The group will form and work together over a 2-day workshop, the workshop will be a combination of group work, pair work, sharing and listening, bodywork, feeling work, breath work and movement, promoting self-contact, and self-expression. Each group member will have opportunity to work with their own process in an individual session as part of the group over the two days. This group will share and hear stories of love and loss, we know that listening and honouring these stories makes a difference. By moving our bodies, and by breathing into and out from, we create an intimacy with what we had been holding in our bodies, that allows for the connection between grief and aliveness to be felt, and the exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. The group will be formed when I have six people interested and will be held on a weekend in October/November.

Tessa has 20 years’ experience as a Chinese medicine practitioner with her focus of practice being around births and deaths, she is a somatic bodyworker and is coming to the end of her Radix training in feeling and purpose, body psychotherapy, personal growth work. She is experienced in holding groups that focus on the aliveness of the human being. Life is about movement and growth, all of life processes have a growth element to them. Growth is sometimes uncomfortable; growth requires a deeper capacity in our humanity. Tessa has been working as a death companion for the last few years and her grief workshops draw on the experiences that death, dying, grief and loss have gifted her in the aliveness that is within them if you dare to continue to love.

Each season gives an opening into working with an emotion in a much more direct and focused way. The seasons energetic mirroring the bodies energetic. In Autumn we can work with Grief and the Lungs with much more focus and intimacy.

In Autumn the energy is flowing inwards like in nature that we see all around, we are nature and it flows through us too, this flow inwards allows us to bring back experiences, resources, awareness into the cores of our being, we want to be touched by our lives, our experiences and our relationships, we want to derive value from and be alive to our moment by moment experience. Our breath and our lungs give us this opportunity in the inward flow of Autumn to regain relationship and intimacy with ourselves. If the in breath flows into our core, we are not afraid to bring life into us, if we breath in from all our body parts, the reality of our present experience can touch us deeply. Grief can interrupt our contact with ourselves, grief can make being in our bodies, being with our feelings an uncomfortable place to be.

Grief is not culturally accepted the length of time one is allowed to grief short; we do not have adequate time and support to stay with grief, be deeply internal with our losses, or things we hoped to experience but never received. The message is people are uncomfortable with grief, we need to carry, on, get on with it, pull ourselves together. What people miss is that grief is a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human. The lack of support, the isolation that occurs around grief, leads to grief being seen as a problem, something that needs to be medicated. The lack of support to go into us means our coming out into the world is not whole and  reflects the underlying fear and mistrust of being uncomfortable and being with this basic human experience. We must restore the healing ground of grief, give space to it, and find the courage to enter it. This workshop is part of this movement.

In Chinese medicine we view autumn as a time for letting go, we see the leaves falling from the trees, we give time to reflect on the year thus far and we are encouraged to let go of the parts that burden us, that we have held onto in our bodies that hold little value for our continued aliveness and presentness, but to do this first we need to be aware and conscious of what we want to let go of, what is burdening, us, what is not of value to us and in what way, to let go, we must first go in and grow awareness around what is of value that we carry and what is not that we hold on to. This is a process of awareness and self-connecting, creating understanding and meaning making, it is an embodied process of feeling, feeling into and the unconscious becoming conscious.

With the changes in the season an energetic shift happens in the body like it does externally it happens internally to, a change of the energy flowing in or out more in the body, giving us opportunity to get into our bodies more or out into relationship with the world more, depending on the season. The shifting between seasons brings a rich energetic ecotone. the seasonal change creates a different direction in movement and quality of focus, that gives opportunity for healing and rebalance, its movement creates an environment for awareness of material that has not been made fully aware of till now.

When we turn from late summer into Autumn, we go from an energetic outreach at the furthest aspect away from our core, the summer allows us to be expansive and energetically engaged in outside of ourselves, warm days, light evenings, holidays, seeing friends as Autumn comes the energy comes back in towards our bodies heading towards our core, the depth of ourselves, as it turns in towards self it can become blocked, the drawing in is a flow in not a contraction against, its natural nature is inward. Interruptions can happen in the flow from out to in, in autumn, people can get stuck outside themselves, looking outwards rather than focusing more inwardly, carrying on being busy, distracting or disassociating from the inner focus, work and alchemy that needs addressing. So many of us get stuck on the out of ourselves pattern, we may be successful in society, good job, money, material wealth, we may have stamina, we may engage with the world outwardly very well, and get little satisfaction, value, reflection or richness from our inner world and contact with ourselves. As we draw into autumn there may be a reluctance to go in, to enter our bodies, to be with what we find there. Autumn is an incredible chance to re-evaluate, rebalance, check in that your inner and outer world is both in alignment and taken care of. In autumn we have chance to work with the accumulated griefs of the year or years, of losses, or experiences never received, of personal grief and community grief.

Grief like any emotion in the body needs movement to feel it, breathing into the grief and being with what is there allows for the flow of life to enter your core and to flow out from your core. Grief and aliveness have an intimate relating. The sources of loss are multiple, and the complexity of addressing this tangled web of grief can at times feel overwhelming. We sense the place of loss from both personal and communal, intimate, and shared. The personal and planetary are inseparable, as is our healing.

We live in a grief phobic and death denying society, the work relegated to shadow work, the shadow work is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives. We send into the shadows the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves or to others. By bringing grief and death out of the shadow, we may be able to feel our desire for life and remember where we belong and what is sacred.

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£150 per person for the two days.

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With warmth Tessa