Wandering
with grief
and death
The Fellowship is a year-long supported journey to learn from nature how to befriend death and grief, to savor the precious moments of your life.
Begins again Summer Solstice, 2023
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A Fellowship with Grief and Death: The Natural World as Teacher
It has long been understood that turning towards death brings a fuller, richer life into view, but in cultures where humans have placed themselves at the center, that view is often obscured by fear.
The Fellowship with Grief and Death is designed to help you align under the natural laws of creation and dissolution with the wild gods as your teachers, so that a deeper embodiment of your soul’s unique qualities can manifest. In their domain, you can see how things are for all earth's forms, with death as a benefactor of life. When your prayer forms to join that cycle, the gods appear, eager to show you how to find your untamed mind inside theirs.
Journeying with the wild gods is a process of inwardly evolving in the likeness of the wonders surrounding us. This is satisfying, but also critically important. Given the unsustainability of the dominant culture, we must turn to the teachers we've forgotten to remember, but who have always been ready to show us the way. The greater dying all around us, of humans and more-than-humans alike, demands that we get clear on what our own death requires, so that we collectively support the new energies trying to emerge and create a more sustainable future.
The Fellowship includes these gateways to befriending death and grief:
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Instruction in how Western culture diminishes our capacity to experience “good” grief and death, and what it looks like to live the antithesis of its constructs.
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At-home practice in the skills of living a deeply experienced reciprocity with your landscape, and for courting its wild gods.
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Reflection on how to navigate the soul edges being revealed by the wild gods.
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Readings that inspire and skill you in how to live within the natural planetary cycles of creation and dissolution.
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Somatic practices to locate and heal our cultural traumatic grief, and follow our body’s innate wisdom for letting go.
COVID-19 format: Our monthly, three-hour meetings will be held outdoors and/or virtually until the pandemic resolves.
Begins again the weekend of June 17th, 2023
Price includes:
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2 weekend retreats in the NC mountains*
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Monthly 3 hour Fellowship meetings, with the opportunity to additionally join a supported Grief Story-sharing Circle and Healing Circle
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Personalized support from Katherine, Karen and Jennifer
* Excluding food and transportation.
$300, or $25 a month
Lower income
You are struggling to meet basic needs and have no expendable income.
$420, or $35 a month
Middle income
You’re able to meet basic needs and have expendable income.
$600, or $50 a month
Higher income
You comfortably meet basic needs and have ample expendable income.
The 22-23 Fellowship has filled! Let us know if you're considering next year's:
A few years ago, I received these words on a New Year’s Day wander in the woods: You will spend the year contemplating your dead self. Soon after, death began making a strong appearance on my wanders, giving me opportunities to take up the question of what it means to die and explore it from different thresholds.
What I normally experienced as the backdrop to my life – i.e., the natural world – came to the foreground in a way I experienced as intent. Wanders became an invitation for the wild gods to speak. In their displays of synchronicities, I could see how the cycles placed a clear emphasis on life. I then wanted death to become my journeying companion, so that the soul edges I had long avoided could receive my loving attention.
As promised in the cycles, the consequence of this attention was more life. When death came that year for friends and family, I was able to draw from a deeper well of grief. I was inspired to sign up for death mid-wife training so that I could offer that care to my community. And then I was encouraged to offer what happened to me, to you.
With the spirits of this place whispering in my ear, I created the Fellowship with Grief and Death to offer the tools to journey in your landscape and receive its wisdom. Holding death as the foundation of our awareness, our effort will plant the seeds for a culture that embodies living and dying harmoniously with the earth that conjured us.
Led by Katherine Savage
Ceremonial support offered by Karen Delahunty
For many decades, Karen Delahunty has pursued a single thread of inquiry and action: 'Why do we continue to destroy the planet—our only home—even though we know we are doing it?' This insistent question guided her to study philosophy at St John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, her study of Eastern philosophy in Kyoto Japan, and her master’s degree in Transpersonal Ecopsychology at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado, and a month long study of ecovillages in Findhorn, Scotland. She worked ten years as Training Director for the International Retail Company, The Body Shop, where she passionately enacted the company's mission to use their shops as a platform for social /environmental justice and sustainable business practices.
Currently, Karen works inside faith institutions to motivate, educate, and advocate for Creation Care. She helped birth and now sits on the Steering Committee for the Interfaith Creation Care of the Triangle (www.interfaithcreationcare.org).
Karen's day job is as a bodyworker and somatic coach through her private practice in Raleigh NC. She also serves as lead trainer for The Center for Embodied Education in Pittsboro, NC. She believes that our psychic wound of separation from the Earth can be healed through the body as we come to sense our aliveness and deep connection to the planet and each other, through embodied presence.
Grief support offered by Jennifer Dorfield
When later in life I married my old friend, my vows included embarking on the metaphysical healing path he’d already begun. I likewise enrolled in the same ancient mystery school, the IM School of Healing Arts, and before our son arrived, completed two of its four years toward energetic healing certification and ordination. These years I also served as a hospice volunteer.
My ushering into motherhood included a postpartum crisis. Part of my recovery included training as a MotherWoman support group facilitator, using a Group Peer Support model. I ran groups for years, and still use the GPS model to build safe group containers. Eventually I returned to metaphysical training, becoming a Certified Wholeness Energetics Practitioner, and practicing this craft of transformational coaching and energy medicine over years as a hobby.
When our family relocated to western North Carolina, it meant letting go my 20+ year career in education and founding my own healing practice. Returning Home Healing (www.returninghomehealing.com) is dedicated to helping us get more out of our own ways so that we may better serve our highest & best purpose. It wasn't long before I met Katherine, felt resonance with her Death Seedling Life mission, embarked on her pilot Death Fellowship, and allowed it to change me in ways I couldn't have foreseen. It would be my pleasure, supporting you through this process that also supported me.
FELLOWSHIP TESTIMONIALS
