Grounding in Grief: Interrupting Overwhelm with Embodiment and Ritual

Registration website


Part of IDHA's fall 2021 virtual training series CRISIS AS CATALYST

About this event

*ASL and live closed captioning provided*

Class Description

We are at a crossroads: as dominant systems seek to diminish the harms of a global pandemic, racial violence, and climate catastrophe, among many ongoing crises, the collective body-mind is stuck in that incongruence. To resist further disconnection from self and others, we must name and work with natural responses to immense and prolonged societal violence. Though Western frameworks seek to separate psychology from the realms of physiology and spirituality, this compartmentalization represses our most basic needs, leading to burn-out, overwhelm, and shame.

This class will explore how grief can serve as a teacher, an assertion of our collective humanity when allowed acknowledgement and tending. Facilitators Camille Barton and Marika Hendricks will challenge the pressure to neglect these parts of self, moving through experiential practices rooted in somatics and ritual that offer pathways to transmute grief and ground in deepened connection and choice. Participants will be guided through feeling what has been lost, and what we might build into the future, if we can sit inside the generative power of grief, mourning this moment and resourcing ourselves to create space for pleasure, joy and liberation.

Learning Objectives

• Critique how mainstream Western ideologies work to disconnect and disembody us from human responses to loss, harm, and violence
• Name the ways grief and shame are stored and manifested in the body
• Identify the outcomes of unprocessed emotional and physiological overwhelm
• Locate the histories of colonization and how grief and shame impacts communities differently across experiences of racialization
• Explore grief’s connection to creating room for mutual care, growth, and joy
• Learn to utilize somatic and ritual practices to process and integrate collective and intergenerational trauma

Faculty

Camille Barton is an artist and renegade researcher working on the intersections of embodiment and healing justice. Camille is the head of MA Ecologies of Transformation which explores how art making and embodiment can facilitate social change. Camille’s practice is rooted in Embodied Social Justice - their work explores how oppression, such as racism and ableism, is rooted in the body; and how we can re-pattern it using mindful attention and movement. Camille is currently completing grief research in collaboration with GEN, to create a toolkit of embodied grief practices. They also work to ensure that psychedelic therapies will be accessible to global majority communities (POC).

Marika Heinrichs (she/her) is a queer femme of German, British, and Irish ancestry who has been practicing as a somatic therapist and educator within social justice spaces for over a decade. She has trained in the lineages of generative somatics, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST), Focusing, and NeuroAffective Touch. Marika holds a commitment to pushing back against the appropriation of BIPOC cultural wisdom in mainstream somatics, as well as to cultivating spaces for people of European ancestry to connect with something in themselves older than whiteness, through embodied practice

What You Get

Registration includes the 3-hour class session, and access to IDHA’s School for Transformative Mental Health forum on Mighty Networks. This is our virtual learning community where you’ll have the opportunity to engage with other students and your faculty.

NOTE: IDHA is in the process of applying for CE credits for this class, included for those who register at the General or Supporter Rate (a $20 value). Learn more about CE credits at IDHA here.

Questions?

Email us at [email protected]