❤️🩹 Grief Dance is a two-hour journey into the tender terrain of the soul, offered on Sunday, December 28th, from 4 to 6 pm, intentionally held in the space between the holidays and the New Year. Whether you are carrying the ache of heartbreak, the transition of a loved one, or the quiet accumulation of trauma, this practice invites you to meet grief as an illuminating partner rather than a burden to fix. In a culture that often rushes past our sorrow, Grief Dance creates a rare community container to welcome the ways grief softens, reshapes, and opens us. Through music, dance, and vulnerable presence, dancers are invited to explore the full spectrum of their emotional landscape, allowing grief to become a catalyst for reflection and transformation.
❤️🩹 This experience is held by Lacye Winkelpeck and Adam Clark, who together cultivate a supportive, trauma-informed container where grief can alchemize. The journey of Grief Dance unfolds with a grounding guided meditation led by Adam to help participants settle into their bodies and the safety and comfort of the container. From there, Lacye will guide an inquiry into how grief lives within the body, offering somatic tools to support accepting its sensations with compassion and curiosity. This foundation opens into an hour of ecstatic dance, accompanied by a curated playlist of neoclassical, avant-garde, and lyrical music to facilitate emotional processing. The journey concludes with sound healing and a closing sharing circle to initiate integration.
❤️🩹 Grief Dance invites participants to leave feeling emotionally transformed, spiritually enriched, and soulfully connected. Additional trauma-informed assistants will be present to offer elective emotional support, ensuring each participant can navigate their process with care. Cry-pillows, comfort teddies, and blankets will be available for grounding and self-soothing as needed. Participants are welcome to bring a symbolic object, photograph, letter, or other representation of their grief to place on a communal altar. The altar will serve as a sacred space to honor what is held, witnessed, and remembered throughout the dance. Grief Dance is an invitation to welcome and move with our emotions, an opportunity to feel, to alchemize, and to be empowered by the ancestral wisdom woven through our sorrow and the emotional resilience it can develop.
❤️🩹 Following the formal close of the dance, there will be an optional 30-minute integration window for anyone who feels called to continue their process in community or desires more time to ground, receive support, or sit in the tenderness of what has arisen.
❤️🩹 Ticket prices are on a sliding scale from $15 to $25 and can be paid upon entering the event by cash, Venmo, PayPal, or Zelle. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Facilitators:
🦋Lacye Winkelpleck
Lacye Winkelpleck is a writer, storyteller, shadow worker, yogi, and integrative grief support specialist whose work emerges from her own profound encounter with loss. After the accidental overdose of her husband in 2018, she was thrust into the complex terrain of grief while navigating single parenthood and the multifaceted social, emotional, and financial shifts that accompany bereavement. Confronted with the stark absence of communal and cultural skills for tending to grief, she embarked on a three-year healing journey in Bali, where a supportive community and spacious environment allowed her and her daughter to rebuild their lives. Through this process, Lacye developed a deeply intuitive, trauma-informed approach to grief that honors the shadow and the transformative potential within it. She is committed to normalizing grief, dispelling shame, and offering compassionate tools that empower others to integrate their losses and reclaim a sense of wholeness.
🦋Adam Clark
Adam Clark is the host of Ecstatic Dance SLO, an educator at Esalen Institute, and certified in dance movement psychotherapy. His approach to navigating grief draws on inner child work, somatics, and Gestalt techniques that support the evolution of a more liberated self. After experiencing the death of a partner in 2011 and lacking the tools to process that loss, Adam’s unintegrated grief manifested in substance abuse, ultimately directing him on a dynamic path of healing initiated by a spiritual encounter and sustained through community support. He now weaves dance, spirituality, ancestral wisdom, and trauma-informed space-holding to create inclusive environments for personal and collective transformation. Dedicated to enlightenment and wholeness, Adam empowers individuals to reclaim their innate connection to themselves, each other, and the collective consciousness.
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