What is Returnings

Led by Gayano Shaw, Emma Collins, Jason Stewart

I’m delighted to be sharing this 5-day residential with Jason and Gayano (next dates to be confirmed) – in Wales for anyone bereaved, bereft, inert, saddened, heartbroken and grappling with how it is to be human and be alive in these times.

Join us to grapple with what it might mean to know grief as wisdom, as recognition, as bearing faithful witness to ‘what is’; Grief as a skill, joined at the hip with love and wholly mandated as part of an ennobling human endeavour…

Returnings is a time to be with others, for grief to be more than ‘just ‘mine’ and personal to ‘me’ – a time to be accompanied; to be part of creating a ‘non judgmental human basket in which to thrash around in’ with love, praise, gratitude and an indebtedness for being alive as cornerstones of our being together.

What to expect

  • We envisage sharing, walking, ceremony, ritual, storytelling, music, tears, laughter, and we will all be needed for fire and home tending together.
  • The shared garnering, preparing and cooking together of the foods that will sustain us will be part of the backbone and hearth of our being together.
  • Interwoven through our days will be the call to stillness, to praise, to lineage and the tending of the lived relationships between others, our non human world and the unseen world.

We initiate this gathering fed from our deep living and daily practice of NVC infused with and called forth from the teachings of Stephen Jenkinson (http://orphanwisdom.com/) and others (see below), as well as our lived grief and broken heartedness.

Our five days will be woven with many threads and in particular Francis Weller’s ‘Five Gates of Grief’, with our days  gently anchored within the five gates:

  • Everything We Love, We will Lose;
  • The Places That Have Not Known Love;
  • The Sorrows of the World;
  • Ancestral Grief;
  • What We Expected and Did Not Receive

We are intending poems, songs, stories, ritual, ceremony for each day to honour each of these –  the gates offering  focus and intent – a threshold towards what is there for each us.

When, where and how much?

Venue: Denmark Farm Trust, Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales SA48 8PB
Contribution: Sliding scale £265 – £485
Deposit required: £100 to secure your place”

The sliding scale gives you an option to contribute what you believe you can afford along a scale of what the trainers find sustainable for themselves. If you are confused, you can use this guideline: the bottom end of the scale is for people who regularly find it difficult to pay their rent, and the top is for people who regularly eat in a nice restaurant. Still confused? Choose somewhere in the middle.

Any questions, thoughts, reflections or to book –   Please  contact gayano on gayano@ymail.com, 01558 650747 or 07933 743105.