‘Returnings’ – A five day residential gathering

A FIVE-DAY RESIDENTIAL GATHERING IN WEST WALES FOR ANYONE CALLING FOR GRIEF TO BE GIVEN ‘A PLACE AT THE TABLE’ Grief as wisdom, as recognition, as 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 is a time for us all to come together to live and love 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 be woven with many threads and in particular Francis Weller’s ‘Five Gates of Grief’, with our days  gently anchored within the five gates: 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 We are intending poems, songs, stories, ritual, ceremony for each day to honour each of these –  the gates offering  focus and intent – a threshold towards what is there for each us. The sessions are 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. We come together to share and to learn from one another…to be together in a human scaled way... 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