An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community--practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing loss
We live in a culture that suppresses our ability to truly feel our grief--deeply, safely, and on our own terms. But each person's experience is as unique as the grief itself. Here, Camille Sapara Barton's take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer readers disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss.
Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes rituals, reflection prompts, and exercises that help us process and metabolize our grief--without bypassing or pushing aside what comes to the fore. Sapara Barton includes exercises that can be done both alone and in community, including:
Written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC readers, Tending Grief is an invitation to reconnect to what we've lost, to find community in our grief, and to tend to our own suffering for our individual and collective wellbeing.
Based in Amsterdam, they designed and directed Ecologies of Transformation (2021 - 2023), a masters program exploring socially engaged art-making with a focus on creating change through the body into the world. Camille curates events and offers consultancy combining trauma informed practice, experiential learning, and their studies in political science. They love plants, music, and dancing.
"In this beautiful little book, Camille Sapara Barton offers readers a powerful medicine, not only for being with and moving through grief, but for responding to the social injustice that sickens our world. Setting sharp, lucid political analysis alongside transformative somatic practices, Tending Grief is an essential map for anyone who longs for collective healing. This is an invaluable resource for changemakers everywhere."
--Kai Cheng Thom, author, mediator, and somatic coach
"Tending Grief is a cauldron containing the right ingredients to center our individual and collective grief. The kind of grief and loss that makes us raw, come undone, unravel, and come into our humanness. The ingredients in this magical cauldron in the form of a book are the historical and ancestral understanding of how we hold grief in our bones and bring it into our movements. Tending Grief calls us to turn toward our grief, acknowledge and respond to it, and allow it to move through and change us. This book is a vital tool and resource for the times we are wading through, times that are mirroring to us the patterns of what must change and change now."
--Michelle C. Johnson, author of Finding Refuge and We Heal Together