White tarp tents lined one side of
Allston Way in Berkeley, California, on a
sunny week in early April 2023, beneath which
a cluster of people sat on ornate pillows,
sipping from ceramic cups at the tea ceremony
booth. Others filtered to and fro, sometimes
stopping to peruse the flyers and stickers
that were fanned out on the fold-up tables, or
to participate in group art projects. This
city block, adjacent to the illustrious
University of California campus, was
transformed into a marketplace as part of the
Bioneers
Conference—an independent
annual event focused on environmental and
social justice solutions that began in 1990
in the Bay Area (though 2023 was its first
time taking place in Berkeley).
At one end of the street, rotating
passersby painted large-form mural versions of
activist art posters onto the asphalt. Nestled
near the painters was an unassuming white tent
similar to the others except for the addition
of white tarp “walls” that were intermittently
velcroed closed. Inside, candles flickered
between altars made from moss, lichen, sticks,
rocks, dried leaves, and flowers. Paper and
pens were laid out with a note inviting people
to write out their joys and sorrows. This was
the grief tent, which offered public grief
rituals, free to all throughout the week of
Bioneers, conference-goer or not.
People inside sat in a circle on folding
chairs, taking slow, deep breaths in unison,
as a facilitator guided them through a
meditation to connect with their bodies, their
breath, their hearts, and the earth. Then, the
circle was invited to bring their attention to
something in nature that they loved, and
something in nature that they mourned. Next,
one by one, each person was invited to share
about what came up for them. As eyes welled up
with tears, people passed a box of tissues
across the circle to one another.
There was a long, natural pause following
each person’s turn, as the space grew silent
and the circle hummed with a sense of mutual
understanding, and shared loss.
Birgitta Kastenbaum, an end-of-life
guide, death midwife, and doula who offers
grief-tending through Bridging
Transitions in Los Angeles, co-facilitated
grief rituals, including this eco-grief
circle, throughout each day of Bioneers 2023.
She says that because the Bioneers
Conference is largely focused on ecological
healing and activism for people and the
planet, the subject matter carries with it
immense grief for many.
“We started to have
grief circles [at Bioneers] because we
started to recognize that there was an
extreme need for people to share,” she says.
Grief circles throughout the conference
varied—some focused on more general,
all-inclusive grief, and others focused more
specifically on subjects like “eco grief” or
“death and dying.” All were free, and open to
the public.
She says the idea to include grief in the
conference initially came out of panel
discussions on end-of-life care and
intentional dying that she, Anneke
Campbell (an activist who works as a writer,
filmmaker, poet, midwife, and yoga teacher),
and others were having. This prompted a
conversation among organizers, and eventually
led to the public grief tent.
Eco Grief
“We also started
noticing that there were a lot of people who
were having eco grief,” Kastenbaum
says—especially among lifelong activists who
had spent years standing up for the planet
only to be knocked down over and over again.
“[Activists] have had to rise up to be
pushed back down, and there was a sense of
hopelessness and grief. It became clear that
there was a desire for people to have spaces
where this could be expressed, in a circle
where communal grief was at the center.”
Ecological grief, or the grief we
experience due to the human-caused destruction
of nature and climate disasters, has become an
increasingly
common experience for many in the 21st
century. As we enter the Anthropocene
epoch in which human activity has the
most dominant impact on the planet’s
environment, therapists have been overwhelmed with clients experiencing the
mental health effects of our times. Mental
health experts have been grappling with what to do, and there has been
an increasing call for psychological
research into ways of dealing with eco grief
and eco-anxiety.
Kastenbaum says she thinks the reason
grieving circles like the one at Bioneers have
the potential to work for anyone, even
strangers off of the street, is that
universally we want to be witnessed, in our
grief.
“There’s something
about recognizing that you are not alone,”
she says. “Sitting in a circle, you hear
everybody’s stories and see that there’s
this communal thread, this tapestry, that
we’re all a part of. And each thread is
different, but when we weave together, it
makes us stronger.”
Kastenbaum says that the organizers
behind the Bioneers Conference’s grief tent
wanted to help people see how easy it is to do
grief-tending work. She says all it requires
is to create a space that feels safe—whether
that happens in your living room, in a park,
or somewhere else.
“There has to be a
sense of safety for people to be able to
share—so that can mean setting a little bit
of ground rules around what it means to sit
in this particular circle, and how we are
going to hold each other,” she says. “But
then, that’s it. We are just being present
to one another. The hope is that there was a
little bit of a spark there, like, ‘Ah, I
could possibly do this too.’”
Remembering How
to Grieve
Kastenbaum has lived in the U.S. for
decades, but was raised in a small rural
community in the Netherlands, where she grew
up witnessing the cycles of birth and
death—both of which often happened in the
home. Her father was a child Holocaust
survivor, and she says due to the resulting
fear and trauma, grief was an ever-present
element of her upbringing.
“Maybe the beauty
that I can see now, but I didn’t see then,
is that you learn to walk with grief,” she
says. “You learn to hold it, in a way, as a
constant companion—while at the same time
having joy in life and being excited about
the future… but it’s never gone.”
While grief is a natural process and
healthy response to life events, Kastenbaum
points out that—especially in the U.S. and
other modernized Western European
cultures—many people today tend to be what she
calls “grief illiterate.”
However, this is not the case everywhere
in the world.
“The only thing we
know about grief [in U.S. society] is that
you’re not supposed to have it—and if you
have it, you’ve got to get rid of it,” she
says. “When we look at other places the
world over, we see that they have ways in
which they hold grief.”
She says those ways can be as simple as
an altar with a photograph and a candle or a
prayer that is repeated each morning. Or, they
might be as complex as a weeklong festival
dedicated to grief and mourning, with myriad
traditions and rituals throughout.
She points out that the language
presented around grief is often focused on
“getting over it” and “getting through it.”
She noticed this especially in the language of
resources she found when she began offering
grief-tending work focused on death and dying
around 2012.
“It was presented as
something really negative,” she says. “There
was a sadness for me in that, because with
our grief, we also hold onto love. With our
grief, we hold onto memories. They are
intertwined. Often when we push away grief,
we’re pushing away our memories, our love,
all the beauty, all the wisdom, all the
gifts that come with that process.”
Francis Weller, a well-known
psychotherapist who guides grieving circles
and teaches people to facilitate grief-tending
work, writes in his book The
Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of
Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief:
“Grief and love are
sisters, woven together from the beginning.
Their kinship reminds us that there is no
love that does not contain loss and no loss
that is not a reminder of the love we carry
for what we once held close.”
While our culture may continue to tip-toe
around grief, there is a movement by people
like Weller, Kastenbaum, and many others for a
revival of shared grief work. Many people
around the U.S. and the world facilitate
community grieving circles and rituals. For
example, Dani Leonardo (who trained in grief
facilitator with Francis Weller) offered
community grief circles in Ashland, Oregon
following devastating fires as well as racist
violence that took place in 2020 and 2021,
which is detailed in my article “How Making
Space for Grief Can Promote Community
Healing,” originally published in 2021.
There are many grief circle facilitation
trainings and resources available around the
U.S. and world, including the Unitarian
Universalist Association’s guide for hosting virtual grief circles,
trainings through the Good
Grief Network or the Center
for Grief and Loss, as well as trainings offered by
individual grief professionals like Weller and many others.
Rituals for
Grief
Kastenbaum notes that we all have the
natural capacity to process grief through
ritual.
“I think by nature,
we are ritual makers—we just are,” she says, noting the way that children
will often create rituals around grief on
their own, whether that means speaking words,
writing a note, making a drawing, or
collecting a bouquet of dandelions to place
over a buried hamster.
“When something
dies, or something painful happens, children
pause,” she says. “They naturally have that
ability to create ritual. We might be
adults, but that’s still in us.”
Ritual has been intrinsic to human life
for millennia, and ritual likely played a foundational role in the creation
of early human societies according to research
in human evolution. Social psychologist Shira
Gabriel spoke to how important shared ritual
is to our mental health, in an article titled “What Happens When We Lose
Our Social Rituals?” by Jill Suttie, published
in 2020 in Greater Good Magazine.
Gabriel’s research shows how rituals, defined as “choreographed
events that produce an emotionally laden
experience,” help to bond us with others and create
meaning in our lives.
“Rituals give us a
feeling of going beyond the ordinary—of
having a moment that transcends that,
turning events into something special and
meaningful,” Gabriel is quoted as saying in
the article.
Suttie explains in the article that this
is “transcendent” because “when we participate
in ritual, we experience a sort of emotion
contagion that sociologist Émile Durkheim
called ‘collective effervescence.’ That uplift
and energy increase our sense of commonality
(even with strangers) and make us feel we are
part of a larger community.”
Kastenbaum points out that the size of a
ritual does not equate to its meaning. Small
and simple rituals can be just as powerful as
grand, ornate gestures, she says.
“Lighting a candle
every night for somebody you are actively
grieving—that could be immense in the
quality of the meaning that you are
creating,” she shares.
She says ritual has meaning for us as
humans, and without ritual for something as
intense and transformative as grief, there is
often a significant sense of disconnect.
Rituals, especially when they take place
with other people, are how most of us want and
need to make sense of grief, Kastenbaum says.
She notes that therapy can be helpful,
ritual can often be a more connective way to
process grief.
“We don’t want
to just book an appointment and sit across
from somebody for an hour and tell them
everything that’s wrong with us,” she says.
“That’s not how to honor grief. That’s not
how to hold grief.”
In fact, ritual is likely the reason some
people recover from loss more quickly and more
completely than others. Rituals performed
following loss, was the one factor more
emotionally resilient mourners have in common,
according to the results of a study titled “Rituals Alleviate
Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and
Lotteries” published in the Journal of
Experimental Psychology in 2014 and conducted
through the Harvard Business School.
In addition to public grief circles, the
grief tent at Bioneers also offered people the
chance to participate in co-creating a
communal altar, made from natural objects
(like moss, lichen, sticks, and rocks). Paper
and pens were laid out, too, and people were
invited to write out their grief, and tuck
notes into the altar.
“The idea was that
grief needs a space to lay, to be able to
rest,” Kastenbaum says, noting that people
were invited to “lay down” their grief at
the altar. “The beauty is that this altar
was alive. It was fed by our grief and
transformed,” she says. “When we started on
the first day, there were very few things on
the table. And at the end it was filled. And
that, too, is something really powerful for
people to see: how we can transform
something… From this grief, we created
beauty.”
She says this is something anyone could
easily do at home, share in their community,
or incorporate into a memorial. She says all
it takes is to create a dedicated space for
people to write or to gather natural elements
to symbolize their grief, and witness the
transformation together.