‘Returnings’ – A five day residential gathering in West Wales offering grief ‘a place at the table’

Grief as wisdom, as recognition and bearing faithful witness to ‘what is’;  grief as a skill, joined at the hip with love and wholly mandated as part of an ennobling human endeavour… This event is open for anyone moved to come -  we invite an ‘etiquette of reverence’ and a willingness for big-heartedness, risk-taking and an acknowledging of the unknown as an integral part of our guiding forces.  And, please know this is no 'workshop'; there is no aim or intention to take people through and towards a specific outcome.  Neither is this a 'retreat', indeed it is instead a plea towards 'proceeding as if needed' and an entreaty to make a bold charge to join us as apprentices to grief as a source of human scaled wisdom for living. You are invited then, in the spirit of learning together and an alongsided-ness with one another;  to come together in living and loving deeply.  Especially there is a tender open hearted welcome for those bereaved, bereft, inert, saddened, heartbroken and grappling with  how it is to be human and be alive in these times.  It is a time to be with others in honouring life and for grief to be more than ‘just ‘mine’ and personal to ‘me’  – a time to be accompanied; to be part of creating a ‘non judgmental human basket in which to thrash around in’ with love, praise, gratitude and an indebtedness for being alive as cornerstones of our being together. We initiate this gathering fed from our deep living and daily practice of NVC infused with and called forth from the teachings of Stephen Jenkinson (http://orphanwisdom.com/) and others (see below), as well as our lived grief and broken heartedness. We envisage sharing, walking, ceremony, ritual, storytelling, music, tears, laughter, and we will all be needed for fire and home tending together.  The shared preparing and cooking together of the foods that will sustain us will be part of the backbone and hearth of our being together.  Interwoven through our days will be the call to stillness, to praise, to lineage and the tending of the lived relationships between others, our non human world and the unseen world. Our five days will also be fed through the words and inspirations of Francis Weller’s 'five gates of grief’; Everything We Love, We will Lose; The Places That Have Not Known Love; The Sorrows of the World; Ancestral Grief; What We Expected and Did Not Receive. As before, our home for these days is the 40 acres conservation site of Denmark Farm Trust in Ceredigion –http://www.denmarkfarm.org.uk/ where we will be based in the beautiful eco lodges and have access to the roundhouse as well as the grounds. Most of the rooms will be shared twin bedded, with one or two singles possible… Any questions, thoughts, reflections or to book –   Please  contact gayano on gayano@ymail.com, 01558 650747 or 07933 743105 We have up to 12 further places to offer - please do let gayano know asap if you are called to be part of this endeavor and we can confirm what places are available with people nearer the time. With gratitude and love, gayano, jas and emma “How do we learn to carry our grief and not collapse or turn away in denial?  How do we come to see grief as vital and necessary and not something to be endured?  To achieve this shift requires a re-visioning of grief, not as an event in our lives - a period of mourning -  but as an ongoing conversation that accompanies us through life…”  Francis Weller

Honouring teachers/elders -  Stephen Jenkinson, Nathalie Roy, Martín Precthel, Francis Weller, Robert Bly, Marshall Rosenberg, Robert Gonzales,  Miki Kashtan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Brother Blue, John O’Donohue, Catherine Cadden and Jesse Weins, Martin Shaw, Derrick Jensen, David Whyte, Rachelle Lamb, Vicky Peirce, Helena Eastwood amongst many others....