I've been sitting with grief for most of my adult life — first my own, then other people's.
I lost my mother when I was 29. She didn't die all at once. She left in pieces, over years, through a slow illness that took her personality before it took her body. That kind of grief — anticipatory grief, they call it now — doesn't have a clean shape. There's no funeral date you're building toward. You just wake up one day and realize you've been grieving someone who is still alive, and there's no ritual for that. No one brings you casseroles. No one calls to check in.
I started leading grief circles not long after she passed. Informally, at first. Women who had found me through mutual friends, who knew I'd been through something similar. We sat in living rooms and occasionally outside, and I started noticing what helped and what didn't. Talking helped. But something else helped more: moving. Holding. Making something physical out of something invisible.
Over eight years, I've guided more than 200 people through what I now call grief transitions — the moments when a loss asks something specific of you, whether that's releasing it, holding it, or learning to carry it differently. The people I work with aren't in therapy. Most of them have never been. They're looking for something to do with the weight of what they're feeling.
That's what ritual gives them. Ritual is not a cure. It doesn't resolve grief. What it does is give grief a container. And when grief has a container, the body can begin to process it instead of just storing it.
I discovered polyvagal theory while trying to understand why some rituals consistently worked and others didn't. Stephen Porges' framework explained something I had observed intuitively: the body has to feel safe before it can let go of anything. Rituals that created that safety — through rhythm, through grounded touch, through gentle movement — worked. Rituals that skipped to catharsis without the groundwork usually didn't. Understanding the science didn't make the work feel less sacred. It made it feel more honest.
I'm also deeply influenced by IFS (Internal Family Systems) — not as a clinical tool, but as a framework for understanding the parts of us that hold grief. The part that won't let go. The part that's still waiting for the person to come back. The part that says the grief isn't over because finishing it would mean admitting it was real. IFS gave me language for conversations I'd been having with people for years without a map.
I'm based in the Pacific Northwest. I run small grief circles — usually four to six people, no more. I write for The Ritual Journal Collective because I believe the work of grief processing doesn't have to stay in therapists' offices or spiritual communities. It belongs to everyone who is in it.
The rituals I write about are ones I've used. With other people, and with myself. I don't write about what I haven't tried.