Hearth ~ Six weeks of grief, ritual, music & community.
Commences 5th November, 7:30pm - 9pm
with Tanya Forgan and Catherine Holt
Grief needs a village.
We live in a culture that has made grief increasingly private. We are expected to carry on, to return to work, to be strong, to find closure. There are few places where sorrow is allowed to take up space, fewer still where it can be witnessed without someone trying to fix it.
And yet, for much of human history, grief has been held in community.
People gathered, told stories, made ritual and held music at the heart of life. They tended the grieving and allowed sorrow to belong to the whole rather than being carried by one person alone.
Hearth is our offering to remember the village way of grieving. We were never meant to do this alone.
The grief we carry can be vast. It is not only what happens when someone dies. We grieve relationships and endings. The childhood we needed but did not have. The mothering or fathering we longed for. Bodies that change. Identities we have outgrown. Dreams that never came to be. Places and communities where we once belonged. We might carry ancestral and cultural grief. The sorrow of injustice, displacement and disconnection. The grief of witnessing what is happening to the Earth and to one another.
Grief does not always look like sadness. Sometimes it arrives as exhaustion, numbness, rage, anxiety, restlessness or a persistent ache we cannot quite name.
Some grief arrives suddenly, some accumulates quietly over years. Some may have been carried for generations.
Hearth makes room for the many faces of grief. Not to pathologise them or hurry them towards resolution, but to give them somewhere to belong, to be witnessed, and to listen for what they might be asking of us.
Grief also tells us something about what matters.
We grieve because we have loved. Because we have belonged. Because something or someone has touched us deeply enough to leave an absence when it changes or is gone. And sometimes, when we allow ourselves to turn towards grief rather than away from it, we find ourselves brought closer to the beauty and preciousness of being alive.
Grief and love are not opposites. They are part of the same story.
Many voices around the Hearth.
cross cultures, traditions and generations, people have explored what it means to mourn, to make ritual, to live alongside loss and eventually to find our way back towards life.
Throughout these six weeks, we will draw upon a constellation of voices that have shaped our own understanding of grief, ritual, community and belonging.
These include the work and teachings of Sobonfu Somé, Malidoma Patrice Somé, Martín Prechtel, Stephen Jenkinson, Joanna Macy, Francis Weller and others, alongside poetry, story, music and wisdom carried through different traditions. The teachings are brought into conversation with our lived experiences.
We will honour lineage and context. We will notice what resonates, what challenges us and what asks further questions, and we will keep returning to what is happening between us.
Who is Hearth for?
You do not need to be recently bereaved to come. You may be carrying an old grief., or grieving something other people do not recognise as a loss.
You may feel the weight of what is happening in the world.
You may spend much of your life supporting others and long for somewhere you do not have to be the one holding everything together.
You may simply be curious about grief, ritual and what happens when we begin to meet sorrow differently.
Or perhaps you cannot quite explain why you are drawn to this work.
That is enough.
You do not need experience of Circle, ritual or grief work. You do not need to know what you are grieving.
Only a willingness to arrive as you are.
What you will experience.
Across the six weeks we will weave together Circle, live music, song, story, poetry, embodied and somatic practice, ritual, reflection, silence and community.
There will be invitations to continue exploring between gatherings, with readings, questions and simple practices to take into your everyday life.
Hearth is not something to achieve. There is no correct way to grieve and no destination we are trying to get you to.
Our hope is that you leave with a more spacious relationship with your own sorrow. More capacity to sit beside the grief of another. A deeper understanding of what ritual and community can offer us, nd perhaps a renewed awareness of the strange truth grief so often reveals: that our capacity to sorrow and our capacity to love belong to one another.
Those who walk with grief in this way often find a softer, more compassionate relationship with their own sorrow and the sorrow of others, along with relief from isolation, a deeper connection to the sacredness of life, and a renewed sense of aliveness that comes from being fully met in their emotions. They leave with meaningful tools, rituals, and relationships that allow them to hold both sorrow and joy, loss and love, with greater confidence and tenderness.
Week 1 - ARRIVING
Our relationship with grief
We begin with ourselves.
What have we learned about grief? What was permitted in our families and communities? What did we learn to hide, swallow or carry alone?
We begin slowly, creating the ground beneath us and the Circle that will hold the weeks ahead.
Week 2 - VILLAGE
Grief was never meant to be carried alone
What happens when sorrow is witnessed?
We explore the loss of communal grieving and the human need to be accompanied through life's thresholds.
We consider what village might mean now, not as nostalgia for something that once existed, but as something we can begin practising between us.
Week 3 - GRIEF & PRAISE
Because we have loved
There is an intimacy between grief and gratitude.
We mourn because something mattered. We ache because we have loved. Sometimes sorrow brings us into startling proximity with beauty.
We explore grief and praise alongside one another, not to make sorrow positive, but to remember the love that often lives beneath it.
Week 4 - WHAT WE CARRY
The grief that has not been named
Not everything we grieve is recognised as loss.
The childhood we needed. The belonging we never found. The relationship that could not become what we hoped. The road not taken. The parts of ourselves we abandoned in order to survive or belong.
We make space for the grief that may never before have been given permission to call itself grief.
Week 5 - THE WIDER SORROW
Grieving in a hurting world
Our personal grief does not exist separately from the world around us.
We are living through ecological breakdown, war, injustice, displacement, extinction and profound disconnection.
How do we allow ourselves to feel what is happening without becoming overwhelmed or turning away? What if our grief for the world is evidence that we still belong to it?
Week 6 - RETURNING
Carrying life differently
The final gathering is not about completing grief.
It is about turning towards life again.
We gather what these weeks have revealed. We honour what has moved and what remains unfinished.
We make ritual around what we are releasing and what we want to carry forward.
Held by Tanya & Catherine.
We created Hearth from our shared belief that grief needs community, ritual, beauty and places where we are allowed to be fully human.
Our role is to tend the Hearth. To create the conditions in which people can gather, listen, feel, question, remember and be witnessed, and to trust what becomes possible when we do that together.
Tanya Forgan
Tanya is a Group Facilitator, Ritualist, and Embodiment, Guide devoted to creating spaces where grief, love, and the fullness of life can be honoured.
With a passion for helping people feel truly alive, she crafts breathtaking experiences of ritual, embodiment, and Circle, spaces of belonging where the heart opens and the soul remembers its place in the whole.
She believes grief is the most exquisite emotion, revealing the depth of our love, and that by deepening our capacity to love we build the resilience needed to meet life fully, with courage, tenderness, and connection.
Catherine Holt
Catherine is a Musician, Teacher, Group Facilitator, and Sound Therapist devoted to exploring what it means to be fully human and alive.
With a passion for Sound, Music, Circle, and Belonging, she tends the transformative fire of community, creating spaces where people can rest into truth, discover connection, and awaken to the healing power of vibration.
She believes peace is found in embracing both darkness and light, and that by returning to ourselves and to each other, we come Home, to the Circle, the village, and the belonging that makes us whole.
