Dark Woods of Grief Presents
Sacred Body // Wild Grief
An Introduction to Somatic Grief Tending
A 3-hour live online workshop for practitioners who are ready to go deeper
$97 USD · Live on Zoom
June 18th 10am pacific time // June 30th 4pm pacific time
Choose what time works best for you!
The body is a sacred vessel
we each get one ~ and only one ~ in this life
It carries both wisdom and trauma – joy and grief.
And grief is a wild thing
You can feel it in the room.
A client sits across from you — or in a square on your screen — and beneath whatever they’re saying – there’s something else.
Something older. Something heavier. Something that hasn’t yet found words.
Maybe they call it anxiety. Or burnout. Or “I just can’t seem to move on.”
But you sense it’s grief.
The question is: what kind? And what does it need?
And how do you invite it to begin to move
and safely guide your client through this sacred passage.
Grief and trauma are not the same thing.
They often arrive together. They can look identical from the outside. And the instinct to treat them the same way — to apply the same tools, the same pacing, the same invitation — is understandable.
But this can leave people even more stuck than before they sought help.
Grief, when it is “clean” — when it is the natural energy of loss moving through a body held in community — wants to flow. If you know how to hold the space, it will move. And when it does, there is relief. There is integration. There is something that feels like a return to self.
Trauma is different, but often layered with grief. This is what we call ‘complex grief’ — and you need a specific and careful set of skills to move with it wisely.
This workshop is about building the foundation of those skills, and learning to recognize and differentiate so you know what kind of support is needed and when. It’s also about deepening your connection with your own body – because we hold not only grief & trauma in our bodies – but also wisdom and intuition.
Sacred Body // Wild Grief
This is a 3-hour live online workshop designed for practitioners — therapists, coaches, bodyworkers, yoga teachers, group facilitators, anyone who holds space for others in their pain. We will explore:
- How grief is held in the body — what it looks like somatically, how it moves when it’s allowed to, and what gets in the way
- The difference between clean grief and complex grief — and why that distinction changes everything about how you work
- How trauma and grief interweave — what trauma does to the nervous system, and what that means for the grief tending process
- The core principle of pendulation — the rhythmic movement between the grief vortex and the healing vortex that forms the drumbeat underneath all somatic grief work
- Why community matters — grief is not meant to be moved alone, and understanding this changes how you design the spaces you hold
- An introduction to grief tending as a practice — what it asks of you, what it gives back, and how you can begin to develop these skills in your own work
This is not a lecture. It is a facilitated transmission — part teaching, part felt sense, part introduction to a lineage of work that has been gathered over 25 years of my personal practice – and through teachers, mentors and lineages that are timeless.
Who this is for
This workshop is for you if:
- You’re a therapist, counsellor, coach, bodyworker, yoga teacher, or facilitator who regularly encounters grief in the people you serve — and you want to meet it with more skill, more confidence, and more presence
- You’ve hit a ceiling in your current framework. You know that what someone is carrying goes deeper than what you’re training prepared you for. You’re ready to go there
- You’re drawn to somatic work but aren’t sure how it applies to grief specifically. You want the theory grounded in felt sense, not just concept.
- You’ve walked through significant grief yourself, and you feel the calling to help others do the same — but you want to do it in a good way
- You’re curious about the Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training (Level 1) and want to experience this work before committing to the full program
What you'll walk away with
- A clear, embodied understanding of how grief and trauma differ — and what each needs
- The beginning of a somatic vocabulary for working with grief in group and 1:1 spaces
- An introduction to pendulation and why it’s the core skill underneath everything else in grief tending work
- A sense of what becomes possible when grief has a solid container — and how you can begin creating that in your practice
- A felt experience of Josea’s teaching, so you can make an informed decision about the full Level 1 training
About Your Guides
Josea Tamira Crossley
Founder of Dark Woods of Grief
Josea Tamira Crossley has spent over 25 years gathering the threads of somatic therapy, ancestral healing, ritual facilitation, and community-based grief work — and weaving them into something her students describe as both rigorous and profoundly alive.
She has trained with Francis Weller (author, Wild Edge of Sorrow), Mariah Moser (Relational Somatic Psychotherapy), Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), Diane Poole Heller (DARe), Irene Lyon (SmartBodySmartMind), and others. She has facilitated grief work with hundreds of individuals across North America and beyond.
Her ancestors came from Ireland and England — and her own journey with intergenerational grief, alongside her commitment to decolonizing how we hold pain, runs through everything she teaches.
She is the founder of Dark Woods of Grief and the creator of the Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training, now in its fifth cohort.
Jane Spielman
Dark Woods of Grief Community Elder
Jane worked as an educator for 50 years, but is still deeply excited by and involved in focusing on creating educational spaces where students are immersed in rich natural environments that encourage their own questions and ways of knowing to drive curriculum. She helped build trauma and healing informed school programs all over New York City that got to the root of what was in the way of student’s learning. When her wife of over 3 decades fell ill, she began her study of caregiving and grief. Jane believes that learning how to grieve and face trauma in safe-enough spaces is essential to physical, emotional and spiritual life; and is absolutely essential in the process of discovering the gifts we have to offer the world.
Jane has studied with Zen and Tibetan Buddhist masters, hospice providers and is a graduating student in the Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training. Her work is grounded in these lineages as well as Somatic tools, Internal Family Systems work & Reiki.
Jane is a Jewish anti-Zionist who believes we were born for these times, and a lifelong activist, with a focus on allyship in anti-colonist struggles. She is also a proud lesbian who has always represented and collaborated with other LGBTQ2S folx.
Jane has built her own active practice in Sow the Seeds of Healing to support individuals as well as groups in somatic grief and trauma work.
The Details
What: Sacred Body // Wild Grief : An Introduction to Somatic Grief Tending
Format: 3-hour live workshop on Zoom
Investment: $97 USD
Dates: June 18th 10am pacific time // June 30th 4pm pacific time – Choose the one that works for you!
A next step, if you feel the call
This workshop is the natural entry point into the Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training — Level 1, a 4-month online immersion beginning September 15th, 2026
In that training, you’ll develop the full foundation of somatic grief tending and ritual facilitation skills — learning to hold space for both individual and group grief work, to tend your own energy while doing deep work with others, and to bring these practices into your community in a way that is sustainable, ethical, and soulful.
Investment: $3,000 USD · Payment plans available · Solidarity pricing for BIPOC practitioners
Attendance at this workshop — and the discount offered to live participants — is one of the most aligned ways to step toward that training.
What graduates of the full training said...
The world needs people who can hold this.
We are living in a time of compounding loss — personal, collective, ecological. Grief is everywhere. And yet most people have nowhere to bring it.
You can be someone who knows how to hold that.
It starts with deepening your understanding here.
Save your seat for $97.
*Solidarity pricing and accessibility needs: please reach out to info@darkwoodsofgrief.com before registering.