holy mama grief ritual: tear medicine

within all lineages our deep time ancestors had root practices, social healing technologies, that would tether them to one another, the other than human and more than human. these practices wove our ancestors in and through the inevitable and necessary encounters embedded in and belonging to our human experience -- birth and death, rupture and repair, rites of passage, illness and healing, celebration, grief and gratitude. these distinct threads, worked with and held sacred, were a form of relational hygiene that moved the individual and communal body from dysregulation to co-regulation. 

today, indigenous, traditional and elder cultures continue to engage these communal practices through ceremony, ritual and living in reciprocal relationship to people and place. In the west our connection to ancestors and their practices have been stretched thin or severed due to the long, difficult and often violent path that brought them to the lands we are all held by today. without the protection these ancient technologies provide, we fall prey to the mass branding of individualism, and feel defective when "going it alone" leaves us empty rather than entangled. severed from our ancestral lineages, our capacity for deep connection and wide responsibility has been impacted, atrophied, and numbed. 

elder cultures have been sensing our young culture's disorientation, pain and the destructive ways of being and doing we embody in order to allay our sense of separateness. many wise cultures have sent teachers with other forms of knowledge and medicine, potent but often unintelligible to us. however, malidoma somé and sobonfu somé, from the dagara tribe in burkina faso, africa, were able to translate their village’s wisdom into a form that our culture could understand – a grief ritual. francis weller, among several other teachers, shared this ritual far and wide, inviting groups of individuals to practice becoming a “sudden village”, holding grief communally. through this lineage of teachers, a form of vesseling is created where we touch into our common human experiences, interrupt the privatization of pain and sorrow, and return it to the commons. while holding one another in ancient and emergent healing ways, through writing, song, movement, poetry, sharing circles and ritual, we tend our grief and open ourselves more fully to the movement of life – a dance all mothers know. bone know. 

this grief ritual is part of a larger body of work, holy mama work, that is dreaming and experimenting with mothers working collectively to challenge western culture and begin the seeding, stitching, and mending that gestures towards a living culture. maybe. this ritual aspires to break our hearts wide open, stretch our connective tissue to include all life and allow our tears to become a potent source of medicine.

details:

date - friday january 10th 2025 6 - 9pm and saturday january 11th 2025 9 - 6pm

location - skylake lodge, rosendale, new york

fee - $250 (does not include food or lodging)

next steps - if you are an interested mama or have questions please reach out to jerilyn jerilynbrownstein@gmail.com