THE ART OF ENDINGS
A Grieving Workshop / A Dreaming Seminar / A Creative Outlet / A Place to be Witnessed
A Community Gathering
For those people navigating the particular grief and losses of
Endings around Personal and/or Collective Belief Systems, Relationship Deaths and/or Transitions, Physical Deaths
WHAT
Over the course of 7 Zoom sessions (of 90-minute length) together, spread out over the span of 14 weeks, an intimate cohort of grievers will come together.
Together we will have the opportunity to :
Wail together about living losses that feel as large as a universe / as large as our capacities to love
Re-imagine our lives in the wildest way possible
Hold each other accountable to small every day actions in nature that will become the beginnings of new connection
Speak out loud
Goals for getting through short-term hardships
Dreams we hold so deep inside ourselves that they may just be glimmers
Griefs both fresh and the ones before our time - what can they reveal about our stories? How do they speak to one another?
Our divine strengths that will guide us to new places. This will be a place to celebrate strengths, joys, and all of the wins.
Our wildest desires
Take in writing, audio and visual creations by healers/artists/dreamers that grapple with the questions of survival and love amidst great heartache.
Write our own paths through using the fertile yet heavy soil of this grief-laden place we find ourselves in. Make space in this soil to grow things we cannot yet imagine or understand.
TOPICS/ COURSE LAYOUT
1) Introductions/ Deathwork as art-making. Art as a tool in grief and death.
2) Loss of community/ideological death & growth— how do we rebuild community while grieving?
3) Death and fear of death - leaning into the wisdom of deathcare
4) Contributor workshop #1
5) Contributor workshop #2
6) Contributor workshop #3
7) Relationship loss/endings & Closing circle.
Participants will also have the opportunity to join 1 small group session of no more than 3-4 participants to process and deep dive. This space will be held by Resham Mantri and Trishia Frulla. For anyone in the NYC/Brooklyn area, there is an additional opportunity for an in-person meeting.
WHO
This gentle container will be held by death doulas, artists, and creative collaborators, Resham Mantri of The Community Deathcare Digest and Trishia Frulla of HypoFutures.
CREATOR/CO-FACILITATOR
Resham Mantri is a death doula, divorced single co-parent and grieving/loving writer and artist who believes in the fertile soil of the in-between spaces for great dreaming and imagination. She is the creator of The In-Between, an online publication of her heart and mind and the co-creator of The Community DeathCare Digest, a newsletter that explores how we die in community. She creates installation and performance art that has been shown in Brooklyn where she lives with her two children, her mother and their dog Freddie. In relationship grief work, Resham brings all of the tools she has been trained in and practices. These include many years as a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn Family Court working with children and families experiencing hard transitions, her experience as a death doula, her work within restorative justice practices navigating divorce and relationship work, and her ongoing friendship with her childrens’ co-parent. Her work as a deathworker, writer, and artist are her foundational dreamscapes which she will bring to this offering through embodied practices around gentle presence and acceptance, shared essays and prompts, poems, podcasts, music, conversation and literature. Her belief is that we all have medicine to share and understanding this fact and sharing our wisdom out is a deeply loving and healing practice for ourselves as well as the collective.
CO-FACILITATOR/CONTRIBUTOR
Trishia Renee Frulla (she/they/siya) Trishia Renee Frulla is a queer, Filipinx artist, inspiration, daughter, and dog mom. She centers craft and death work through her art practice, workshops, and client sessions. Raised on the lands of the Rincon band of the Luiseño Natives (Escondido, CA), Trishia has been caring for and cared for in her relationships since she was first introduced to her maternal family of 50+ aunts, uncles, and first cousins—most living within a 30 mile radius of one another. The eldest on her paternal side, as well as her immediate family, Trishia is currently tending a long distance relationship with them all from Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY), where she works on new frameworks for financial freedom, and continues to learn just how tender time and relation can be.
Our Esteemed Guest Contributors will offer their experience and artistry to help create this container.
Corie McMillan (they/them) Corie McMillan is a deathworker and Student Development Manager at Going with Grace, the end-of-life training and support organization founded by Alua Arthur. “I am a Queer, Transcendgender lover of music and graffiti art and meditation and prayer with European ancestry (Scottish, Irish & Polish), living on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land in Huichin, also known as Oakland, California. My spouse Batul & I have lived in the same home for the past 15 years and I support them in tending to our gardens and making medicine for the people. We share this space with our 2 cats, Buddy & Banjo, a wild cat that we call Hula, an abundance of plantitas y hierbas as well as many raccoons, opossums, hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, bees and a cute little skunk that keep the outside of our home buzzing with LIFE and DEATH.”
Noleca Anderson Radway (she/her) Noleca Radway is the Founder of Queer Media, a family production company specializing in audio and visual art through a Black Queer lens. Noleca is a producer, emergent strategist, educator, speaker, writer, screenwriter, host and director. She is the producer and host of the progressive parenting podcast Raising Rebels. She is also the former Executive Director of the Brooklyn Free School. Noleca recently served as Impact Producer for POV/American Documentary’s Otherly Series producing educational resources and panel discussion. She also produced HBO’s Between the World and Me Podcast, highlighting her unique ability to amplify multiple voices and mediums to tell a story and create impact. Noleca is executive producer and director of critically acclaimed audio series In Love and Struggle and Drapetomaniax: Unshackled History. She considers the ability to make connections between people, philosophies and dimensions her personal superpower. She attributes this to being a Bronx-raised, first-generation Black-Jamaican, wife, mother, teacher, educator and Octavia Butler fan. Noleca graduated from Howard University and attended Bank Street College of Education. She lives in Amsterdam with her partner and their three children.
Batul True Heart (they/them/aapo) is 2Spirit Yaqui, Chicane, & Panamanian identified with Native American, African, and Spanish & English ancestors. They are a traditional medicine practitioner, community herbalist, and death companion living on Lisjan Ohlone Land in Huchiun, also known as Oakland, CA. With the guidance of elders and mentors, as well as learning directly from their well ancestors and the elements, Batul has spent nearly 20 years facing, feeling, healing and integrating their personal and inherited sustos. Through years of dedicated self-healing practice, Batul has gained skills in working with people and pain, particularly from a nature-based point of view. For 5 years Batul was lead facilitator of the Curanderx Toolkit class at Ancestral Apothecary School in Oakland. Within their community, Batul holds ceremonial space working with various (Mexican) traditional healing modalities as well as offers their line of mostly homegrown herbal remedies… Maaso Medicina: Flower Medicine for Ancestral, Generational, and Personal Pain. They are also one half of the Floripondio End of Life Planning & Services team...a community project providing culturally conscious death companionship for QTBIPOC and all dying allies: https://floripondioendoflife.com/
meital yaniv (they/them) meital yaniv (b. 1984, Tel-Aviv, occupied Palestine) is learning how to be in a human form. they do things with words, with moving and still images, with threads, with bodies in front of bodies, with the Earth. they are a death laborer tending to a prayer for the liberation of the land of Palestine and the lands of our bodies. they keep Fires and submerge themselves in Ocean and Sea Water often. yaniv is learning to listen to the Waters, birdsongs, caretakers, and ancestors as they walk as a guest on the home and gathering place of the Cahuilla-ʔívil̃uwenetem Meytémak, Tongva-Kizh Nation, Luiseño-Payómkawichum, and Serrano-Yuhaaviatam/Maarenga'yam. yaniv is the author of bloodlines. They make offerings through true name collective. ig: @bloodlines_book
WHO IS THIS FOR
Any human who is struggling in the space of belief systems endings, relationship transition and/or death.
(This offering will be useful overall in growing the seeds of listening to our deepest desires. The only constant is change. )
We acknowledge the myriad types of endings with great impact to our hearts AND in order to create the most cohesive helpful community, mean to give some examples, which are not all encompassing:
Romantic relationships
Ideologies which no longer serve us (patriarchy, colonialism/capitalism which show up in our personal lives, navigating difficult family structures)
Mourning physical deaths that have occurred or are in process.
People going through various kinds of separation/ divorce
Those suffering heartbreak connected to loss of all the above and/or other losses of community
There will be a dream-oriented lens to this offering. This offering may be most helpful for people who would like to explore creation within the in-between spaces of loss. We explore these practices as a means of survival and connection. We will offer readings, audio and visual treats by healers and artists who wrestle with questions around radical re-imagining and use art and spirituality as a mechanism to survive heartache. We will have opportunities for sharing our hopes, dreams, creations with each other.
We acknowledge the deep and specific type of grief around relationship loss and ending that is also tied to harmful abuses. In this container, while we will make space for the various shapes of deep griefs, we will not have capacity for individual trauma-based work and urge those who need it to find every single tool on earth in this moment of transition. You deserve as many tools and modalities as you can find.
Here we will focus on acceptance and dreaming as a modality of survival within a community of people who are facing a range of heartache and loss.
We come to relationship loss and transition from a place of Restorative Justice practices.
Restorative Justice is a set of principles and practices rooted in indigenous societies. Restorative justice can be applied both reactively in response to conflict and/or crime, and proactively to strengthen community by fostering communication and empathy.
Only from a place of safety can we begin to recognize some of our core values:
We believe in decolonizing grief practices by looking beyond Western healing practices. This also looks like healing in community.
We grow our strength in the ability to sit in the unknown.
We aim to never replicate the carceral systems of oppression that limit our imaginations towards punishment and shame, and turn ourselves towards universal love that connects us to all living beings.
Ultimately we are creatures that seek connection, we heal and thrive in communities of care.
We aim to create nurturing and accepting spaces for everyone. Sometimes that means we learn how to do this together.
COST/ EXCHANGE
$375-450 -sliding scale for all 7 sessions, plus 1 small group session. (8 sessions total or $46-56/session investment)
(Note re: sliding scale: This entire offering and the ability to pay everyone involved livable wages depends on those who can afford the full $450 investment to pay that, and we appreciate your time in considering this investment as one you are also making in the lives of the healers/artists giving their time to create this container. Thank you so much!)
(This offering is designed as a progression together, not necessarily a drop-in model. We hope to create a sense of community through as steady an attendance as is possible.)
Offering will be capped at 20 people.
At least 1 half price scholarship and 1 full scholarship will be available. More soon.
WHEN
October 31 - Opening Session
November 14 - (Contributor Session)
December 5 - (Contributor Session)
December 19 - (Contributor Session)
January 2 - (Contributor Session)
January 16 - Large Group Session
January 30 - Closing Session
Plus an additional small group session date, of no more than 4 people, will be announced later.
7-8:30 PM EST, 4-5:30 PM PT, on Zoom