Tending the River - Community Grief Ritual

In intact cultures with active grief practices, grieving is a communal activity. A community grief ritual is an opportunity to gather and open together to that which is too much to feel on your own. To experience the love that you are and release the unavoidable grief involved in being human.

We live in a grief-heavy culture, land, and world. We have lost much of the traditional wisdom about how to move our sorrow, express our losses, mourn what we loved, or ritually praise the life giving places and relationships that connect us into deeper peace and innate belonging. 

There is no other way but through. Grief is the price we pay for loving. The opportunity to surrender to life, allow grief to move through our bodies, and alchemize our losses in a community and ritual container is a healing and kind act towards ourselves and the world we live in .

These rituals create a portal for the members of the community to enter a liminal space to access their open hearts, connect to the presence of helping & healing ancestors, and to release the burden of aloneness: These rituals are engaged regularly at times of:

• loss
• death
• transition
• unmet needs
• unfulfilled dreams
• illness
• change
• failure
• betrayal
• ancestral traumas
• environmental change
• social injustice
• rupture and violence in our personal relationships, communities, and world.

This community grief ritual revolves around a beautiful co-created grief altar, live drumming, and community singing. Inspired by the grief rituals from the Dagara peoples of Burkino Faso brought to the U.S. by Sobonfu Some and infused with the wisdom of Francis Weller and the esoteric shamanic spiritual traditions of the East.

Our 3 day event includes embodied practices that allow each member of the community to open to their personal relationship with their grief and loving presence.

These include:

• Co-create a safe and sacred space in community to honor individual and collective grief and joy
• Learn about different types of grief and ways to identify how it may be showing up in your life.
• Expand perspectives on how grief is held in wisdom traditions and indigenous ways.
• Connect with and express your grief and joy through writing, movement and embodiment, song, and time in nature.
• Experience the healing power of honoring grief by being witnessed and witnessing others grieving without trying to change, fix or solve the grief process.
• Open your heart and increase vitality through the liberating energy of forgiveness and embodiment
• Integration practices such as breath work, meditation, cultivating joy, and being in nature
• Communal connection
• Opening the pathways for deep connection with the well ancestors and elements
• Cultivate a renewed intimacy with yourself and recover the aliveness that is awakened from choosing to honour and embrace grief and joy in your daily life. Practices to take back into your daily life for integration and further deepening.

Come to the grief altar with us and join us as we recover our inherent resiliency, capacity for joy, and the freedom of being fully alive!

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We hold tenderly in our hearts that each being has their own relationship with prosperity and the flow of money.

Honoring this diversity, we offer a sliding scale, as well as a benefaction/reparation program specifically for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+, and individuals with acute financial need.

The scale is intended to be a map, inviting each of us to take inventory of our financial resources and look deeper at our levels of privilege. It is a way to challenge the classist and capitalist society we live in and work towards economic justice on a local level. Please look within your heart and pay what is in alignment with your level of abundance.

10% of the proceeds for this event will be donated to the Sonder Project and Tewa Women's United. The Sonder Project is empowering the Dagara community with sustainable drinking water and support. The wells are being built in Malidoma & Sobonfu Some's family compound and community. This project was built as a way to give back to the Dagara people for their profound grief wisdom and healing ways that inspired this ritual remembrance. See more details here: https://support.thesonderproject.org/fundraiser/4625276

Tewa Women United is a multicultural and multiracial organization founded and led by Native women of northern New Mexico

Sliding Scale Guide:

$450-600- SUPPORT - If you comfortably meet more than basic needs and have expendable income, your payment of $450-600 helps to support the work and assists those who cannot pay the full amount.

$300-450- SUSTAIN - If you are able to meet basic needs and have some income beyond them, your payment of $360-500 allows us to meet the operating costs and supports the facilitators so they can continue to offer this work.

$240- RECEIVE / REPARATIONS - If you are struggling to meet basic needs and regularly have no expendable income, your payment of $240 allows you to be supported by receiving a discount off the full cost. This is reserved for those in severe financial need and those of the global majority that would benefit from reparations.

Partial Scholarship available by application for those in severe financial need. Scholarships will be awarded by .

REFUNDS: We are unable to offer refunds but you can transfer your attendance to a future ritual if you give us 48 hours advanced notice. Alternately, your registration fee can be donated to someone in need, to be used within 1 year.

All are welcome regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity.

Space is limited to 24 registrants. Registration closes Friday September 9th at midnight to give us time and space to prepare for the ritual.

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Friday Sept 12th, 5:00pm - 9:15 pm

Saturday Sept 13th, 9:15 am - 6:00 pm

Sunday Sept 14th, 9:15 am - 6:00 pm

After Ritual Integration Circle (virtual): Dates TBA, Sept 2025

Held at TaoSatva, El Prado, NM

Bring your own lunch for Saturday and Sunday. A refrigerator will be available. There may be a local, organic catering option to purchase

Register by using the Eventbrite payment system, or by sending payment via Venmo to @Mikyo-Black-6 with an email to c3Vicm9zYXNhbnRvIHwgZ21haWwgISBjb20=.

If you have any questions, contact us by email at U3Vicm9zYVNhbnRvIHwgZ21haWwgISBjb20=, or by text/phone: Mikyö Black-Wangmo (575) 224 - 6611

You can also see our website: www.SubrosaSanto.com

Also check out other Nonprofit events in El Prado, Sports events in El Prado, Health & Wellness events in El Prado.