Thurs, Mar 26th at 6:30 - 8:00 p.m PT
Location: Online | Zoom
Free | By Donation

Speaker Series Description:

This talk is part of the Speaker Series offered through the Grief Tender Mentoring Program — a six-month learning community focused on cultivating grounded, community-based grief ritual leadership. The program is guided by elders Thérèse Charvet and Laurence Cole and is now in its fifth year, with more than 150 alumni and 56 participants in the current cohort.

The Speaker Series offers a space for members of the mentorship program and the wider grief tending community to gather, learn, and strengthen our shared capacity to meet the grief of these times.

This series is designed for grief tenders with experience in Dagara-inspired grief ritual lineages and related teachings from Malidoma Somé, Sobonfu Somé, Laurence Cole, Thérèse Charvet, Francis Weller, and others. It is especially suited for those actively holding community grief spaces or deeply invested in supporting them.

Speaker Topic: Angeles Arrien Teachings For Grief Tending

Angeles Arrien’s work draws from cross-cultural wisdom traditions and centers on practices that strengthen community, restore wholeness, and help people move through experiences of loss. Her teachings—including the Four-Fold Way, the Four Universal Healing Salves (song, story, movement, and silence), and the principles of shared responsibility and reciprocity—offer simple, human ways to meet grief with courage, compassion, creativity, and presence. She emphasized that tending grief is communal work, and that ritual, embodied practice, and authentic connection are essential in transforming sorrow into deeper resilience and belonging.

In this talk, Laurence will share the teachings and insights he received over many years of working closely with his mentor, highlighting the practices that directly support grief tending and community grief ritual. Many of these teachings can be applied in simple, accessible ways to deepen communal holding, strengthen group coherence, and create ritual spaces where grief can be expressed, witnessed, and honored.

Presenter: Laurence Cole

Laurence Cole is a song elder, ritualist, and community facilitator based in Port Townsend, Washington. He has devoted his life to exploring how human beings can live in respectful, sacred, and equitable relationship with one another and the natural world through communal arts such as group singing, ritual, and shared beauty-making. Laurence the co-founder and guiding elder in the Grief Tender Mentoring Program and has led workshops and circles across the United States and Canada, teaching songs that are easy to learn and powerful in building connection and cohesion. His work blends song, poetry, movement, and storytelling with grief tending and community ritual, drawing on influences from teachers like Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, Angeles Arrien, Michael Meade, James Hillman, Francis Weller, Joanna Macy, and Martín Prechtel. He has been co-facilitating grief retreats and grief tending gatherings for over a decade, offering spaces for people to express, witness, and transform loss together.

Organizers:

Siena Tenisci, MA, LMHC (Senior Facilitator)

Siena Tenisci is a Senior Facilitator for the Grief Tender Mentoring Program and organizer of the Speaker Series. She is also a mother, therapist, and founder of Northwest Grief Tending, a practice dedicated to offering accessible grief rituals and supporting community-based healing.

Thérèse Charvet (Program Director & Guiding Elder)

Thérèse Charvet is the Program Director and a guiding elder for the Grief Tender Mentoring Program, and land steward of the forrest sanctuary Sacred Groves, where she has hosted grief rituals and retreats since 2002. She trained for many years with her mentor, the late Sobonfu Somé.

Laurence Cole (Lead Facilitator & Guiding Elder)

Laurence Cole is a lead facilitator and guiding elder for the Grief Tender Mentoring Program. A song elder and ritualist, he trained extensively with Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé and has supported grief rituals since the late 1990s. He joined the Sacred Groves grief retreat team in 2009 and continues to share ritual and group singing widely.

Grief Tending Mentoring Program Team

The program is supported by a core team of six members—Thérèse Charvet, Laurence Cole, Siena Tenisci, Alex Eisenburg, Jordan Lyon, and Sarah Jackson—along with 10+ program alumni serving as pod leaders and elders in training.

Questions? Please email Siena at nwgrieftending@gmail.com

Contact the host of Speaker Series: Angeles Arrien Teachings for Grief Tending

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