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Welcome to Sacred Grief

Nurturing Connection Within Ourselves, Between One Another, and With Life

Sacred Grief programs are for those whose hearts are broken open by personal, collective, ecological, and ancestral loss. For those who are searching for grief work that is holistic, pragmatic and soul-nourishing. For those who want to cultivate embodied presence with themselves and others in the passage that grief invites. For those who seek connection with the wider field of relationships and Spirit towards healing, wisdom and an invitational embrace of grief as belonging. For those who experience grief as a clarion call into spiritually grounded, culturally mindful action and eldership. And for those whose soul path is holding space within the thresholds of change.

Sacred Grief is for those who desire meaningful ways to be with grief and resilience as a sacred practice towards personal and collective healing.

Explore multiple paths towards cultivating a life-affirming relationship to grieving, personally and professionally.

Roots to Resiliency Path - foundational educational programs to deepen your relationship to grief and healing within cultural, ancestral, therapeutic, and ritual contexts.

Feeding the Forest Path - training programs and resources to deepen your skills and efficacy providing grief support and healing presence to others in 1:1 and group facilitation contexts.

Of Stone, Bone and Water Path - a deep dive apprenticeship into ritual, therapeutic, and ancestral skills and practices for healing practitioners called into the vocation of tending personal and collective thresholds of change.

Becoming the Mountain Path - extended mentoring for 1:1 and small peer group circles, fostering learning, support and accountability to refine your medicine and offerings.

All programs are trauma-informed, somatics-based, anti-oppressive and rooted in animism and decolonizing values. In the sentiments of Roshi Joan Halifax, Sacred Grief is about creating a collective community that has been deeply humanized by grief.

~Our grief does not need healing. Our healing needs our grief~

Stay connected and be the first to know when programs open for enrolment and to receive heart-full writing and learning content in service to sacred grief work. This newsletter will only appear in your inbox once every month or two.

Since I started learning from you in early 2020, I feel such gratitude for what has come in as a result of your teachings. I now have a reliable and natural connection to four elevated ancestors. I have an established sense of how grief is an anchor for my activist work. Oh, "anchor" really doesn't capture it...it's like grief is what makes it all work. Most times now, this collective grief just wants to live as a ground-ness, a catalytic backdrop, a distortion-preventer, and a friend who waves in and out. I am so very grateful to you for the ways you have opened these aspects up for my growth and exploration. I can see how they have given me so much capacity to be in dynamic, intimate community--something that is essential for me.

Candace Tkachuck

Sacred Grief Programs

Roots to Resiliency

Roots to Resiliency is a learning path focused on deepening your personal relationship to grief and resiliency. These are foundational programs nourishing the roots of embodiment, cultural awareness, ritual healing, Spirit relations, and ancestral practices for grieving. Programs include:

Coming Back to Ourselves: Embodiment and Culture in Grieving
- April 19th, 2023
- TBA, early 2024
Belonging to the World: Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief
- February 1st, 2023
- October 4th, 2023
Immanence: Grounded Practices to Support Our Spirit Relationships
- March 17th, 2023
- TBA, Spring 2024

Shauna Janz holds a safe and spacious environment in which to learn in. Her courses opened a door of which I had been standing in front of for a very long while. Shauna is a fiercely grounded and tender facilitator whose knowledge and understanding of grief, ancestral healing, and ritual, seems unending. You can feel her embodied understanding of what it means to hold space for folx interested in transforming grief. She took the 'woo woo' out of things that I have been interested in for decades and put the “WOW” back in. I am forever grateful and look forward to continuing to learn with her .

Traci Foster- Artistic Director and Mentor

Tending the Taproot

Tending the Taproot is an online portal of practice for folks who would like to continue gathering together for grief rituals, somatic resourcing, ancestral connection, peer support, and soul nourishment.

Tending the Taproot: A Place of Practice Towards Personal and Collective Healing
- next 3 month cohort, dates TBA

Shauna is an attuned listener, an empathic guide, and holds everyone she works with within high regard. She walks with a kind of knowledge, reverence for all life, and connection to both the seen and unseen worlds that is deeply needed in this time.

Participant- 2020 Cohort

Feeding the Forest

Feeding the Forest is a training path for those who are called to companion others with dignity through difficult experiences. These programs support you in cultivating your grief support roles through therapeutic skills and trauma-informed training. Programs include:

Healing Conversations: Five Guiding Principles to Support Someone through Grief
- self paced, enrol anytime
Therapeutic and Soulful Approaches to Support Grieving
- TBA
Trauma-Informed Grief Support: A Professional Development Workshop
- January 26th & 27th, 2023
- April 20th & 21st, 2023
- November 9th & 10th, 2023

I am a psychotherapist often working with folks managing and healing their trauma responses and histories alongside the interconnection with unexpressed grief, which prompted me to join this training. Some of the content was not new to me, but that which was I was able to use immediately in my sessions, while the refresher of content also enhanced my practice. What ended up being a powerful lesson was Shauna's facilitation, which was rooted in compassion and clear and direct communication. Her holding of our and her boundaries created a tangible honesty that left me never having to question her intentions or capacity, allowing me to fully root into the content. This lived lesson served as a powerful example for myself as facilitator and container holder for others, an example that is often not present in teaching, healing or co-creating spaces.

Alice Hacker - LCSW

Of Stone, Bone and Water

Of Stone, Bone and Water is an intimate 10 month training program for healing practitioners of diverse kinds who are called into tending ancestral and ritual healing in service to personal and collective thresholds of change.

Of Stone, Bone and Water: Ancestral Healing and Ritual Training
- September 2023 to June 2024 (now filled)
- September 2024

I've taken several classes centred around ancestral healing; some were "apolitical" and created deeply unsafe containers, so I came in pretty skeptical about signing up for this. Shauna and this program exceeded my expectations. She relayed the information in very clear ways, while leaving lots of room for mystery. She facilitated beautiful live calls, and radically modelled how to allow grief into the space. Decolonization, dismantling white supremacy, and what ancestral healing means for folks who have colonizer ancestors was at the forefront of her work. As someone with settler colonizer ancestors, her compassion and rigour in working with the deep, complex questions around decolonization was really good medicine.

A.W. - Performing Artist, Director, Activist

Becoming the Mountain

Becoming the Mountain is an extended mentoring path for 1:1 and small peer group support, learning and accountability for those already immersed in Sacred Grief.

Mentoring Circles - small peer groups, meeting once a month
- 4 month cohorts, ongoing enrolments

I connected with Shauna during one of the most difficult times in my life. She supported me to navigate my grief and helped me begin my journey of ancestral healing. She also gave me tools to deepen my skills in holding sacred space and ritual practice.

Cadence McCann - Inner Cadence Healing

Have a question? Reach out here.

A little about Shauna Janz - Founder of Sacred Grief

We are the glorious manifestation of the power of the universe. We are the fingertips

of the force that drives the stars, so do your job and FEEL.

~ Tanya Tagaq

My name is Shauna Janz (she/her) and I am the founder of Sacred Grief; a growing vision contributing towards cultural regeneration through the heart of grief, and an extension of my joy and service towards more just, connected and loving futures.

For 15+ years I have been facilitating individual, family, organizational and community grief education, support and ritual, trauma-informed training, group process, and 6+ years of ancestral healing and reclamation work. Since 2019, it has been a pleasure to extend Sacred Grief offerings online. I travel nationally and internationally to offer in-person workshops and healing retreats, and am in partnership with national organizations offering trauma-informed facilitation training.

My ancestors are northern European from the lands of Scots Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Nordic cultures. On my fathers side, my people are recent refugee-settlers by way of Poland and Ukraine, and on my mothers side, my people are early colonial-settlers to Turtle Island. I currently reside on the unceded lands of the K'omoks and Pentatch First Nations, on Vancouver Island Pacific West Coast of Canada,

I am in ongoing commitment to embody and work from a place that understands my historical and current social location as a white cis-gendered queer woman with lineages of both colonial settler and refugee experiences, and how this informs my contribution and responsibilities towards collective healing. I am a somatic intuitive who finds sacred communion through music, dance, nature and contemplative practice; a practitioner of the Old Norse tradition of seiðr; and a singer-songwriter.

If you are seeking to learn more about me and my learning lineages, or to bring capacity-building workshops to your business team, organization or community (in-person or virtual options), please visit my consulting website and be in touch.

If you would like to stay connected to be the first to know about Sacred Grief programs and learning opportunities, and to receive more personal writing and learning reflections from me on this path, I warmly welcome you to join my newsletter sent every month or two.

with heart and respect,

~Shauna

Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of
reassurance and stability for the wider community.
~ Francis Weller

The depth of community building, vulnerability, and safe ritual container in such a short time blew me away. I learned more than imagined due to the exceptional communication skills and balance of the intuitive and cognitive. Shauna's skill as a facilitator and ritualist is unparalleled" - Ash Schoep, Climate Change & Consciousness

Shauna is a master at holding space. It is very easy to relax and trust and drop into the process with her in the lead. She is also brilliant and highly intuitive, so her responses and guidance around questions and comments are always bang on. And that includes encouraging us to follow what feels right in our own experience and body. She is strong on safety. And she brings lots of humor. The healing work I've been doing with her over the past year has had a huge impact on my life. Mary McAlister, The Base Healing Community

Shauna is a gifted and balanced teacher. Her practical, grounded yet deeply intuitive nature allowed everyone in our group to relate to her in their own way, and she held our ritual container with such safety and support. I feel blessed to have had her as a leader in this work!
M.T., Ancestral Healing Retreat participant

Shauna was an awesome facilitator with amazing empathy, patience, intuition, and compassion. Grateful to have learned from her. Marlene Torvonen, Nanaimo Hospice

Shauna you are a true facilitator. Thank you for your gift of space-holding, your knowledge and experience, your ability to genuinely include everyone in such a graceful and uplifting way. It was such an honor to be a part of this course, and each person contributed valuable insights; a sense of community naturally emerged. Sally Ross, Healing Practitioner

I felt instantly welcomed by Shauna's warm presence and her approach to supporting others through grief is refreshing and much needed on our society. With so many helpful takeaways, I feel more more prepared to support others. Amber Rowse-Robinson, Volunteer

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be

counted as warriors

~ Adrienne Rich