Sacred Grief - Shauna Janz

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Courtenay, BC
Sacred Grief - Shauna Janz

I offer education & facilitation in grief, trauma, ritual, embodiment & ancestral healing Companioning Others Through Grief, Loss and Transition.

It is through our shared experiences of pain and loss, and by providing spaces to share and connect about these things, that we can nourish a deep sense of well-being - physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, both as individuals and as a collective global community. This page is dedicated to providing one such space - a place to connect, share words, quotes, articles, educational and community resources.

10/11/2025

A symptom of, and ongoing contributor to, colonial and supremacy culture is unmetabolised grief. At the risk of over-simplifying, the ungrieved grief contributes to hardening of protective strategies to not feel pain and the conscious and unconscious projections of that pain inwards as shame and outwards as relational harm.

Disruptions in relational, cultural and ancestral lifeways due to the complexities of oppressive histories leaves many of us bereft of healing rituals and relationships that are necessary to create the safe and secure conditions that meet our vulnerability and pain and allow us to process our grief in life-affirming ways.

It is a birthright to all of us, and part of our shared humanity, to live a life enriched by rituals and relationships that widen our embrace of care and love with other humans, other-than-human kin, and Spirit ones. The threads into our re-membering meaningful rituals and relational ways of being are not far from our bone level memory, and can be animated again, for these contemporary times, to meet us in our heartbreak and to contribute to present day healing personally and collectively.

I hope you might consider joining me for my course Belonging to the World: Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief, where we dive into tangible research, embodied practice, ancestral skills, and Spirit connection in service to embracing grief as an ethic of living and as a necessary act towards cultural change.

This course is a queer-celebrating, trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and culturally-inclusive framework focused on offering you a pathway to deepen into your own grief ritual and relational practices as relevant to your identity, current social location, and ancestral heritage.

Link in bio, tiered pricing, starts October 15th, 2025

sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

10/10/2025

Re-enlivening ancestral practices, rituals and relationships to support us, here and now, in ways that contribute to personal healing and cultural change means re-membering the value of relating to our grief as an offering to life and as a responsibility that supports the balance and health of both the individual and the collective.

How this will look is unique to each of us depending on many variables; our identity, cultural and ancestral heritage, our social location within dominant culture, our soul's signature, our relational and attachment styles, our nervous system capacity at any give time, our vocation, our vision for healing, and our roles and responsibilities to others, to name a few.

In my upcoming 9 week online course, Belonging to the World - Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief, we explore 8 different cross-cultural principles that guide us into a heart-full and holistic relationship to grieving, and that act as invitations to deepen your unique path in grief work in ways that are relevant and pragmatic to you and your lived experiences, past, present and ongoing.

Find out more through the link. I would love to be alongside you in this; there is always so much richness in this exploration and what we learn from one another in it.

www.sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

10/08/2025

Thank you and Katie, and so many others who have said yes to joining me in remembering our ancestral, ritual and animist relational practices for supporting our grief, our love, our dignity and our reciprocity with life.

Belonging to the World - Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief
Still time to join us in this exploration and learning together.
October 15th start with our welcome call and ritual opening. Self-paced recorded lessons, weekly live experiential calls and ritual practices, and tons of additional resources and embodied practice invitations.

link in B10
or https://www.sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

10/04/2025

Grief has an energetic reality and deepening our relationship to our energy body increases our capacity to support the energy of grief to metabolize and flow.

Different maps of working with the human energy system exist across cultures, traditions and historical times, some lineages remaining intact through generations, others rising, falling, and reshaping within the complexities of history, diaspora and imperialism/empire.

The mapping of body, heart and mind is one that shows similarities across cultural and mystical traditions, within current therapeutic and somatic modalities, within neuroscience, and can also be heard in our everyday colloquial and descriptive language. We can re-animate ancestral ways of being in relationship to grief through inviting in the holistic reality of grief expression in these centers.

This approach also arises within Western psychotherapy grief models, and supports different grieving expressions and balance within and between each center. We explore this more in Belonging to the World - Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief.

Link in bio.

10/02/2025

As we become more aware of how the energy of grief moves uniquely through our own body, heart and mind, and the more we cultivate these expressive channels in service to grieving, the more we can also create meaningful rituals of reciprocity that allow these expressions to be offerings of deep connection with Spirit and the animate ecology of beings around us, that we are always in community with (including other human people!).

This holistic integration of heart, body, mind supports our grief rituals, and our grief rituals support the integration of heart, body, and mind. A beautiful healing feedback loop in a deeply relational world.

09/29/2025

The therapeutic and conceptual distinction between grief (an individual's internal emotional experience) and mourning (as an outward expression) can be helpful in our healing, however this distinction is likely a recent one and a symptom of the disconnection from a deeply relational world in which grief could never be imagined as a singular individual experience.

I came across this insight during the 10 years I was delivering grief education in schools, and when students from more collectivist cultures, such as Japan and China, would look up "grief" on their translation devices - there was no word for grief, only a word for mourning. This has also shown up in cross-cultural research studies in the field of bereavement more recently.

The concept of grief as an individual's emotional response may be an artifact of modernity and individualistic (dominant) culture.

Through our heart-brokenness, we can re-member ourselves back into deep relationship and belonging with our other-than-human kin, through embodied sensing, intuitive relating, and rituals of reciprocity, gratitude, grief and love.

In my own experiences, they too are waiting for us to extend ourselves to them and to be re-united in reciprocity with their human kin. This is a bone deep ancient ancestral way of being.

We explore place-based relating and our ancestral ecology of relationships within my upcoming 9 week course Belonging to the World - Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief, weaving research, embodied practice, animist ritual and ancestral connection.

We start Wednesday October 15th, and registration is open.

All lessons are pre-recorded to view/listen at a time that works for your schedule, with live Zoom calls to gather for integration, practice and questions, every Wednesday at 4pm pacific time (also recorded).

Spaces are still available at each tiered pricing option. Link in bio. DM with any questions. I would love to have you join us.

https://sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

09/26/2025

For those of us who do not have access to lineages, traditions and rituals that support our grieving (I am here alongside you in that), we can re-animate meaningful grief practices and relationships by exploring cross-cultural principles that have shaped human relationships to grief and grieving. These offer a way in to your personal reclamation path as is relevant to your identity, ancestral lineages, family experiences, and place that you are living.

These principles are an outgrowth of my long-time (18+ years) self-inquiry, research, and professional capacities supporting grieving in both personal and cultural contexts... I am grateful to many teachers, bodies of research and work, contemplative practices, and the diversity of people, families and communities that have invited me into their grieving process over this time.

These principles and practices are what guide our time and learning in Belonging to the World; I offer a relational and ritual map, and you re-animate it through tangible research, embodied self-inquiry, intuitive gnosis, and direct ancestral connection.

We begin Oct 15th, and spend 9 weeks exploring and rooting into a foundation of grief relations and rituals that will continue to sustain you through life.

Find out more in the usual place.
or - https://sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

09/24/2025

Our grief is a language that flows within and between the wider field of living relations around us, seen and unseen. When we consciously enter into this relational reciprocity, we gift our heartbreak eloquence and expression in the world, and we allow our grief to be an offering to life, healing and wisdom.

For many, we have forgotten our place in this soulful and heart-full exchange due to dominant culture and supremacy in all its expressions. We have become disconnected from our ancestral ritual skills for grieving.

We all have a birthright to connect with ritual, other-than-human relations, and ancestral practices in ways that are respectful and meaningful in our present-day life to support life-affirming grief expression towards dignity, right-relationship, and belonging.

In this 9 week online course I guide us into cross-cultural principles for grieving to explore the ecology of relationships, rituals and ancestral practices relevant to your own identity that support your grief as medicine. I invite us into somatic and energetic practices that support our unique grief expressions. We will nurture relationships with beings of land and plant kin while deepening our ritual skills of reciprocity in our grief and love. I invite us to explore connection to our ancestors through both spirit work and tangible research into ancestrally informed grieving practices. I offer a map for supporting the rite of passage of death and bereavement. And we will nurture our grief as an invitation into belonging and possibility towards healing, relational reciprocity, and connection to the world.

We start October 15th, 2025. Reach out with any questions. I would love to have you.

Find out more in my B10 🔗
or: https://sacredgrief.com/p/belonging-to-the-world

08/21/2025

It has been 5 months since I have shown up here. I was experiencing the most significant chronic illness pain flares that I have had in my 20 years living with fibromyalgia. It was an immense time of limitation, pain, and fatigue.

I was reduced to 3-5 hours total a day of capacity. A practice in limits, uncertainty, and triaging priorities every day, while grieving my loss of capacity and the impacts on my mental health and financial stability as a solo living, self-employed woman. And at the same time, living the paradox of finding new depths of beauty, gratitude and fulfilment within the limits and being blessed with a community of support, from meal trains to excellent medical care.

I chose rest, creativity, and pleasure to fill as much of my limited capacity as I could, rather than the paid work and tasks that had too big of a recovery cost for me. It was a practice to sit in the acute discomfort of being so limited and unavailable during this time of rising emergency, fascism, grief and need for showing up for one another, and still uplift my own birthright for joy, rest and pleasure amidst my own suffering and care needs.

I know that this is not something for me to strive to reconcile, but rather to expand my internal capacity to be in the complexity of, the paradox of, the discomfort of, and to practice being in the joy of. I had to remind myself that this practice of new culture building that I am devoted to is also a long-game; a marathon not a sprint. I can trust that I can pass the baton for others to carry while I take rest and much needed healing time.

I am tender yet buoyed by more vitality again, and more resourcing and understanding for this invisible disability that I live with. I am thrilled to have the capacity again to slowly show up through my offerings and with others again (slow and steady), in collaborative vision and connection and heart.

I feel how all the more precious these things are to me now. I am easily moved to tears.

Address

Courtenay, BC

Website

http://shaunajanz.com/, https://www.sacredgrief.com/

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