january 29th, 5-7pm PT
Live Zoom Meet & Greet
with Josea & the Dark Woods Team
Are you wondering if this way of working with grief & trauma is actually for you?
about the event
We will lead a short somatic meditation, share briefly about our current offerings & then have an open question period where you can ask us anything.
*Please note that we are not able to offer therapeutic support during this meet & greet session. We are happy to answer questions about the work and offer ideas around what could be helpful for your unique situation & needs based on our combined 150+ years of experience, but this isn’t the right space to do deeper therapeutic work.
Check out our team below – we will all be there to answer your questions.
Meet the Team

Josea Tamira Crossley
Team Lead, Mentor & Founder of Through the Dark Woods Community
For over 20 years, I’ve been working with grief & trauma. Through practices that work with the nervous system & rewiring the brain learned through my studies in Somatic Therapy, Attachment Theory, Deep Nature Connection, Craniosacral therapy, Shamanic Study, Tibetan Buddhism and Yoga, I’ve learned to support people to completely transform how they experience the world and themselves. As a survivor of severe childhood abuse, learning these skills was a matter of necessity.
In terms of walking through the dark woods and returning with gifts, I am a living, breathing example, and this work is my offering to you.
It is my mission to create spaces in this world where people can experience enough safety & belonging, and can gain enough skillfulness to be able to heal.
The body does the rest.
I am deeply and forever grateful to my mentors Elizabeth Claire Burr & Sonara Medicine Wolf, and for my teachers Francis Weller (author of the Wild Edge of Sorrow), Mariah Moser (Opening to Grace Relational Somatic Psychotherapy), Peter Levine & Diane Poole Heller, Irene Lyon, Jon Young, and for the influence of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Martin Prechtel, Gabor Mate & Robert Moss.
I am a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor through ACCT Canada and can provide receipts for both 1:1 counselling and group work.
I currently live, work & play in the seaside mountain town of qathet, BC, on the traditional territory of the Tla’amin people.

Jane Spielman
Team Elder & LGTBQ2S Community Lead
Jane worked as an educator for 50 years, supporting transformative, inquiry-based literacy for children from birth through teenagers to undergraduate and graduate teacher candidates. 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.

Elizabeth Claire Burr
Team Mentor & Meditation Practice for Grief Facilitator
Elizabeth has been studying the Vajrayana & Nature of Mind teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition with Mingyur Rinpoche since 2008. **She has taken the Bodhisattva vow, and her deepest aspiration is to support all beings with wisdom and compassion and to practice this in the world as best she can. This has come to manifest in many forms; meditation and yoga teacher, cranial sacral and somatic therapist, founder/owner of a healing arts center, kirtan leader, doula, mothering, mentoring and sacred partnership.
She embodies compassion and joy in a way that is rare in this world, and people often say they experience Love of the Divine, self and each other in a way they haven’t before when being in her presence. She currently resides by the ocean on the traditional territory of the Ligwilda’xw people; the We Wai Kai, Wei Wai Kum and Kwiakah First Nation.

Sabrina Simon
BIPOC Community Lead & Facilitator
Sabrina is a world traveler, singer, and a Creatrix and contributor towards a new embodied culture. She uses embodiment practices, ritual, song, yoga, breathwork and Thai yoga massage in a beautifully woven form of facilitating emotional release. She values the processes of emotional release through cathartic expressions along with bringing support and safety to the nervous system.
She was initiated into grief work by the loss of her son, Jude, during preterm labor in 2022. Since then, she has made her grief her ally and greatest teacher. She aims to bring the conscious tending of grief to her communities and especially to underserved populations.
Sabrina has completed 700 hours of Yoga Teacher Training through School Yoga Institute and the Paramanand Institute of Yoga Sciences and Research; she learned Thai Yoga Massage through Hadadi Thai Massage in Lisbon, Portugal; she studied sacred space holding through the Kula Collective in Guatemala; and she has learned to use her gift of song through many ceremonies over the world. She is a graduate of the 2024 Cohort of the Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training.

Madison Steadwell
Online Community Manager, Facilitator & Neurodivergent Community Lead
Madison Steadwell is an artist, heartful creature and grief tender who lives on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe peoples of Fort William First Nation, now known as Thunder Bay, the land she was born on. She is currently studying Social Work at Lakehead University. She has also completed two years of study at Wisdom of the Earth Wilderness School, and reverently carries the medicine of deep nature connection and community building.
The loss of village and colonization being one of her most heartbreaking griefs, she is devoted to learning and embodying the old wisdom, stories, rituals, and traditions of her ancestors with the intention of healing. She is also a graduating student of both Year 1 and 2 of the Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training.
Madison is autistic, and is on her journey of “breaking the masks” and becoming more of who she already is, her natural self! Being extremely sensitive, she recognizes the “wound as gift” in her autism oh so very well. She is walking the path of self love, allowing herself to exist as she is, through embodiment and courage.

SaNaz Hosseini
community Facilitator
Having navigated her own path through grief many times, Sanaz is passionate about helping others find their way. As an Iranian woman and an immigrant, she has faced multiple forms of loss, and what is coined as disenfranchised grief, often without access to resources or community support. This journey taught her how isolating grief can feel and the importance of processing it. Over the years, she has learned to channel her grief and recognize its transformative power. Now, she is committed to helping others navigate their own losses.
Professionally, she has a diverse background that complements her role as a grief facilitator. She is a product manager with degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering, and management. She has mentored young professionals and volunteered for a suicide helplin , both of which have strengthened her ability to support people during difficult times. Her passion for storytelling has helped her connect with people on a deeper level and understand the power of shared experiences in healing.
As a facilitator, she strives to create a compassionate and supportive space for others, grounded in empathy and enriched by professional and cultural insights.
She teaches yoga and meditation and is a graduate of the 2024 Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training. She also currently serves as a peer grief facilitator in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.

chanda Turner
CoMMUNITY Facilitator
Hi, I’m Chanda. I live in Inuvik, NWT in the Gwich’in and Inuvialuit Settlement Regions, and am happiest spending time out on the land. I am a lover of skyscapes, good food, candles, kitchen witching, boats, skidoos, intimate friendships, astrology, twinkle lights, and dogs.
I am yearning to rebuild our deep connections to other beings, human and non-human, and experience the vastness of our universe. I am learning to use movement, acceptance, and compassion to heal and discover myself after years of masking and living in trauma response patterns. I have recently completed the Dark Woods Grief Tending and Ritual Facilitation Training, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to hold space and offer support to others on their own healing journeys.
Other hats I wear include: Step-mom, Dog Mom, Marine Protected Area Senior Biologist, Witch, Consultant, Disrupter, Neurospicy Human, Partner, Daughter, Crafter, and Sister. My current day job(s) are in wildlife co-management with the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in peoples, who have signed land claims that guarantee their involvement in wildlife management. I work to move the processes of co-management closer to true, equal power-sharing and consideration of Traditional Knowledge and ways of knowing in what are still very colonial and science-based practices. This work, as well as where I live and who I love, has moved me to challenge my own biases and inherent beliefs from growing up in western settler culture and to encourage others to do the same.

Adeline Lefevre
CoMMUNITY Facilitator
Adeline is a wild woman and lover of nature and big adventures. She came to Canada in 2018 to complete the Wisdom of the Earth Wilderness School Immersion program. Through this training she became a mentor for children in deep nature connection and discovered that grieving is necessarily a part of healing and coming into deeper connection with nature, each other and ourselves. Upon returning to her home in France, she lost her dear mother. The depth of this grief led her return to the path of grief work and to Canada to complete the 2024 Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training. She has held grief circles both online and in person, and is currently home living in France.

Sitka Moss
Community Facilitator
Sitka is one of many of us who were born into grief, and her commitment has been to transform her wounds into gifts for the world. Her capacity, expanded through her own walk with grief, shows up in her ability and willingness to hold space for all types of grief.
Rooted in deep teachings of Great Mother Earth, she guides others with an unending well of compassion. She is a practicing Witch and brings elements of Earth-based magic to everything she does. Her unique approach is rooted in ritual and woven with a diverse approach from her elders and teachers.
She has learned from and sat in ritual with Terese Charvet, Laurence Cole, Tere Carranza and Mary Hart of Sacred Groves. Through this, she has been immersed in the teachings of Malidoma and Sobonfu Some who brought traditional Dagara grief ritual to North America in the 90’s. She is also a graduate of the 2024 Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training.

KIMBER FINNEy
Community Facilitator
Kimber is a naturally intuitive healer who follows her gut in everything she does. She has been studying healing, grief & death in depth since her own initiation into grief in the summer of 2023. In December of that year, she found Dark Woods of Grief and attended a retreat with us. She knew she had found her calling. She is a graduating student of the 2024 Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training and is also a Certified Death Doula through Village Deathcare. Kimber has a huge heart and brings a depth of humor & hard-earned wisdom to everything she touches. She currently resides in Bend, Oregon on the traditional territory of the Wasqu, Wana Kana (Warm Springs), and Northern Piute peoples.

Madisen HILLIGOSS
Community Facilitator
Madisen has lived along the Columbia River, the Salish Sea, and the surrounding mountains her whole life. As a sensitive child she spent her time among the trees and making art- two things that would later help her on her journey with grief.
She was initiated into grief at the tender age of 15 when both her father and her dog died within a few months. She knows from experience that there is not enough support in the world for grievers and is passionate about extending a hand to others on this journey. She also carries gratitude for her early acquaintance with grief, as it has kept her aligned with her heart her whole adult life.
Madisen is currently living on the lands of the Coast Salish peoples near Seattle, and can be found skiing, making natural paints, hide tanning, and teaching nature connection to kids when she isn’t facilitating in our Dark Woods Grief Support Group! She is a graduating student of the 2024 Dark Woods Grief Tending & Ritual Facilitation Training.