May 2015 Good Grief Women's Retreat

In May my friend Audrey Freudenburg and I led a women’s retreat called “Good Grief,” where women of all ages (4 decades represented) came together to share their stories. We were interested in exploring meaning in our lives and how our story telling is enhanced and shaped in safe, supportive community; we were interested in grief, the ways we suffer, the ways we hold and share our suffering, and ways we find healing and wholeness together. We explored grief, loss, and gratitude through stories, art, movement, bonfires, quiet space, walks, trampoline jumping, reiki, and enjoying long fresh Tumlinwood Farm to table meals prepared by Chef Jamie Fleming.

At the retreat, two activities I found meaningful centered around corporately engaging art. We painted masks and designed body maps. The simple act of silently working on our masks side by side was powerful. I had a sense of being held by a community of women. Our uniqueness was expressed by our vastly different masks, and yet we were held in this sacred space by our shared experience.

The lovely Audrey Freudenberg with Mask and Map

Can we change our culturally-supported pursuit of happiness into a more vivid experience of our moment? Can we consider what we are thrilling to live, and willing to die, for? Can we embrace death as a way of enabling us to free others' pain, planning a communal model for the release of grief which in turn allows us to reach out and create communities which encourage the discovery of pain? Let us strip away the illusion of permanence and expose choice, using the fact that we can, in this protected space, hold another's hand as we take those choices up.

We want to open an interrogative retreat where participants have the opportunity to engage in creating their own images of wellness. On the grounds of the lovely Tumlinwood Farm, we will come together to consider some small subset of the literature that guides us to shape our own stories. (Bring some of your own, to share!) We will use movement and art, silence and sound, to encourage the surfacing of our own best visions and values. Surrounded by beauty and good home-grown food, we will surround each other with just enough structure to free.

Audrey Freudenberg

Additionally, we created body maps, where we traced each other with charcoal pencil in various positions. Then we spent time silently illustrating the maps of our lives- significant moments and important experiences of grief and joy. When debriefing this exercise, the women described having new insights about themselves. At the end of the weekend, we spontaneously (completely unplanned) taped our body maps together as they had come to represent our individual stories that ultimately linked us together. These art projects felt like communal, spiritual practices and certainly were the impetus for thought and deeper discussion about the essential elements of life.