Community Grief Vigil | Ritualizing Grief
Co-creating Ritual Grief Practices in Veterinary Medicine
As veterinary and animal care professionals, we engage with intense forms of emotion (including grief) on a daily basis.
Whether these emotions are our own, our colleagues, or our clients and patients, in order to maintain our emotional health and safety, we require emotional hygiene and emotional ergonomic practices that mirror the biosecurity and physical hygiene rituals already recognized for their positive impact on patient and practitioner health.
Co-Creating Ritual Grief Practices in Veterinary Medicine
Join with other members of our local Colorado and global veterinary community in a continuous practice of co-creating care and support protocols for our community.Â
These ceremonies are aimed at creating virtual spaces to allow animal care professionals to connect, fellowship, process their own emotional load, and support their colleagues in the processing of emotions we encounter as practitioners.
Facilitators are licensed mental health care professionals with veterinary-industry knowledge and relationship within our community.Â
As a community, we are actively seeking novel solutions to the professional grief experienced in the everyday routine of veterinary and animal-care professionals.
Support this community resource with a donation.
Support this resource to our community by joining in our fundraising goals. This resource supports emotional hygiene practices and professional facilitation of grief processing among veterinary and animal care professionals.
Our $1000 USD goal allows our team to host and facilitate a virtual grieving ceremony.Â
Upcoming Events
May 16 2025 | The Radical Act of Grieving Well
A Community Gathering for professionals on the front line in veterinary medicine.
Facilitated by Debra Rosenman, this community grief gathering explores and centers the personal relationship health professional have with grief. This gathering provides community members with a guided somatic meditation, a community healing ritual, a writing practice prompt, and the opportunity to share personal reflections.
June 6 2025 |
This community ceremony is hosted in preparation for the June 2025 World Congress on Planetary Health.
During this conference and disaster exercise event, veterinary and animal-care teams plan and practice disaster response skills and cooperate across industries and cultures to problem-solve for disaster preparedness at a global scale.
Past Events & Resources
February 18th 2025 | Mourning the loss of a colleague
We sit together and commemorate Dr. Hernández and the work that veterinarians offer to the community.
The goal of this event is to help each member of our community heal a little, together. This tragic loss hurts the soul of our collective community.
Únase a nuestra comunidad en una vigilia en honor a la vida y el trabajo del Dr. Héctor Hernández Cañas, lamentamos su pérdida en nuestra comunidad.
Please join our community in a grief vigil honoring the life and work of Dr. Héctor Hernández Cañas while mourning his loss from our community.
August 13th 2024 | Community Grief Vigil
Speaker: Co-founder of A Healing Bridge, Alexandre Jodun (he/him). Alexandre Jodun is a psychotherapist, psychedelic facilitator, ritualist & ceremonialist with a creole-diasporic ancestral heritage. His eclectic work is in service to the remembering of essential wisdoms, practices, and initiatory processes for ripening into mature adulthood, such that living culture may emerge to carry the future ones.
On his personal path, Alexandre practices vegetelismo and is in an avid apprenticeship with Master Plant Teachers, particularly Tobaco (Nicotiana Rustica) and various Amazonian trees, under the Mamancunawa lineage - which deeply informs his work and life. He lives in the Sacred Valley of Cusco, Peru.Â
Resources shared during ceremony:
Books: The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martin Prechtel, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Podcast episodes: SAND interview with Francis Weller, Emerald Podcast (Joshua Schrei)
Poem: Hieroglyphic Stairway by Drew Dellinger
For those attending this event, we encourage you to bring a candle, pen, paper or journal notebook. We look forward to sharing this opportunity for those who wish to explore grief as it may relate to them personally or professionally.