Hello and welcome Nature Lovers

This is an invitation to re/imagine how we live with loss and love. Over four weeks we explore generative possibilities in nature's wisdom and metaphor for sorrow. Choose from one or all four sessions.

Grief and all it brings is like the rhythms of nature.
Friendships end, people we love die, we fall in and out of love, we achieve, fall flat and fail to achieve, we feel let down by people and ourselves, pets die, the planet suffers, war continues, wild places get plundered and developed... grief is older than we are, it lives where love lives and permeates the landscape of our lives.

Sometimes it's hard to locate language to express what is inside of us. This inquiry asks nature to help us reveal what we feel. We cultivate ways of being together to tend to the fertile ground of our losses.

Friday's // 10am - 12 noon // Mullum

18 Oct - Languages of Grief

25 Oct - Soil

8 Nov - Water

15 Nov - Trees

This series is for you if you wish to better understand the landscape of grief in life, deepen your bonds with others and the wider world, and strengthen your own muscle of grief supports. This is the authentic and accountable work of ripening as adults and Elders.

This is for you if your grief is long past, fairly recent or emerging. You may be a carer, living with a diagnosis, have ageing parents or are simply seeking life skills for what you know to be imminent in the future.

You maybe a clinician, therapist, social worker, life coach, celebrant, or doula seeking to create deeper connections, or are seeking more language framing and sentiment with clients and participants.

This series explores how nature connections, ritual, community, and compassion support a life-long apprenticeship with grief. We practice being in right relationship with loss, in this, we grow relationally with each other and with the place we live. You will strengthen your capacity for being with grief in yourself, and with others.

Whatever your age and stage, skills and knowledge - you are welcome.

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Course Objectives:

Explore nature's living systems and organisms to help identify and metabolise grief
Explore Tree, Soil and Water wisdom, metaphor, symbolism
Non verbal grief language
Explore practical tools and rituals for working with grief.
Cultivate a deeper understanding of one's own grief journey and the medicine it offers.

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Week 1: Introduction
- Overview of the course and its objectives.
- Introduction to the series
- Co existing with grief: Exploring grief and its role in our lives
- Exploring the cultural context of grief communication
Week 2: Soil
- Could soil be the place of wild alchemy? Could it transmute the grittiness of suffering into fertile ground?
- We explore soil as a body, the ground as a place to contain and support us in sorrow, making good use of our grief material just as soil composts organic matter. We'll invite awe and wonder for what lies underfoot, share in reflective discussions, poetry, mythology, mini beasts and creative exercises to re/imagine loss through the language and metaphor of soil.
Week 3: Water
- How might water reflect our journey through sorrow
- We explore water connections, emotional and relational being, water as refuge and ritual
- Our bodies as ecosystems; the symbiotic nature of human bodies and bodies of water
- And some cultural and spiritual interpretations, and significance.
Week 4: Trees
- We explore tree sentience and communication, resident tree life, and cultural and spiritual significance.
- We'll reflect on themes of vulnerability, strength, stability, and support as we delve into how trees inspire and offer a rootedness, solace and ballast in our processes of being with grief.

Facilitator: Emma Beattie [she/her] - Before & After Life
Emma has worked, studied and volunteered in caring and deathing since 2020. She brings an animistic, creative and poetic lens to caring, deathing and grieving. Her death and dying work and studies intersect a long line of lived experienced with personal loss. Her professional origins reside in strategic thinking, storytelling and social impact. She offers practical supports, education and facilitation for people, families, and groups via term courses, workshops, community meets and retreats. Emma is a member of Palliative Care NSW, NDAN (Natural Death Advocacy Network), NALAG (National Assoc. for Loss and Grief) and an advocate for Compassionate Communities Australia.

Others have said
"Just reaching out to let you know how amazing I think this course is already.“
"What a blessing. Thank you. I’ve received so much from our time together with this body of work."
"It's just so exquisitely held by you, and I'm really loving all of it.“
"I want to thank you ... for the generosity of heart and spirit I’ve been so moved to witness in you towards all the people in the group."
"It's just, so, nourishing."

I look forward to your company.

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We possess the profound capacity to metabolise sorrow into something medicinal for our soul, and the soul of the community. The skill of grieving well enables us to become current—to live in the present moment and be available to the electricity of life.

- Francis Weller

Nature Speaks: Love and loss through the wisdom of water, soil and trees

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