There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.”
― Francis Weller
This Life-affirming dancing weekend will explore the many ways we can meet and live more freely with loss and love.
Don’t expect this to be a miserable weekend. We will have a vibrant, often pleasurable time together, weaving our sorrows and our loves, so that we can claim much more aliveness.
Through dancing and simple enquiry we’ll grow and support our capacity to fully live the rich soulful tapestry of love that life offers.
It can be hard to be alive to anything in a body that is asleep, so we will gently wake our bodies, and dance our hearts awake too. Our imaginations will step up and our intuition will deepen.
There is often an unspoken cultural belief that we must be able to deal with our sorrows alone. That’s partly true, we do need to be able to be with ourselves as we meet any loss. And, we also need to be together as a collective, witnessing in our shared capacity for grieving. When we lose things; people, loves, hopes & dreams, physical capacity - we also need solace and connectedness in the company of others.
Both these things; meeting our own experiences and meeting with others to acknowledge that we all live with sorrows, can free up our powerful and innate lust for life.
There will be space and encouragement for both aspects during our time together this weekend.
“To honour our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfil a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.”
― Francis Weller
I have been training as a grief-tender with Frances Weller, (author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow), who names gateways of grief that we all live with, and that are often unacknowledged.
'All that we love, we will lose' is just one of the simple and true gateways of grief that he describes.
Also, we grieve The places that we didn't receive love; The sorrows of the world; Things we expected and didn’t get; Ancestral grief and more.
This work will inform our time together. We’ll dance and dance, of course and weave a rich weekend
Assistance: Frie Lavelli.
“William Blake said, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction, or anaesthesia.
Francis WellerLetting go is not a passive state of acceptance but a recognition of the brevity of all things. This realization invites us to love fully now, in this moment, when what we love is here.”
― Francis Weller
It is the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human.”
― Francis Weller
There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.”
― Francis Weller“Grief keeps the heart flexible, fluid, and open to others.”
― Francis Weller
