REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED

Dear Friends,
Thank you for your interest in the upcoming course, An Apprenticeship with Sorrow: Community, Ritual and Sacred Work of Grief. As you have discovered, the registration for this program is closed. We received an overwhelming response in just a few hours. We held the registration limit to 150 participants, particularly for this first round, to see how fluidly we could work with the Zoom format in large numbers. I am in awe and humbled by the enormous response to this offering. I am sorry that many of you were not able to join us. We hope to offer this program again in the future. Please note that we will not be starting a waiting list. Thank you for your fidelity to your souls and your longing to share your love/grief for the world. Warm best, Francis 

Cultivating an Apprenticeship with Sorrow

Grief and loss touch us all, arriving at our door in many ways. It comes swirling on the winds of divorce, or the death of someone dear, as an illness that alters the course of a life. For many of us, our grief is tied intimately to the ravages we witness daily to watersheds, forests and the disappearance of species, the silencing of languages and the coarsening of culture. And yet our encounters with sorrow are often met with confusion, fear and overwhelm. We are uncertain how to meet this difficult guest when it surfaces in our lives. 

This Four-week course is designed to inaugurate an Apprenticeship with Sorrow. It is through the rites of grief that we are, in turn, ripened as human beings. Grief invites gravity and depth into our world. Our work is to understand grief not only as an emotion, but also a core faculty of being human, a profound capacity to metabolize sorrow into something nutrient dense for the community. This apprenticeship is, at heart, about the crafting of elders capable of meeting the pain and suffering of the world with a dignified and robust bearing. This is soul activism intended to foster deep cultural change. 
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During our time together, we will explore the soul’s relationship to grief; how grief shared deepens our capacity for compassion and eases the congested sorrows that cloud our hearts. We will work with the dimensions of our apprenticeship and develop ways to bring a seasoned attention to the layers of grief in our lives. During this intensive course, we will be invited to honor the ashes of our losses and remember that “where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.” We do this work not solely for our own healing, but also to make us capable of responding to the critical needs of our times. Utilizing the potent tools of inquiry, writing practice, imagination, and ritual, we will deepen our trust in our emotional and bodily wisdom, and build a community of concerned hearts that will help us bring forth our stories of love and loss into the visible world.


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Week 1. An Apprenticeship with Sorrow
Week 2. Rough Initiations: Radical change in Uncertain Times
Week 3. Medicine for the Long Dark: Disciplines for the Underworld Journey
Week 4. It All Turns on Affection: Keeping the Heart Open​

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"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground."
​                             -Oscar Wilde

REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED 

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We will meet on four Saturdays, for a 2 1/2 hour Zoom session, beginning on June 6th. Each meeting will offer teachings, small group process including writing practice, imaginal work, dyad work and more.

You will also receive practices to work with between sessions.