Speaker Series: Village-Style Grief Ritual - Including our Ancestors and Descendants

• Monday, Feb 23rd 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: Village-Style Grief Ritual - Including our Ancestors and Descendants

For those seeking to develop rich and lasting community ritual, we look towards expanding our capacity for relationship with past and future generations.  This means inviting both our wise ancestors and our exuberant, playful youth into ritual with us.  

TOPICS we will touch upon:

• Healing our ancestral lineages

• Including our children and honoring their innate orientation to ritual

• An animst orientation towards the wider ecology of beings all around us

Presenter: Nala Walla, MS

Ancestral Healing | Somatic Griefwork

Nala is a Somatic Griefwork and Ancestral Healing Practitioner with several decades of experience in ritual and ancestral healing.  She is on a mission to help us tap into belonging as a fundamental human birthright, coming home to our own bodies, to our own ancestors, and to this Holy Earth.  

Nala holds a Masters degree in Ecosomatics, and has birthed multiple innovative projects, including the Grief and Gratitude Community, and the Selkie Sessions, which integrate ancestral myth into land-based ceremony for all ages.  She is currently an "Elder in Training" for the Grief Tender Mentoring Program (GTMP.)

As founder of The Well:  An Oasis for Animist Ritual, Nala's work offers a multi-generational framework for mental health, and an embodied, prayerful approach towards recovering the earth-based traditions that are part everyone's heritage.  For more about her current offerings, and private sessions, visit BWellNow.org, WellWisdom.org, or @nalawalla on social media channels.

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