Speaker Series: Working with the Sixth Gate of Grief - The Harms We've Done

• Thursday, Feb 5th at 6:00 - 7:30 p.m PT

• Location: Online | Zoom

• Free | By Donation

Speaker Series Description:

This talk is part of the Speaker Series offered through the Grief Tending Mentorship 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: Working with the Sixth Gate of Grief -

The Harms We've Done

with Naila Francis, Cassandra Lam, and Holly Truhlar

The Sixth Gate of Grief asks us to be with one of the most tender landscapes of the human experience: the grief of the harms we’ve done. In an overculture shaped by punishment, supremacy, and shame, most of us weren’t taught to stay in relationship with our impact while holding ourselves with compassion and care. This session invites us into another way, one rooted in dignity, belonging, and accountability. Together, we’ll explore rupture, regret, and ancestral repair, trusting this gate to guide us back to the commons of the heart and our shared humanity.

In this gathering, we will:

• Explore the Sixth Gate of Grief: The Harms We’ve Done through a politicized grief tending lens

• Briefly explore power, rank, and privilege and how they shape our relationship to this gate

• Connect the Sixth Gate to our work with other gates, especially Gate 4 (What We Expected and Did Not Receive) and Gate 5 (Ancestral Grief)

• Explore regret, shame, and compassionate accountability as integral parts of this gate

• Explore how loss of village and systems of supremacy shape our capacity to be with harm

• Offer a soft and slow practice for deepening into the Sixth Gate of Grief

• Practice returning to dignity and belonging as we work with a harm we’ve caused

Presenters:

Naila Francis

Naila Francis (she/her) is a certified grief coach and death midwife, an interfaith minister and a writer/poet. Through her practice This Hallowed Wilderness, she offers one-on-one coaching, workshops, community grief tending and rituals with a focus on holistic, heart-centered care and support. Her work is often informed by her love of poetry, nature, and spiritual practice. Naila is also a co-founder of Salt Trails, a Philadelphia collective holding space for grief through community rituals, and a recipient of a Leeway Foundation Art + Change Grant. "Wonder Unsung," her debut poetry collection, an album released with guitarist-producer Paulito Muse, is available on streaming platforms. An ardent joy enthusiast, Naila believes in grieving well as a fundamental human skill that ultimately deepens our capacity for pleasure, connection and compassion.

Cassandra Lam

Cassandra Lam (she/her) is a neurodivergent Vietnamese-Chinese politicized somatic practitioner, liberatory rest educator, and community grief-tender based on the unceded lands of the Cherokee (Asheville, NC). In these times of collapse, her ancestors called on her to gather and guide communities to grieve, rest, and care for one another as a means of “survival pending revolution” (quote by Huey P. Newton). She founded Collective Rest in 2021 to help people feel safe enough to slow down, address soul burnout at the roots, and reawaken night consciousness (our soul-led ability to see, move, and create in the dark). Cassandra offers virtual and in-person grief rituals, group programs, 1:1 mentorship, and workshops for individuals and organizations. Rooted in Asian spiritual lineages and in service to collective liberation, Cassandra is passionate about creating spaces of refuge where people of the global majority can sing, cry, laugh, dream, remember, and accompany each other through The Long Dark in a good way.

Holly Truhlar

Holly Truhlar (they/she) is a community organizer, collapse psychologist, politicized grief tender, and soul activist. Their work revolves around neuroqueering collapse, cultivating a cosmology of belonging, and practicing the alchemy of rupture and repair. They hold a Doctorate in Law and a Master’s in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, though their deepest learnings come through relationship with the Wild, including the Dreaming Earth, Ancestors, Hekate, and donkeys. As a member of the Bohemian diaspora, they practice síla pravdy: the liberating force of truth. Known for weaving fierce clarity with grounded compassion, Holly cultivates spaces capable of holding the layered grief and relational complexity of living through the death of a global empire. They're devoted to co-tending the collective molt, the shedding of supremacy and domination toward the teneral emergence of intimacy and revelation.

Organizers:

Siena Tenisci, MA, LMHC (Senior Facilitator)

Siena Tenisci is a Senior Facilitator for the Grief Tending Mentorship 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 Tending Mentorship 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 Tending Mentorship 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