Roots of Ritual

Grief Tending Foundations Level 1 Facilitation Training

Online Training Starting April 2025 - 5 Spots Left

This 4-month online journey guides you through the foundations of grief tending while honoring the sacred nature of this work.

From April to August 2025, you’ll participate in 9 live teaching circles, receive 6 personal mentoring sessions, and gain access to our supportive community forum.

Each module builds your capacity to create grief tending spaces where pain can transform into medicine – where broken hearts become pathways to deeper connection.

You’ll develop practical facilitation skills grounded in somatic awareness and ancestral wisdom, all while being held in a cohort of fellow practitioners committed to bringing this essential healing back to their communities.

No travel required – just your willingness to step into this sacred work from wherever you call home.

In these times of collective upheaval, ecological crisis, and profound fracturing of our communities...

…the call for those who can hold space for grief has never been more urgent.

Many of you have been asking for a more accessible way to learn this work, and I’ve been listening.

I’m excited to announce a new doorway into this work:

Roots of Ritual: Grief Tending Foundations (Online Training)

I have a vision of what's possible when more of us are equipped to tend grief in a deeply soulful way in our communities.

I see a world where pain isn’t pushed away or suppressed, but transmuted into gifts.

Where ritual creates a sense of belonging.

Where our broken hearts become pathways to deeper connection.

I dream of somatic-based grief tending spaces in every community, every organization, every gathering place. Places where we can unravel from the colonized mindsets that separate us from our emotions, from each other, from the Earth. Places where we remember that grief and trauma are not problems to be solved, but initiatory energies we need to honor and alchemize.

This training may be calling to you if:

You've witnessed how unacknowledged grief creates dis-ease in body, mind, spirit, and community
You're already holding space for others but would love to deepen your skills and support
You sense that ritual and grief tending are missing medicines in our fractured world
You yearn to create spaces where people can reconnect with their emotional wholeness
You feel a longing to bring these healing ways to your community, organization, or clients
You recognize grief tending as essential to decolonization and cultural healing work
You envision being part of a network of grief tenders seeding these practices worldwide

There is so much heartbreak in the world at this time, many days I ask myself, how can we go on?

But we must. 💔We must because here we are, and what is the alternative, really?

There is a saying in Arabic – In’shallah. It more or less translates as, “God willing.”

I love this, because it is a kind of prayer but also an acknowledgment that we are not, ultimately, in control of what happens.

Yes, we can affect change.

Yes, we can create meaningful things in the world, and we certainly are a part of co-creating our own realities.

Yet, ultimately, the big things, like how and when we and the ones we love the most will die or leave us, are simply not up to us.

But what we can do is keep showing up. This does not always mean having the right answer. Sometimes it means not knowing anything at all anymore.

Sometimes it means being open to the unknown in a completely new way.

Sometimes it means continuing to let our hearts break, rather than going numb.

As Francis Weller says, “So much depends on a broken heart…”

feeling the

Feels

Have you been feeling the call to the Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training, but haven’t been able to imagine how you could travel to BC for the in person retreats? Has the full training felt just beyond reach financially?

At long last, and thanks to many of you asking, we have an alternative option!!

Beginning April 22nd through mid-August 2025, this journey will take you deep into the foundations of grief tending and group facilitation while allowing you to learn from wherever you call home.

This new Level 1 Online Training will run concurrently with our full training program (Levels 1 & 2), with participants joining many of the same calls together, creating a rich and diverse learning community.

The Gifts of This Journey

This is not just a training—it’s an initiatory journey into creating alchemical spaces for suffering to transform into medicine. When you step into the Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training Level 1, you receive:

9 Live Teaching Circles/Modules that will transform how you understand and facilitate grief work (Apr 22, May 27, Jun 3/10/17, Jul 8/15, Aug 5/12)
6 Personal Mentoring Sessions where I’ll hold space for your own process, your questions, and your emerging vision
Lifetime Access to the Dark Woods Online Community Forum—a digital hearth where our community gathers
The Return from the Underworld Course—12 additional modules of practices & tools that will help inform the rest of your learning.
The 2025 Roots of Ritual: Grief Tending Foundations Manual—written with both practical guidance and soul wisdom
A Place in the Circle of our Dark Woods Grief Support Group, where you’ll both receive and observe the work in action

Our journey will unfold through these 9 Modules:

Entering the Dark Woods: Welcoming all five gates of grief
Differentiating & Addressing: Understanding grief, complex grief, and trauma
Soulful & Somatic Skills: Embodying practices that release stuck energy
Somatic Skills in Action: Working with the body’s wisdom
Primal Energy & Anger: Honoring the fierce protector that often guards our deepest wounds
Story as Elder: Discovering how myth becomes medicine for the grieving soul
Tending the Inner Fire: Preparing yourself as a strong vessel
Ethics & Relational Dynamics: Creating containers that truly hold everyone in the circle
Planning Your Grief Support Circles: Bringing your unique medicine into the world

Throughout our time together, we’ll explore how grief work is fundamentally decolonization work – reclaiming our emotional sovereignty, our right to feel deeply, our connection to ancestral ways of metabolizing loss collectively rather than in isolation. We’ll examine how colonization has severed our relationship with grief and how we can restore these vital practices.

There is also ample space made for discussion and questions to deepen your understanding, thus curriculum flows like a river, adapting to the energy and needs of our circle while maintaining its essential direction.

A Vision Unfolding

This Level 1 online training is part of a larger vision. In future years, (starting in 2026) it will become the foundation, the first spiral of the journey, followed by Level 2 in-person retreats that I will offer on the West Coast of BC, and *hopefully* in other key locations in the world. My hope is to bring the teaching to you rather than requiring everyone to come to me.

This year, our Level 1 and full training participants will gather together in many of the same virtual circles, creating a rich tapestry of experience and wisdom.

*This is also the last year I will be offering Levels 1 & 2 together as an 8-month immersive journey, and we have just 6 seats left in that training!

Calling in the Circle…

I’m inspired to keep this circle intimate and powerful, so I am opening just 12 seats for this inaugural Level 1 Online Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training.

3 seats are already taken, which means we are opening now for 9 more of you to step in.

Is Your Soul Calling You to This Work?

Listen deeply, because this training will ask much of you. It will invite you to face your own ungrieved losses, to stretch beyond comfort, to step into leadership in ways that may feel frightening at first.

This is a mentorship-style training – not a passive consumption of information, but a mutual commitment to transformation.

As you step closer to your fullest potential as a leader and space holder, old wounds tied to your gifts may arise.

The Commitment:

The training includes 1:1 mentoring as well as many other supportive components, and is designed carefully to empower you to navigate these places with grace.

Yet still, you need to be prepared to walk through the gates of initiation that prepare you to hold powerful space for others. This is why registration for this training is also by application only.

The investment for this journey is $2,500 USD or 5 monthly payments of $500 USD.

We all need support on the journey of stepping into our gifts as the leaders and co-creators of the world we envision for the future.

This training offers you a way to nurture your own leadership by being in a deeply supportive cohort of others who are walking the same path.

Are you ready to make a bold commitment to yourself and to this work?

To begin your application journey or to speak with me about whether this path is right for you, you can APPLY HERE NOW.

A Call to the Brave-Hearted

The level of suffering in the world is great at this time.

Systems are collapsing. Communities are fragmenting. Hearts are breaking in isolation.

And yet – when grief is properly tended, it becomes compost for new life, for vision, for the world we know is possible.

This is decolonization work at its core – reclaiming our right to feel, to break open, to be held by community rather than shamed for our vulnerability.

Are you ready to commit to what it takes to step into your gifts, your fullest presence + offering in the world?

Are you ready to go beyond your comfort zone to claim the life & work you most long for?

If something in you is trembling with both fear and recognition – that is a good sign.

The Dark Woods are calling.

Will you answer?

With fierce love and commitment to creating a world where grief has its rightful place,

Josea

P.S. If you feel drawn to this work but have questions about whether it’s the right fit, please reach out. This is too important a commitment to make without clarity. I’m here to help you discern your path – these 12 seats in this training are for the folks who are absolutely meant to be there.

You can fill out the application HERE and we will book a short chat to answer any questions you have, with absolutely no pressure to join if it’s not the right fit for you at this time.

"Thanks Josea...

...for your wisdom, curiosity, care and attention during the course. It was a privilege and a gift to be in circle with everyone. I cherished the time we spent in vulnerable presence with each other. I learned much about holding the space for grief and being held by community, ancestors and the earth.”

~ Ahava Shira

"The work I did with Josea Tamira Crossley in 2015 and 2016 literally changed my life and was part of what saved my life from the brink of serious breakdown. Josea is hands down my go expert on how grief and trauma are held in the body and how as a community we can come together for deep healing. I have never met someone so committed to living the truth of what they teach. Truly trauma informed in her approach, if grief is even remotely something you're dealing with (even collective grief) working with Josea is necessary work! Big claim i know. I stand by it."