Community Grief and Renewal Ritual

We are at the edge of thawing out from all that we’ve been holding during this time. As our world is speeding up and opening, we feel this sense of wanting to slow down and really metabolize what we’ve gone through. True rebirth and transformation require this kind of allowing and attending. From there, we let ourselves choose new paths, from more whole selves, with all that we’ve learned through this time. One of the things we’ve heard from many people through this time of isolation is how much they’ve been longing for community ritual space to tend to what they’ve been holding, feeling, and struggling with alone.

We are living through a wild time of grief, loss, change, and profound uncertainty. The energy it can take just to navigate real and apparent threats and anxieties in our nervous systems, on a daily basis, can be exhausting even to those who already have a resilient core, much less for those working with unresolved traumas, and ungrieved losses. Unprocessed grief can build easily over time, affecting us in a myriad of ways. It is easy to drift out into a turbulent sea of emotions where the waves can feel unrelenting. In this era of the coronavirus, which sits on the throne of the lungs, where much of our grief is held, personally and collectively, learning resiliency practices to metabolize grief and find our heart's path is vital.

Our bodies hold wisdom and memory for metabolizing our collective grief and growing resilience. Our ancestors are with us, and they too have gone through the aches of epidemics and loss. Learning to connect to their wisdom and courageous spirits is part of stepping fully into our true selves, the ones who are both vulnerable and strong, who remember how to carry all this together. Using grief as a collective healing tool we will navigate the energetic fields across generations, weaving together the greater spiraling webs of space and time.

This one day weekend workshop will be held on the coast near Bodega Bay, Shell Beach, CA on a sacred spot at the feet of our majestic Grandmother Ocean.

The ritual will be held in the healing lineages taught to Madeleina and Coby by Martín Prechtel and Sonbonfu Somé. We will use ritual practices for metabolizing grief as a community, as well as somatic tools for balancing the nervous system and metabolizing intergenerational trauma. We will also integrate herbal wisdom and ancestral practices to create a solid community container for helping each person feel a steady, internal sense of greater well-being and health, step into their deepest gifts, feel greater depths of love and compassion, and gain access to our full energetic bodies, with our Hearts at the center. We offer and receive in service to ourselves, our communities, and our beloveds.

Arrival on the land by 9:30 am Saturday. Ceremony until 7 pm-ish

Detailed workshop information will be sent once registered.

Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/e/community-grief-ritual-tickets-154479643773

Cost: $80-180, sliding scale

If you would like to avoid eventbrite processing fees feel free to register and pay by Venmo to @Coby-Leibman or Paypal cobyleibman@yahoo.com. A confirmation email will be sent once payment is received.

Scholarships and reduced rates available for BIPOC and other marginalized communities.Please contact us directly for inquiries at communityritual@gmail.com

10% of the proceeds will go to an inter-tribal biocultural heritage farm and indigenous educational center located in Graton.

http://www.nativeland.org/donate

All CDC-issued covid protocols including social distancing and masks will be observed during this workshop.

Why grief is important:

Sobonfu on Grieving:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtUqMwRXvhY

Sobonfu on Death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_0gFHYL4Ec

Martín Prechtel on Grief

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUwewfPPSbE&t=22s

From the book 'The Smell of Rain on Dust, Grief and Praise' by Martín Prechtel:

"Grief, if not metabolized, almost always goes to some form of accusatory violence in the end. Either externalized, exported, or internalized - or all of the above.

It's needful for the peace of a people, peace of the human heart, peace of the earth, for grief to be there, not transcending on a bliss journey to avoid grief.

We need a culture of passionately grateful people who can hear, give, and truly feel the deep weeping grief inside the absurd platform of hate caused by the writhing of human pain. Instead of compulsively defusing the situation, these cool people would know to find and digest the grief through the whole bigger 'story' of life, knowing it is hard in our frustration not to always want to fight against 'something' to make it alright.

How relaxing it would be if there really just was a bunch of bad guys who you had only to depose to make the world all fixed up. But that's too simple and the source of even more loss, because in the instance of trying to cure it all by force you plant the next round of the sickness of revenge. So what do you do?

Get courageous.

Become a person. Make beauty out of grief. Become real people who might have untenable rotten ideas, but who in the end grow into solid old people who are generous and unconniving, people who know things and don't just see everything as a business opportunity. Be courageous, make your hate into an art of love beyond your wants, and stop sending undigested grief in the form of sorrow frozen into hate into the arms of the future. Hand over the world with some modicum of the possibility for peace".

Madeleina and Coby's Bios:

Madeleina Bolduc has been cultivating the art of medicine and ritual for twenty-eight years. Raised in the creative crucible of the Naropa University, she was trained by Tibetan meditation masters, artists, and indigenous elders in the practices of everyday magic, consciousness, and world wisdom traditions since she was a child. She is a Holistic Health Practitioner, integrating Clinical Medical Herbalism, traditional foods, Chinese, Mayan, Tibetan, and Energy Medicine, spiritual counseling, coaching, somatic practices, and indigenous wisdom, as given permission by her teachers. She is an educator of Clinical and Elemental Herbal Medicine, a lineage holder of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practices, a ceremony officiant, and an artist. She has been both visiting teacher and core faculty at various herbal schools.

Currently, Madeleina is teaching a myriad of classes, including medicine making, and the Elemental Herbal Wisdom Immersion that starts at the beginning of each year. She holds a full private practice and is core faculty at the Scarlet Sages's School of Traditional Healing Arts.

She was a student and friend since 1995 of the beloved, late Sobonfu Somé, is a devoted student of the illustrious maestro, Martín Prechtel since 2000, attending his school, Bolad's Kitchen for the last 12 years (www.floweringmountain.com), and is training with master teacher Adam Gainsberg in Open Heart Experiencing work.

As a re-Weaver of Culture, and Beauty-Maker, Madeleina is passionately dedicated to the preservation and cross-pollination of wisdom and healing traditions, while infusing them with fresh color and perspective. She loves teaching people about the wonders of Plant Medicine, the Vitality of our Hearts, our relationships to the Elements, and the incredibly diverse ways in which we can be fully Awake and Praise Life!

Coby Leibman is a Somatic Therapy Practitioner, a chef, a wild forager, a lover of plants, people, and all wild beings. He creates community events on a regular basis to build community, culture, and vitality.

His primary teachers have been:

Martín Prechtel: 10 years participating in ritual with Martín and attending his school in New Mexico (Bolad's Kitchen).

Malidoma Somé: 10 years of assisting and training with Malidoma including the IAST program and Kontomble training.

Sobonfu Somé: Coby attended and assisted grief rituals with Sobonfu for 8 years and has worked closely with the community here in the bay area holding her lineage.

Peter Levine: Three years of training and classes in Somatic Therapy and Master Class in Ancestral Healing.

Coby has also trained with Keith Pashe and Shane Pashe from Dakota Tipi for 10 years and worked with many local native communities including Sogorea Te as an ally and supporter in cultural revitalization.

Coby runs youth rites of passage programs in Sonoma County and does outdoor wilderness and somatic therapy with youth and adults. He has worked as a chef for many years and currently teaches foraging/cooking classes, connecting people with wild foods and medicines of the North Bay.

Coby runs a private practice as an SE Counselor helping people connect with the amazing capacity of our bodies to heal and overcome the greatest challenges of our times.