faso people. We also intend to make a donation to this organization with a percentage of the proceeds.

In the resonant words of ahlay blakely: "As a woman of European descent, I hold the complexity of carrying a lineage of African descent. This is something I continuously grapple with in humility and respect. I oscillate with the question of whether to continue forward in this lineage at all, knowing the deep wounds of appropriation, enslavement, and extraction tied to bodies of African descent on Turtle Island by people who look like me. And yet, I return again and again to the reason Malidoma and Sobonfu were sent West by their Elders: to help mitigate colonization and neo-colonization. Having lived through French colonization themselves, the Elders asked: how could such a people enact this violence? Their answer: a people with frozen hearts, grief illiterate, severed from ancestors. This is why I continue to grapple with carrying this lineage: in service to decolonization, in service to breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma both caused and endured by my ancestors, and in service to reconnection with the ancestors. As Martin Prechtel has said, all war is unmetabolized grief. My intention is to hold this work with as much integrity as possible, and I remain open to feedback and conversation about the complexities that accompany carrying this lineage. I am committed to ongoing learning."