04 Sep Grief Tending at Medicine Festival 2024
Once again Medicine Festival invited Embracing Grief (Sarah & Tony Pletts, Bilal Nasim plus Sophy Banks) to facilitate a grief tending workshop. Unlike our regular workshops, we have the capacity and team for a large number of participants. Year on year there is a more eager crowd to join us. The people who come to the festival tend to be open and seeking transformative experiences.
It seems there is a growing number of people who are ready to be with grief in community. Many are hungry for collective grieving, but don’t know it exists. When they find Grief Tending, they often recognise that it is something they have been longing for.
This year we also held a huge open-air grief ceremony in the ‘Sacred Glade’ at Medicine, and people came ready to express feelings. We designed this as a series of different spaces to move through – from the ‘village’, ‘calling in support’, ‘evoking emotions’, ‘expressing grief’, ‘soothing’ and being ‘welcomed back’. This included crossing thresholds, and spending time at a ‘grief shrine’. The form was informed by big grief rituals held by Sobonfu Somé.
Supported by Aama Sade and drummers, we were able to create an atmosphere of lively song, movement and fun in our make-shift ‘village’. As a vibrant representation of aliveness, this ‘village’ supports the process of expressing grief that is happening simultaneously on the other side of the grass clearing. People can be surprised that during the event they may shift roles from griever to supporter to village member – also moving between sorrow and joy or other contrasting emotions.
These co-existing feelings – love and loss, or in Martín Prechtel’s words, ‘grief and praise’, represent the two wings of the bird, that we often use as a metaphor. We need access to both to be fully alive. As Colin Murray Parkes said,
“The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love…” It is a bitter sweet paradox that grief is necessarily entwined with love.
We hold Grief Tending workshops regularly. You can find our next events here.
Sarah Pletts is a Grief Tender and Artist who offers workshops in London and online, sharing rituals where grief on all themes is welcome. For more information about Grief Tending events see here.
No Comments