Roots & Remembrance: A Day Retreat Honoring Our Grief

With the change of the season comes a call to slow down, turn inward and embrace the long dark nights. Join together with a small group of individuals gathering to honor our grief during this season, especially as the holidays approach.

Our skilled facilitators will guide you through gentle restorative yoga, guided art journaling, small and large group sharing, songs, poems, and a nature focused reflective activity. These tools will support you to move into the holiday and winter season with a greater sense of resourcing, belonging, and reverence for the grief and love you hold.

All belief systems are welcome. Open to adults 18+.

4 Early Bird Pricing Tickets Available!

This event will be held primarily indoors at the Meadowdale Community Clubhouse, with a short outdoor activity weather permitting. All materials are provided for yoga and art journaling. Please dress comfortably for yoga, and bring anything that keeps you comfortable such as an extra pillow for floor sitting and layers if you get cold. Please bring a journal, a water bottle, your own lunch, and a snack to share if desired.

Grief Background and Inspiration:

We carry grief with us every day: grief over lost loved ones or pets, major life transitions, diagnosis, parts of ourselves that hold shame or guilt, world events, climate changes, and cultural loss to name a few forms. As humans, we were born to feel and process our feelings in community, with support of the village at our back for these major life sorrows. In our modern society, we may feel an expectation to grieve alone or suppress our grief. This can lead to anxiety, depression, illness, and isolation. Doing this work together allows us to connect our hearts and be witnessed in our deepest depths. It allows us to move this energy and make space for joy, playfulness, and gratitude.

This community space is inspired by the grief rituals shared by Sobonfu and Malidoma Some, who brought, taught and shared their ways of honoring and living with grief from Burkina Fasso. The framework of the 5 gates of grief was outlined by Frances Weller (Book the Wild Edge of Sorrow) after his time with the Some's. Other inspirations and teachers include Martin Prechtel, Sacred Groves (Thérèse Charvet and Tere Carranza), Laurence Cole, Mary Hart, Northwest Grief Tending (Siena Tenisci), Ahlay Blakely, Peter Jabin, Christina Manzoni, Holly Truhlar, Heart Art Healing (Cynthia Gahan).

Energy Exchange:

Financial energy exchange allows us to offer this important healing space that requires our time, supplies, rental fees, and overhead to facilitate. Please self-select a ticket price that matches your current financial means:

$145 - Supported Ticket: 3 available at this level - for participants experiencing financial hardship. (Please contact us if this level is difficult for you, we may receive some additional scholarship funds)

$195 - Earlybird Sustaining Ticket: The suggested contribution. We have 4 Early Bird tickets available at $195, then the price moves up to $235. Buy your ticket early!!

$235 - Sustaining Ticket: The suggested contribution after Early Bird has ended.

$275 - Overflowing Ticket: This is the suggested ticket if you have a little extra to give. This helps us cover overhead and scholarship tickets.

About the Facilitators:

Trisha Wilkerson, Bereavement group facilitator, Holistic Health Coach and Trauma-Informed Restorative Yoga Teacher , is dedicated to guiding individuals through the landscape of loss. She offers a compassionate, body-centered approach to grief. Her work creates a safe, curious space to quiet the noise, settle the nervous system, and gently transform pain and shame into love, connection, and self-care.

Kim Varner, Grief Mentor, has been a student of community grief ritual for years, tending her own extensive personal, ancestral and communal grief. She completed a grief tending mentorship program and began facilitating grief circles in the Edmonds area in 2024, focused on introducing grief work to her community and weaving in various healing modalities and rituals. She is also a certified Art Journaling facilitator through Hearth Art Healing.