Art of Ripening through the Medicine of Grief-Work
Join us for our community’s June Grief Ritual - facilitated by Alexandre Jodun of A Healing Bridge
Join us for our next Community Grief Ritual - June 6th
Contrary to what the modern, hyper-rational, ancestrally-disconnected world may have us believe - as humans, we are deeply sensitive animals that are receptor-sites for love, connection, and incredible forms of creativity (that ultimately benefit life).
When our ways of life do not reflect what our ancient bodies are naturally expecting, what we experience as depression or disconnection might actually be a signal that we are losing touch with something essential about being human. There is something within us that inherently knows that it is natural to feel, to express ourselves, to be embodied, and to heal and grow together in community.
So what do we do when global culture, when the ways in which we are encouraged to live, when the very field within which we work, are unhealthy (and perhaps even ill)?
This is where we are each, perhaps, being tasked with ripening into healthy individuals, not in isolation, but within willing communities that harbor shared values and life-generating visions for the future.
Join us on June 6th 4:00 - 6:00p MT for our continued work with grief as a community.
During this communal grief gathering, we will create the space to:
Explore teachings on how to practically and somatically work with our emotions as ripening adults, particularly working with the experience of grief in its many forms.
Participate in a community grief-ritual
Engage in embodied practices to support metabolizing grief (and other emotions)
Share personal reflections and practice deep-listening/witnessing in community
Ask questions and receive guidance/support
Friday June 6th | 4:00 - 6:00p MT
Join us in our virtual meeting space (Zoom) for this community event.
Through the support of the Care for the Healer nonprofit - this event is free to the community. There is no cost for this event.
Set the sliding payscale to $0 when registering.
What to bring to this community gathering:
Journal and writing materials
A candle, matches/lighter
Small bowl of water (we will use this for our ritual)
A flower, preferably a rose (or one with many petals)
Why is this work important?
Professionals working in the field of veterinary medicine are faced with an unsettling irony: they are taught how to treat and care for animals in need, yet receive little to no training on how to care for themselves emotionally and psychospiritually (let alone pet owners and other colleagues).
With this, along with all the other pressures that come with working in this field, it is an understatement to say that there is an immense well of grief (and other emotions) that are potentially waiting to be digested.
This ranges from untended personal grief experienced, burnout and exhaustion, to vicarious grief experienced from witnessing harm and death to the animals in care.
“Grief doesn’t go away.
It can change into many things and will, but as a substance and presence it never leaves.
To have caused and witnessed suffering and loss of life means grief is eagerly awaiting your decision as to what direction it will take in your destiny: to make more life or to make more death and violence, internally or externally.
The best decision is that all grief be turned into life-promoting grief-based beauty and usefulness."
- Martín Prechtel
As humans, it is not natural for us to be isolated, unexpressive, and disconnected from our emotional life and intimate communal gathering. That is a way of life we must be trained into. Thus, if things are to change, we must untrain ourselves out of these ways by engaging in the practices and ways of being that our ancestral animal-bodies know is fundamentally natural.
When we grieve well together in community, bringing compassion and tender-hearted care, we awaken the innate capacities of our gifts and the beauty of our shared humanity. We also experience the kind of healing that frees up our capacity to love the world more fully and to participate with more courage and wholeheartedness. What, other than this, could be more important to re-awaken in these critical times we live in?
It is with this intention that we will gather together: to remember how to care for ourselves and each other in ways that benefit all life.
We welcome you to join us.
“Those who undertake the full journey into their grief come back carrying medicine for the world.” - Francis Weller
Friday June 6th | 4:00 - 6:00pm MT
Join us in our virtual meeting space (Zoom) for this community event.
Through the support of the Care for the Healer nonprofit - this event is free to the community. There is no cost for this event.
Set the sliding payscale to $0 when registering.
What to bring to this community gathering:
Journal and writing materials
A candle, matches/lighter
Small bowl of water (we will use this for our ritual)
A flower, preferably a rose (or one with many petals)
More About Our Facilitator:
As an integrative psychotherapist, group facilitator, community-tender, ritualist & ceremonialist, Alexandre Jodun is in service to the remembering of the essential wisdoms, practices, and initiatory processes for ripening into mature adulthood, such that living culture may emerge to carry future generations.
Originally born in Mauritius with a creole-diasporic ancestral heritage and raised as a first-generation immigrant in Australia, he has always felt a calling to remember, bridge, and weave, the roots of ancestral wisdom within the unique context of these modern times.
Through over a decade of training within integrative, as well as earth-based and animist paradigms, his sacred activism involves tending the fertile edges of human-becoming and bridging worlds.
Among many lineages, his work is predominantly influenced from his Holistic Psychotherapy training at the Metavision Institute (rooted in Arnold & Amy Mindell's Process-oriented Psychology); his 4 years of experiential training and apprenticeship with Grof Holotropic Breathwork & Transpersonal Psychology; 5+ years apprenticing in, and facilitating, grief-work (from the lineage of Francis Weller); his 3-year comprehensive training and initiation in Psychedelic Medicine & Transpersonal Psychology through the AWE Foundation; and over 10 years of receiving teachings and initiatory transmissions from plant-teachers (through traditional dietas) and various medicine-keepers across Peru, Ecuador, Gabon, Colombia, Australia, and Mexico.
Through synchronous circumstances and his own personal healing journey, Alexandre has felt a strong calling to study, practice, and facilitate the medicine of Grief-work over the years.
Grief-work was not something he intentionally chose to do, but was holy work that affectionately claimed him.
He has experienced, time and time again, how engaging in the sacred labor of grief has profoundly changed the lives of those he’s worked with and contributed to re-enlivening the magnificent reality of our shared humanity/beingness. He has had the privilege of co-facilitating grief-work (online and in-person) with, and mentoring alongside, renowned elder, writer, and soul-activist Francis Weller, and draws much inspiration from his mentoring relationship with poet, Jaiya John. He integrates grief-work into his 1-on-1 and couples integrative psychotherapy practice, his ceremonial and therapeutic facilitation work with sacred plant-medicines and psychedelics, and also the 4-day in-person grief-ritual retreats he offers (alongside his wife and dearest colleagues).
In other dimensions of his work, Alexandre is a part of the facilitation and admissions team for AWE's Ecstatic Mysticism 3-year initiatory program, and has been involved with their sacred activism work of preserving ancestral knowledge and mystical traditions of indigenous communities.
Additionally, Alexandre practices vegetelismo (Amazonian plant-spirit shamanism) and is in an avid apprenticeship with Master Plant Teachers, particularly Tobacco (Nicotiana Rustica) and various teacher trees, under the Mamancunawa lineage - which deeply informs his work and life in general.
As a writer, he is in the process of completing a Master of Arts (MA) in Integrative Psychedelic Therapy through Ubiquity University, and delighted to be in the process of birthing his first book of poetry. He lives in the Sacred Valley of Cusco, Peru, with his wife, Alyona, and dearest dog and cat kin, Nala and Hampi.
You can work with Alexandre or find out more about his offerings by visiting www.ahealingbridge.com.