Grief Workshop
Led By Jon Terrell, M.A.

We offer small group grief workshops about 10 times a year, mostly in New England. Our unique approach to dealing with grief helps participants let go of old emotional pain that is holding them back and keeping them stuck in the past.  Participants report a renewed sense of peace and joy.

Many people who are stuck in grief go around and around in their heads about it. They are caught in a cycle of thoughts and feelings. Many times people can't break that cycle, so they seek help from various sources including grief support groups, therapy, retreats and workshops.

Talking about our grief can be somewhat helpful in releasing past pain, and for some that is all that is needed, While there is some time at our grief retreats to talk about a person's grief, what we do is radically different: We focus most of our time on working through the feelings that are tied into these thoughts. Read on to learn more about our approach.

Working Through Feelings

Grief is a feeling, not a though, although we have thoughts related to our grief feelings.  But where we are primarily stuck is in our feelings, our emotions, not our thoughts. Thoughts can be a gateway into feelings, but for many just talking about emotional pain does not alleviate it...we need to go deeper, into  and through the emotions.

Most of us don't know how to do this, or do this in a way where we are not drowning in the feelings.

Our emotions are often suppressed because they are uncomfortable to our brains, to our sense of self. Our brains don't understand emotions. Our brains can hold facts about emotions/feelings, but feelings are deeper than the thinking brain.

Our brains register feelings, but don't know how to deal with them. At our grief retreats we can help people heal from grief because we go much deeper than the thoughts, than just our brains.

Feelings are in the Body

Our grief workshops help people go into the old feelings by going into the body. That is where we hold our feelings...in our hearts, our muscles our digestive areas, etc. These "gut feelings" are where we need to go.

We primarily hold fear in our nervous system, anger in our muscles, grief in our digestive areas. Each of these main feelings operate differently....fear contracts us, for example...we get tight, want to hide or run, etc.

Complicated grief is grief that continues on and doesn't seem to heal over time. It is often caused by other feelings, such as anger or resentment or anxiety, that  we are holding onto below the grief or mixed in with our grief. At our grief workshops we focus on the wisdom of your body which knows how to heal emotions. Very often these other feelings surface as a person delves into their experience of grief.

Children Know How To Express Their Feelings

When we were a baby, we cried when we were sad, expressed anger when we were angry and shook and made high-pitched sounds when we were afraid. We naturally felt our feelings, and didn't hide from them or hold them in our bodies unless there was severe trauma. We experienced them and let them go.

But as we grew up early on, we learned to push these feelings down into our bodies...we tried to become good little boys and girls by suppressing feelings that we felt and thought our parents didn't approve of. For example, if we didn't want to be a "cry baby" we suppressed our grief.

Later on, we had difficulty accessing those feelings. As Joy Davey once said "We become the perfect person to please everyone else, but we have lost ourselves."

The grief workshop can help us find ourselves again by learning to reclaim our feelings. And not just grief, but all of our feeling. It helps us come alive again.

Find Out More About Our Grief Workshop

Here is a link to our main retreat page, with dates and prices of the upcoming events. I require a free short 1-15 minute phone call to make sure the retreat is appropriate for you. This is not a counseling session but it is a time where you can ask questions about whether the workshop is for you. You can set up a call by using the link below. I will get back to you within 24 hours unless I am leading an event.