Sacred Grief - Shauna Janz

09/29/2025

The therapeutic and conceptual distinction between grief (an individual's internal emotional experience) and mourning (as an outward expression) can be helpful in our healing, however this distinction is likely a recent one and a symptom of the disconnection from a deeply relational world in which grief could never be imagined as a singular individual experience.

I came across this insight during the 10 years I was delivering grief education in schools, and when students from more collectivist cultures, such as Japan and China, would look up "grief" on their translation devices - there was no word for grief, only a word for mourning. This has also shown up in cross-cultural research studies in the field of bereavement more recently.

The concept of grief as an individual's emotional response may be an artifact of modernity and individualistic (dominant) culture.

Through our heart-brokenness, we can re-member ourselves back into deep relationship and belonging with our other-than-human kin, through embodied sensing, intuitive relating, and rituals of reciprocity, gratitude, grief and love.

In my own experiences, they too are waiting for us to extend ourselves to them and to be re-united in reciprocity with their human kin. This is a bone deep ancient ancestral way of being.

We explore place-based relating and our ancestral ecology of relationships within my upcoming 9 week course Belonging to the World - Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief, weaving research, embodied practice, animist ritual and ancestral connection.

We start Wednesday October 15th, and registration is open.

All lessons are pre-recorded to view/listen at a time that works for your schedule, with live Zoom calls to gather for integration, practice and questions, every Wednesday at 4pm pacific time (also recorded).

Spaces are still available at each tiered pricing option. Link in bio. DM with any questions. I would love to have you join us.

https://sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

09/26/2025

For those of us who do not have access to lineages, traditions and rituals that support our grieving (I am here alongside you in that), we can re-animate meaningful grief practices and relationships by exploring cross-cultural principles that have shaped human relationships to grief and grieving. These offer a way in to your personal reclamation path as is relevant to your identity, ancestral lineages, family experiences, and place that you are living.

These principles are an outgrowth of my long-time (18+ years) self-inquiry, research, and professional capacities supporting grieving in both personal and cultural contexts... I am grateful to many teachers, bodies of research and work, contemplative practices, and the diversity of people, families and communities that have invited me into their grieving process over this time.

These principles and practices are what guide our time and learning in Belonging to the World; I offer a relational and ritual map, and you re-animate it through tangible research, embodied self-inquiry, intuitive gnosis, and direct ancestral connection.

We begin Oct 15th, and spend 9 weeks exploring and rooting into a foundation of grief relations and rituals that will continue to sustain you through life.

Find out more in the usual place.
or - https://sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

09/24/2025

Our grief is a language that flows within and between the wider field of living relations around us, seen and unseen. When we consciously enter into this relational reciprocity, we gift our heartbreak eloquence and expression in the world, and we allow our grief to be an offering to life, healing and wisdom.

For many, we have forgotten our place in this soulful and heart-full exchange due to dominant culture and supremacy in all its expressions. We have become disconnected from our ancestral ritual skills for grieving.

We all have a birthright to connect with ritual, other-than-human relations, and ancestral practices in ways that are respectful and meaningful in our present-day life to support life-affirming grief expression towards dignity, right-relationship, and belonging.

In this 9 week online course I guide us into cross-cultural principles for grieving to explore the ecology of relationships, rituals and ancestral practices relevant to your own identity that support your grief as medicine. I invite us into somatic and energetic practices that support our unique grief expressions. We will nurture relationships with beings of land and plant kin while deepening our ritual skills of reciprocity in our grief and love. I invite us to explore connection to our ancestors through both spirit work and tangible research into ancestrally informed grieving practices. I offer a map for supporting the rite of passage of death and bereavement. And we will nurture our grief as an invitation into belonging and possibility towards healing, relational reciprocity, and connection to the world.

We start October 15th, 2025. Reach out with any questions. I would love to have you.

Find out more in my B10 🔗
or: https://sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

08/21/2025

It has been 5 months since I have shown up here. I was experiencing the most significant chronic illness pain flares that I have had in my 20 years living with fibromyalgia. It was an immense time of limitation, pain, and fatigue.

I was reduced to 3-5 hours total a day of capacity. A practice in limits, uncertainty, and triaging priorities every day, while grieving my loss of capacity and the impacts on my mental health and financial stability as a solo living, self-employed woman. And at the same time, living the paradox of finding new depths of beauty, gratitude and fulfilment within the limits and being blessed with a community of support, from meal trains to excellent medical care.

I chose rest, creativity, and pleasure to fill as much of my limited capacity as I could, rather than the paid work and tasks that had too big of a recovery cost for me. It was a practice to sit in the acute discomfort of being so limited and unavailable during this time of rising emergency, fascism, grief and need for showing up for one another, and still uplift my own birthright for joy, rest and pleasure amidst my own suffering and care needs.

I know that this is not something for me to strive to reconcile, but rather to expand my internal capacity to be in the complexity of, the paradox of, the discomfort of, and to practice being in the joy of. I had to remind myself that this practice of new culture building that I am devoted to is also a long-game; a marathon not a sprint. I can trust that I can pass the baton for others to carry while I take rest and much needed healing time.

I am tender yet buoyed by more vitality again, and more resourcing and understanding for this invisible disability that I live with. I am thrilled to have the capacity again to slowly show up through my offerings and with others again (slow and steady), in collaborative vision and connection and heart.

I feel how all the more precious these things are to me now. I am easily moved to tears.

04/03/2025

For they too are yearning you.

To have human eyes not just noticing, but aglow in recognition, familiarity, and kinship.

Shining with intimacy.
Tree, stone, river, bee, and hydrangea are yearning to be seen and known by you.

Your presence and gratitude is hungered for.

Grandchild, remember your worthiness; your necessity in the belonging of things. Yearning flows both ways. You are vital. You are missed.

Follow your tender longing and allow yourself to be met.

***

I have a few spaces still open for this small group online ritual learning community as we deepen our belonging and skills of relational reciprocity through embodied, energetic and ritual practices with our animate and spirit kin.

Sliding scale pricing, sponsored spot still available. We begin April 16th. Reach out with any questions, all info and registration through this link.

embodied practices to ground your spirit work

03/28/2025

I would love to have you join me and other like-hearted humans exploring and folding ourselves back into relationship with our body and the wide web of kinship, seen and unseen.

Special focus will be on grounding our embodied presence and perceptual field, relating to land and Spirit of place, elemental and tree elders, and an ancestral elder guide of your own lineages.

You know where to find more. Reach out with any questions. If we are new to each-other I welcome a Discovery Call to meet.

sacredgrief.com/p/immanence

02/16/2025

Grief is inherently a deeply relational and reciprocal expression.

However, many of us experience a barrier in our ability to receive support, care, and attunement due to dominant hustle culture and early life experiences that conditioned us to override these needs of emotional nurturance.

By practicing the skills of receiving we are both deepening our capacity to allow the energy and expression of our grief, and expanding our range which allows grief to be witnessed and met in a relational context of support (with seen or unseen kith and kin).

We take a deeper look at the neurobiology of receiving and embodied resiliency in service to grieving in lesson 4 of my upcoming online education and training course, Coming Back to Ourselves.

All the content, skills and practices we cover are for your own relationship to grieving and are also easily transferable to your support role contexts.

9 week online training course
Tiered pricing and payment plans.
Welcome call is next week, Feb 26th.
Over 9 hrs of recorded lessons
Over 13 hrs of live time teaching and group practice (recorded also)

DM with any questions.

Link in usual place. Or here:
https://sacredgrief.com/p/coming-back-to-ourselves

02/14/2025

Cultivating our ability to be in a stable, reliable, trustworthy and attuned relationship with our-self and all that arises in our inner and emotional experiences is at the heart of both secure attachment and our capacity for grieving.

Insecure relating (or disrupted attachment needs) is typically seeded in our developmental years, reinforced by inter-generational influences, and perpetuated in dominance culture. It is important to uplift the adaptive strategies that were, and are, necessary to respond to these realities (past or ongoing), rather than pathologize them. We can do this while also rooting into our resiliency and creating more space for choice as we learn new ways of responding to our grief and expressing it.

We can practice somatic attachment skills to deepen our foundational trust in our embodied relationship with grief.

In my upcoming course, Coming Back to Ourselves, each week I offer a practice path, which includes invitations and videos offering many of these practices for supporting you in your grief, and these are also easily transferable to your support role contexts with others.

9 weeks, online. Pre-recorded lessons and live weekly teaching and practice calls.
We start February 26th. Financial access spots available.

I would love to have you!

L1nK in B10.
https://sacredgrief.com/p/coming-back-to-ourselves

02/12/2025

Our personal and collective healing work needs us to be in our capacity to grieve. The strategies that keep us from our own grief, are born of the same seeds that can separate us from each other and our shared humanity and dignity.

Let's gather to learn and practice the skills of grieving through expanding our capacity to 'be with' what is arising in our body, heart, and mind when grief visits us.

In a dominant culture that perpetuates separation from the wisdom of our body and the wisdom of our heart, many of us have been socialized to rely on our head center to express grief, especially when we aren't feeling safe to be in the vulnerability that grief requests of us.

We may fully understand the story of our grief, the why and how, and make-meaning of our grief, which is all an important part of grief expression, but inadequate on its own. We also need to receive the healing wisdom of feeling our grief through our heart and emotions, and through our body and sensations.

This disconnection of the fullness of grief through mind, body and heart is one legacy of cultural disruptions of community and rituals for grieving.

This is all workable, and this is what we deep dive into in my 9 week online program, Coming Back to Ourselves - Embodiment and Culture in Grieving. We begin Feb 26th.

Video lessons, extensive embodied practice videos, additional resources and weekly live calls on Wednesdays, 4pm PT // 7pm ET. Tiered pricing.

🔗 in 8io

https://sacredgrief.com/p/coming-back-to-ourselves

02/09/2025

Our grief doesn’t need healing. Our healing needs our grief.

What often does need healing however, is how we relate to our grief, how we access it, what we have been taught about it through our family system and within dominant paradigms, how we show and express it, and how we do so in ways that are life-affirming, healthy and nurturing of connection and relationship.

Grief is relational and a learned skill, yet for many, cultural teachings for healthy grieving have been steeped in dominant narratives informed by capitalist, patriarchal and colonial ways of relating that undermine the soulful and relational healing grief invites of us.

Reclaiming our ability to be in relationship to grief requires us to start by returning to ourselves - to our embodied presence, to our capacity to recognize and be with grief, and to our attunement to what would be most supportive for our unique grief expression and needs.

In this online course we will be guided to take a compassionate look at how our personal relationship to grief is embedded in dominant cultural conditions and strategies born from disconnection. We will explore foundational principles of grieving, and nurture a comprehensive somatic practice based in secure attachment and nervous system awareness that supports our capacity to grieve. We will deepen our resiliency and ability to express grief in ways that align with our unique needs and emotions. We will discover the old stories that no longer serve our grief, and move towards an ethic of grieving as a living and loving practice. We will nurture our grief as an expression in service to personal healing, relational connection, and cultural change.

We begin February 26th, 2025. Registration is now open. Tiered pricing and payment plans available.

Live calls convene Wednesdays, 4:00-5:30 PT // 7:00-8:30 ET

Over 9 hours of recorded lessons, alongside weekly practice videos and invitations for integration.

Queer-celebrating, trauma-informed and anti-oppressive learning container.

Please visit my link in bio to find out more and to register. 🤎
Or visit https://sacredgrief.com/p/coming-back-to-ourselves

02/09/2025

Grieving is a learned skill. Grieving with purpose takes practice.

Thank you to Cole Arthur Riley for the soul-nourishment that has been my experience reading your book This Here Flesh - Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us.

[quote]

Your wails are worthy to be heard.

Aren’t your eyelids
Tired of keeping
Prisoners? Those tears
Are precious
Minerals. Lap them up
Like a medicine -
It’s called healing.

(p. 106)

02/07/2025

What would Love do here?
How would Dignity lead in this situation?
Where do I need to feel first before acting?
Where might my power/privilege as a white person shelter me to what I still need to know, feel and consider?

I am grateful for the web of relations and lineages of care that also inform these practices and invitations, too many to name here, but a few

Thank you Linda Hunter for introducing the inquiry "what would love do here?", so many years ago when we were collaborating in our death education work