Portal: A Transformative Journey of Grief is a 7-week program designed to support women in the midlife portal through the transformational experience of grief. This program integrates somatic resourcing, creating a safe and nurturing environment for participants to cultivate an embodied relationship with grief. The journey is structured around five portals, each representing a unique aspect of grief that many women experience in the midlife portal:
- Grief and Joy: In this portal participants will walk through the experience of grief and its ability to crack us open to greater capacity for depth and joy in our life.
- The Stories We Inherited: Participants dive into the narratives passed down through generations, examining how familial and cultural stories influence their experience of grief. This portal encourages individuals to reflect on these inherited stories, discerning which narratives serve them and which may need to be released or redefined.
- Hopes Unmet: This portal addresses the grief associated with unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Participants explore the pain of unmet expectations and aspirations, finding ways to acknowledge these losses and creating space for healing and maintaining a relationship with hope.
- The Invisible Woman: This portal dives into the grief that exists within womanhood and femininity that is directly related to the many cultural narratives and expectations given to women. We explore how these narratives can often lead to a lost or distorted sense of identity, a poor relationship with agency and choice, a struggle to use our voice, and experiences of invisibility in our relationships, communities or chosen circles.
- The Spiritual Desert: In this portal, participants wrestle with grief that often accompanies a lacking sense of belonging in spiritual community, feelings of abandonment, and disentangling from theological narratives that bring experiences of oppression, invisibility or experiences with spiritual trauma.
This program is grounded in somatic resources, writing rituals, and community engagement. The goal is to help each person create a strong relationship with the body so that we can have a greater capacity for holding, witnessing, and metabolizing grief in the body. By creating a greater capacity for grief in the body, we are also re-establishing a relationship with trust, agency, and choice that will allow us to live a life with greater depth and meaning.
