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.

03/26/2026

This online training invites folks to explore, learn and practice trauma-informed and therapeutic grief skills to offer compassionate and attuned care, while also offering accessible and effective grief literacy to support your clients’ capacity to be in relationship to their grief in affirming and healing ways.

The content is grounded in my 18 years of professional experience providing grief support and training to diverse audiences, including facilitating traumatic loss support groups for homicide, su***de and substance-related deaths. The content is also informed by the fields of somatics, attachment, neurobiology, NARM therapy, Satir therapy, response-based therapy, and more, and is offered in the values of decolonial, anti-oppressive, and dignity-centered care.

Our time is experiential and relevant to many loss support contexts. We focus on the grief process and supporting individuals' unique grief needs, while aware of the larger cultural influences and loss experience(s) that shape their grieving. We focus on the tangible practical skills and attunement needed to discern trauma response and grief expressions, while offering deeply relational, heart-full and attuned support.

Welcome diverse helping folks who provide therapeutic support to individuals and/or small groups - counselors, coaches, mentors, crisis volunteers, bereavement group facilitators, death doulas, healing arts practitioners, social workers, peer supporters, non-profit teams, and more.

Thursday and Friday, May 7 & 8, 2026
9:00am-2:00pm PST each day.

Financial Accessibility spots available.
Link in B10
or here: https://www.sacredgrief.com/p/trauma-informed-grief-support

01/17/2026

I would love to have you join me and other like-hearted humans exploring and folding ourselves back into relationship with our body and the wide web of kinship, seen and unseen.

Special focus will be on grounding in embodied presence as the place where our intuition and perceptual capacities can be trusted and reliable, and nurturing reciprocal relationships with land and Spirit of place, elemental and tree elders, and ancestral elder wisdom.

You know where to find more. Reach out with any questions. If we are new to each-other I welcome a Discovery Call to meet.

sacredgrief.com/p/immanence

01/15/2026

To fill-fully ourselves with our-self, is to embrace our own spiritual essence and to belong ourselves, embedded and infused with the same sacred stuff as every other being, earth, and cosmos. It is through our body that we fulfill our spiritual natures, that we belong ourselves to a vast kinship of seen and unseen, that we are in reverent ceremonial home-making, and that we source our power to be on the side of Life.

Join me and an intimate group of others as we re-member ourselves into home-making and reciprocity with land, spirit of place, elder beings and ancestral wisdom.

Immanence - Grounded Practices to Support our Animate and Spirit Relationships
Starts Feb 4th, biweekly gatherings Wednesdays. 10:00am-12:30pm PST
8-10 spots, tiered pricing options, monthly payment plans. Application open.

https://sacredgrief.com/p/immanence

01/08/2026

All of us have the innate capacity to connect with the spiritual and animate ecology of relationships that surround and support our life. It is a way of being not far from our ancestral consciousness.

However, many of us have been conditioned within dominant modern culture that is steeped in materialism, colonialism, fascism, and influenced by both new-age practices that may dismiss the body and earthly plane towards higher consciousness, and by legacies of fundamentalist religious doctrines that espouse only transcendence as a path to Spirit.

From this, we can be left without grounded skills to embody relational wisdom and belonging into our life in practical, respectful and integrated ways. And in ways that are in integrity with our own identity, ancestry and responsibility towards cultural repair.

Immanence is an intimate experiential and ritual small group program to be in the skills and practice of folding ourselves back into belonging and right-relationship with our other-than-human and Spirit kin; back into a life infused with the Sacred.

We will explore and practice the skills of embodied presence, energetic awareness, boundaries, protection, pacing and choice as we navigate Spirit and animate relationships within the values of reciprocity, consent, and safety. The program will consist of tangible research, embodied experiential inquiry, ritual practice and group learning process.

Special focus will be on relating well with the land beings and Spirit-of-place where you reside, and connecting with an Elder ancestor for guidance.

Spaces limited to max 12 folks.

Applications are now being accepted. We start Feb 4th, 2026 and meet every second Wednesday, 10am-12:30pm pacific time. Additional resources, audio teachings and practices will be offered through the online platform between live sessions. Option to also meet in peer pods to stay connected and supported.

Some pods are still meeting two years later! I love this.

More info and application link here: https://sacredgrief.com/p/immanence

Reach out with any questions. I would love to have you join us.

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

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Courtenay, BC

Website

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

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