Welcome to Sacred Grief

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

Sacred Grief is an online centre of learning and practice focused on the reclamation of life-ways for grieving, ritual healing, ancestral connection, and animate living towards liberation and new culture building.

All programs are trauma-informed and rooted in liberatory, animist, and decolonial values.


Explore multiple paths of learning and training

  • Roots to Resiliency Path - foundational education programs to explore your relationship to grief and healing, for yourself and for supporting others, within cultural, ancestral, therapeutic, somatic, and ritual contexts.
  • Feeding the Forest Path - soulful training programs to cultivate your animate and ancestral relational ecology of support and to deepen your decolonial and trauma-informed skills for companioning others in 1:1 and group healing contexts.
  • Becoming the Mountain Path - longer-form immersion programs into ritual and ancestral skills and practices to deepen your vocation tending personal and collective thresholds of change.



Sacred Grief is for those who desire meaningful ways to be with grief, ritual and ancestral relating as sacred practices towards personal and collective healing.

 

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

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 - participant in Sacred Grief learning paths


Shauna is a nurturing and present facilitator that cares about each individual and tends to the whole beautifully. She balances science, learned experience and spirit-guided wisdom in her training to create content that is relatable on all levels. She ushers the group to stay present in difficult spaces, while honouring any individual's needs that arise. She is joyful, real and powerful. I highly recommend working with her.

Mindy Taylor - participant in Michigan Grief Ritual training

 

Roots to Resiliency

Roots to Resiliency is a foundational path offering programs for deepening your relationship to grief, ritual and ancestral connection, for yourself and within your support contexts. These programs nourish the roots of embodiment, cultural awareness, ritual healing, animate relations, and ancestral support for grieving and loving.

  • Healing Conversations: Five Guiding Principles to Support Someone Grieving
    • mini course, self-paced
    • enrol anytime
  • Supporting Dignity Through Grief: Soulful Approaches and Therapeutic Skills
    • 8 module course, self-paced
    • enrol anytime
  • Coming Back to Ourselves: Embodiment and Culture in Grieving
    • 9 week course, pre-recorded lessons and live weekly teaching calls
    • February 26th, 2025
  • Belonging to the World: Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief
    • 9 week course, pre-recorded lessons and live weekly teaching calls
    • October 1st, 2025

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

 

Feeding the Forest

Feeding the Forest is a deepening path offering programs to further cultivate your spiritual and ancestral practices, and your trauma-informed capacity to be alongside others through difficult experiences with dignity and humanity. These programs feed the growth of your animate ecology of relations, and expand your helping roles through therapeutic skills, soulful approaches, and attuned presence.

  • Immanence: Grounded Practices to Support Our Spirit Relationships
    • 3 month program, biweekly live teaching calls
    • April 16th, 2025
  • Trauma-Informed Grief Support: A Helping Skills Training (Pt 1)
    • Two-day online live-time training
    • January 30th & 31st, 2025
  • Facilitating Grief: Considerations for Support Groups and Grief Rituals (Pt 2)
    • TBD
  • Tending the Taproot: A Community of Practice
    • 3 month practice cohorts, meeting multiple times each month
    • February 2nd, 2025

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

 

Becoming the Mountain

Becoming the Mountain is an immersive path offering longer-form programs and extended mentoring to deepen your vocation tending to your own and others healing towards personal and cultural change. These programs are a deep dive into ritual healing, ancestral relations, and liberatory practices while fostering a peer community of support and accountability to refine your medicine and offerings.

  • Of Stone, Bone and Water: Ancestral Healing and Ritualist Training
    • September 2023 to June 2024
    • October 2024 to July 2025
    • 2025/2026 cohort TBD
  • Elder Wisdom: Rooting in Lineages of Liberation (co-led with Tamira Cousett)
    • 2025 TBD

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

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

counted as warriors

~ Adrienne Rich