Heart Render

Registration Fee: $250

Scholarship rate: $195

Teens: $100

NB: an application process is required

Application deadline is November 22, 2023. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

For more information, contact Cat at [email protected]

Curious to know more?

Saturday we will court our grief through several pathways: movement, play, journaling, poetry, beauty-making and togetherness. 

Saturday evening we’ll work with story, ritual, drumming and cathartic expression of grief.

Sunday we’ll connect with the elements, share food, circle up and integrate.

Saturday evening dinner, post-ritual meal, and Sunday brunch will be supplied.

What is Grief?

Grief touches all of our lives. Many of us have lost someone we loved, experienced loneliness, felt the weight of ancestral burdens or struggled to face the harsh realities of this world. Grief can take many forms; sorrow, anger, shame, fear. The expression of grief has become a taboo in our culture, and so we have become alone with it. In exiling grief, we also exile its innate intelligence, its ability to point us towards healing. As Martin Prechtel puts it, “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way that love honors what it misses.” Love and grief are two sides of the same coin. In regaining our ability to grieve we also regain our ability to live and love fully. Here is a great talk that elaborates further on these ideas. Please listen before attending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6h3JNOCTYc 

This work is inspired by the work of Jon Young, Malidoma & Sobonfu Some, Randy & Rowena Jones, Joanna Macy, Francis Weller and Michael Mead.

What is Ritual?

Ritual is an opportunity for us to come together in a manner we may have forgotten but know deep in our bones. It's a space for verbal and non-verbal conversation with the unseen in its myriad of mysterious forms and expressions. A grief ritual invites us to freely and fully express our grief in conversation with the unseen, to experience the eldership of story and to become more wildly ourselves.

"Even the simplest of rituals is a way of acknowledging the unseen, the unspoken-about, the holy, which feeds our lives with its inexhaustible generosity. Ritual restores us to one another and to that grander coherence to which we all belong. Devoting your time to a ritual is like tending to a living bridge between the seen and the unseen, keeping that reciprocity alive." 

Toko-pa Turner from "Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home"

Cat Gibbs

Hummingbird Ears with Nothing to Offer

Cat did not come easily to the path of grief ritual holding. Her response as a young girl was to shut down her capacity to feel, in both heart and body. Over the past two decades, Cat has journeyed inwardly and outwardly: diving deep into nature connection and cultural repair with Wisdom of the Earth Wilderness School, journeying with plant medicine, and apprenticing in grief tending and ritual literacy with Randy & Rowena Jones. Community members seek out Cat for personal and relational anchoring, her capacity for deep listening, her long acquaintance with shame and shame resilience, her warm and joyful heart and her trauma-informed approach. Cat has spent over ten years working for SelfDesign Learning Community as an Educator, mentoring and supporting parents in unravelling their deeply held beliefs around children, parenting, school, and learning.

Sofia Jain-Schlaepfer

Sofia is dedicated to wild thriving life. To those wild plant seeds that lay dormant under the asphalt. To those wild seeds that lay dormant in us, including, for many, our untamed expressions of grief. She has followed a winding path between diverse backgrounds including art, biology (MSc), 8 Shields nature connection (Wisdom of the Earth), dream tending (Dr. Stephen Aizenstat) and ritual leadership (Rowena and Randy Jones). As a sensitive person in a culture that has been unaccepting of most of her emotions, she is passionate about creating space for authentic and vulnerable expression, and the connection to self and others this creates.

https://www.awakeningwildseeds.com/

Robyn Fila

The territory is not the map. Who am I? A traveller, a mother, a teacher, a learner, a mentor, a weaver of tales, a disciple of life, a speaker of tongues and part ocean. Hailing from a long line of dissidents and truth tellers, I come by my ways honestly, and have a strong line of Slavic women at my back. In my work as a program manager and instructor at the University of Victoria, I am as committed (if not more so) to unlearning and unraveling as I am to learning in a traditional sense. My work in experiential learning crosses epistemological, ontological, mythical, geographical and temporal boundaries. I am tracking the edges, boundaries, containment and protection and am committed to holding containers and spaces that can hold the tension between the seen and unseen, the material and the other worldly. I am comfortable in spaces that don’t have answers; the off script, the emergent, the entangled, dodging the politics of capture. I am always learning, always integrating and always leaning away from straight lines. In love and in grief, with grit, grace and guile.

Belinda White

Belinda is a nature connection mentor and guide for children and adults in Vancouver and beyond, a skilled photographer, and a passionate storyteller who lives and breathes the art and magic of weaving with words.

She dwells at the potent intersections of story, nature connection, inner tracking, earth arts and cultural repair through writing, poetry, workshop and ritual.  She came to this work through the deep struggles of raising a child through divorce and without an extended village.   Along the way there has been two enduring questions: What is it that connects us deeply to life? Can the trauma of disconnection be repaired?

Belinda’s desire is to weave a basket of belonging and she tends to ritual space with a sensitivity and care especially for those who fall through the cracks.  These past 4 years, she has deepened her study of mythic story telling, applying story as medicine, deep listening, inner tracking, grief tending and council practice.   Belinda is immeasurably grateful to Wisdom of the Earth, Jon Young, Randy and Rowena Jones, Malidoma Some, and the many Youngians, Mythologists, and poets that have carried the seeds of deep imaginal connection forward to these times.

Visit Belinda on Instagram and Facebook @applestarphoto @theTwiningTrail 
@apple_star_learning

See more of her photography and writing
https://applestarphoto.com/ https://thetwiningtrail.ca/
https://substack.com/@thetwiningtrail

Tina Schomburg

Since childhood, Tina has been highly aware of death’s presence. When she was diagnosed with cancer in her young adult years, Tina chose to explore and deepen her relationship with death. On this life-altering quest, she discovered hungry ghosts, otherworldly allies, and the stories and voices of her ancestors, which continue to help her turn poison into medicine. One of her core gifts is to reveal what’s hidden - “the river under the river” (Estes) - so that transformation and healing can occur. As a ritual student and conductor, she actively cultivates her relationship to the Other realm, while reviving her love for this Earthly one. Tina is also a certified death midwife and trained yoga teacher.

Sequoia Lesosky

Following his cry for village, Sequoia has become an embodied specimen of a human devoted to be in service to the collective health. His gifts work like the fungi, sometimes unseen, but connecting people to vital nutrients that keeps them thriving. Humble as fungi, he loves to support others in finding their authentic roars and cries. He brings deep love, care and harvestable dedication to ritual and community containers.

Trevor Mervyn

Trevor Mervyn is a journeyman carpenter, musician, father, and a Wayfinder. Trevor spent almost 20 years connecting to Spirit and Soul primarily through his music, building containers of belonging in the guise of music production and event organizing before a soul descent in 2020 took him down and broke him open. With the help of a variety of teachers, both living and dead, Trevor was gathered and re-membered into a deeper life of ritual, myth, initiation, grief, and reverence. Since 2021, Trevor has been organizing ritual events in the qathet region, including hosting Medicine Story nights from his home in Lund, and facilitating the Heartfire Rituals this past June and September.

https://sacredgestures.com/