OUR APPROACH
The faces of loss are many: death, relationship loss, loss of home or community, health or vitality, job losses, severence from ancestral stories and rituals, sorrow for the degradation of the earth and more.
Heart Land gatherings welcome grief from all sources.
Local Wisdom
Heart Land recognizes the wisdom inherent in each individual, community and culture as the primary compass for navigating the wilderness of grief.
Support based on connecting with this intelligence also facilitates self-care and sustainability for those in caregiving roles. In these ways, Heart Land gatherings support community self-reliance, resilience building and the honouring of local wisdom.
Community Building
For most of human history, community grief rituals provided the means by which healing occurred and were integral to maintaining individual and communal health and vitality.
When people have safe places where grief can be acknowledged, healing happens. When people feel connected to community, immune responses and resilience are strengthened.
Peer-to-Peer
This means that, along with health professionals, many people in each community can be trained to provide skillful grief support and relieve the burden on a small number of mental health workers or counsellors.
While not everyone with lived experience may be suitable to be a designated grief supporter, with so many people who have been touched by grief, there exists an enormous pool of potential responders within each community.
Down-to-Earth
Heart Land training is holistic and largely experiential, designed to engage both hemispheres of the brain in balance and attend to the needs of the body, mind, and heart.
Participants use their own lived experience with grief to learn to give and receive support, such that many participants describe the training as healing. Grieving and mourning our losses allow us to heal, renew our spirits and reengage with life.