Merryn Tenalach

17/02/2026

🌿 Holding Grief, Growing Hope – We Need Your Help! 🌿

Here in Shropshire, more and more people are navigating loss and bereavement, yet many have nowhere safe to turn. Our community grief service provides gentle, non-clinical support, including grief circles and specialist sessions, for anyone who needs a space to be held, listened to, and supported.

We have an incredible opportunity to expand our services across the county. Shropshire Council has pledged funding, but there’s a catch: we must reach our full crowdfunding target on Spacehive to unlock it. If we fall short, their contribution disappears.

This is where you can make a real difference. Every donation, big or small, brings us closer to reaching our goal and ensuring more people can access the support they need when grief arrives.

💛 Support us today: https://www.spacehive.com/holdinggriefgrowinghope

Please share this with friends, family, and colleagues—help us make sure no one has to face grief alone. Together, we can grow hope in our community.

We long to deepen our grief tending, training open-hearted volunteers and offering gentle, subsidised 1:1 support for those walking with sorrow.

16/02/2026

So it’s not completely truth. It hasn’t happened yet. But it will. It may not come from the lottery but I am determined to welcome all of those things for us. I will not be defeated. I will not let the things my mind has told me in the past write scripture into the threads of my being. I will continue to open myself to God, to the thrum of the earth, to the pulse of life itself. Just you watch me 🥰

12/02/2026

Maybe it sounds silly but we chatted for hours about how we, as a nation, have lost the ability to truly connect with those going through challenging times. Whether it’s bereavement, emotional turmoil, ill health and heck, just a bad day, nobody knows what to say anymore.

So we made a promise to one another. No more perfect. No more waiting for everything to be just so before the door is opened. Let’s be the people who show others how to respond in times of trouble by opening our doors no matter what. We’re here for the seemingly silly comments because ‘at least you’re having a go’, we’re open to the possibility that you’ll get things right, let’s learn how to ‘be’ together!

It’s a challenge! Would you join us?

09/02/2026

Let’s spread love today ❤️

31/01/2026

Today I’m based in Shrewsbury Library for the day in ‘The Pod’ which is sound proof, calm, gentle in atmosphere and protects confidentiality with frosted glass. It feels incredibly private and wholesome which, given we’re right in the middle of a central community space in town, is such a gift.

Grief Tending Sessions are fully booked today! These sessions are funded by the ‘Warmer Winters’ programme which is amazing.

If you’d like to make the most of this offering, you can book a grief tending session by contacting the library directly. I’ll be here a few more times over the coming months and there’s still a small handful of sessions available.

With love,

Merryn

30/01/2026

✨ G I V E A W A Y ✨

To celebrate Guided finding its way into the world, I’m offering a chance to win a copy of the book.

This book was written for thresholds.
For beginnings and endings.
For those walking beside birth, death, grief, devotion, and becoming.

How to enter
🌿 Like this page
🌿 Share this post to your stories
🌿 Tag friends in the comments

Each tag counts as an entry, so feel free to tag more than one soul who might love this book.

The competition will run for 10 days, closing on 9th February.
The winner will be chosen at random and announced here.

Thank you for walking alongside this work, for sharing it, and for helping it find the people it is meant for 🤍

28/01/2026

As part of the Winter Warm Spaces initiative, we are able to offer free grief tending sessions with Merryn Tenalach. These sessions provide a grounded, compassionate space to meet whatever is present - sorrow, stillness, memory, or the unknown, allowing space for expression, reflection and healing in your own time.
We have sessions available on Wednesday 11th and Saturday 28th February. Sessions are 50 minutes long and are available, starting on the hour, between 10am and 1pm. These are free to attend but booking in advance in essential. Please phone 01743 255308 or email shrewsbury.library@shropshire.gov.uk to book.

16/01/2026

Navigating life as a parent, for me, is forever about observation, connection, relinquishing, learning and witnessing, especially as my eldest is nearly menarche. I have a lot to learn.

I loved this quite hilarious moment of connection last night amidst the chaos of family life.

And my face is a happy face today ❤️🥰

14/01/2026

Shrewsbury library have been such huge supporters of my work since we collaborated to create Shrewsbury’s very first donation-based grief cafe.

As part of their Warm Winter scheme, you can book a free 50 minute grief tending session with me. Give them a call or pop into the library to book yourself in!

10/01/2026

My little Lu is the face of our grief cafes today. He’s experiencing his own grief right now so there’s no more perfect time 🐈‍⬛

Join me on Monday in Leegomery Community Centre 1.30-2.30pm for conversations about grief, death and dying with practices of non-judgement, confidentiality and compassion, you can rest assured that you and anything you share, will be cared for.

For more information and details about our other locations and timings, visit www.shropshiregrieftending.com

06/01/2026

The truth in opposites being side by side. Sitting with two, sometimes more, feelings or thoughts all at once, different and yet somehow feeling innately human to have this possibility. Spinning tales of threads that do not cancel one another, but strengthen the cloth.

I am learning that the loom does not ask for certainty. It asks only that the hands return, again and again, to the work. One thread is cool as frost, pale and quiet, drawn from still fields and sleeping hedgerows. Another is warm, dark, alive with ember and smoke. They meet, not to agree, but to belong.

The land knows this pattern well. Snow settles without apology on branches that once held birdsong. Fire waits patiently in the heart of wood, remembering summers it has already lived. Roots hold fast in soil that shifts and sighs with rain. Rivers move forward while curling back on themselves, never once confused about their direction.

I am walking a path like this, steady-footed and yet aware of the ground’s subtle sway. There is contentment in the rhythm of breath, in the small daily gestures that keep me tethered to the present moment. There is also a loosening, a not-knowing, a sense of being suspended between one season and the next.

So I weave. I let both threads speak. I do not rush the pattern or pull the fibres too tight. I trust the wisdom of tension, the way cloth gains strength from opposing pulls. The weave holds because it must, because it has learned how.

Perhaps this is the quiet work of becoming, to walk with calm in the chest and tremor in the knees, to tend the fire while snow gathers on the roof, to keep travelling without demanding to see the whole map.

The cloth grows anyway.