Using a short-term model, we spend 3 -9 months moving with and moving through the grief that comes with change, loss, and death using somatic (body based), narrative (story telling), and transpersonal (mystical, spiritual) approaches.

Moving with grief: Acknowledging who has died or what has changed or been lost, identifying the support needed to manage the responsibilities of daily living, establishing resourcing techniques and communities of support.

Moving through grief: Exploring and expressing the emotions and behaviors that accompany grief (mourning), creating rituals of remembrance, recognizing personal transformation, and making meaning of our experiences with grief.

Grief focused therapy is supportive for couples experiencing asymmetrical grief, overwhelming shared grief, or an approaching change, loss, or death. For teens and adult individuals, 1-1 grief work can be responsive support for times of active change or acute grief; as well as integration. The unique grief that comes with estrangement, the death of estranged family members, processing trauma, and reckoning or resisting systems of oppression can also be held by this work.

I’m influenced by Malidoma Patrice Somé, Prentiss Hemphill, Lama Rod Owens, Ebonyjanice Moore, and Yeye Luisah Teish. These influences remind me to center ritual, organic/earth time unfolding, ancestors, and liberation.

I draw from Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief, Breema Center’s self Breema exercises, and principles of surf therapy. I’m inspired by how Weller’s “gates” succinctly illuminate the thresholds where we meet grief. I love the way Breema facilitates self-understanding and a sense of aliveness by directly experiencing the breath and weight of the body. Being in or near the ocean directly connects me to the cycles of birth, change, and death. My awe of oceanic ecosystems guides me as I re-imagine the possibilities for collective healing through grieving.