The Lost Art of Grief Tending

Remembering How To Tend Our Grief

There's a moment in every grief tending circle when time seems to slow down, when the walls between us soften, and when our collective breath creates a sanctuary for what needs to be felt. In these moments, I'm reminded that grief tending isn't something we need to learn – it's something we're remembering, deep in our bones.

To tend to grief is to approach it with the same gentle patience we might offer a wild garden or a small child. It's to kneel beside our sorrows with curiosity and compassion, to create spaces where our tears can flow as freely as laughter, where our pain can be witnessed without anyone rushing to fix it.

In the Guatemalan Tz'utujil language, grief and praise share the same word – a linguistic reminder that our capacity to feel sorrow mirrors our capacity to feel joy. When we truly understand this, grief becomes not something to push away or overcome, but rather a testament to how deeply we can love, how fully we dare to live.

Think of grief like water: when allowed to flow, it creates channels of renewal, carving riverbeds of understanding in our hearts. But when dammed up, it stagnates, losing its life-giving potential. Our culture has built many such dams – expectations to 'move on', pressure to 'stay strong', the subtle and constant message that our grief is too much, too messy, too inconvenient.

As the poet Mark Nepo writes: 'Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief.'

This is the essence of grief tending – not to solve or fix or overcome, but to honour this duet, to let both beauty and sadness sing their parts. To remember that we were never meant to carry our grief alone, that our ancestors knew how to hold both the darkness and the light, and that this wisdom lives on in our bones.

When we tend to grief this way, something shifts. The heart softens. The world feels more sacred. We discover we can hold it all – the love and the loss, the grief and the gratitude, the endings and the beginnings. We remember what it means to be fully human, fully alive, fully here.

Grief tending is an invitation into alchemy. Like the dark, rich soil of a forest floor where fallen leaves transform into new life, grief has its own transformative quality. When we create containers sacred enough to hold our pain, strong enough to witness our rage, and soft enough to cradle our tenderness, something mysterious begins to happen.

We don't need to understand this mystery or name it. We simply need to trust it, as our ancestors did, as indigenous cultures still do. They knew that grief tended in community becomes compost for new life, that our tears can water the seeds of unexpected renewal.

When we gather to tend grief, we're practising a medicine our world has nearly forgotten. It's the medicine of witnessed tears, of hands held in silence, of hearts brave enough to break open together.

In a world that often feels too fast, too loud for our tender hearts, grief tending is a quiet revolution. It's a coming home to what we've always known: that our grief and our love are two wings of the same bird, that our tears can be prayers, that our breaking hearts can be doorways to belonging.

Our way of being with grief

  • Ritual

    “Ritual restores our connection to life’s mystery, to which we all belong”

    We believe that even the simplest of rituals can be a gateway to connect with and release our grief. With guidance and support, we can welcome the mystery into our grief tending, finding a place of surrender and intimacy.

  • Connection

    “The truth is that we were never meant to do this alone.”

    We come together in community to welcome grief, honour loss, and reconnect to our human yearning for intimacy and belonging. By gathering together to share our grief we restore connection to each other, ourselves and the earth.

  • Embodiment

    “Healing happens when we welcome our bodies back into the story.”

    We adopt a somatic approach to grief tending, becoming aware of our nervous system, understanding the ways we unconsciously protect ourselves and coming home to our bodies so that we can integrate grief and reclaim our aliveness.

  • Rest

    “Slow down and be excessively gentle with yourself”

    We recognise the need for a safe place to land, one where you can let go of the breathless pace of productivity, growth and progress. We offer practices to invite nourishment, integration and ease back into your life.

The wounds we carry are the medicine we bring

Resources

Books, podcasts and films that I would recommend to support you in grief

Books

The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller

The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by Martin Prechtel

Tending Grief by Camille Sapara Barton

Ritual: Power, Healing and Community by Malidoma Patrice Somé

Belonging - Toko Pa Turner

Notes on grief: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul by Stephen Jenkinson

Videos & Film

Griefwalker - Stephen Jenkinson (film)

How do you help a grieving friend? (youtube)

We don't "move on" from grief. We move forward with it - Nora McInerny (Ted Talk)

Podcasts & Events

Griefcast hosted by Cariad Lloyd

Human hosted by Jess Mills

The Ted Interview podcast with Elizabeth Gilbert

Good grief festival

You can also hear Nici speaking on various podcasts including: Rooted Healing, Human, I’m Fine Thanks, Joan & Water Your Soul