Grief grips the body in many ways: the numbness and disorientation of shock, the body armoring of frozen love and loss, the collapse of despair, the futility of resentment paralysis, and the piercing stridency towards making sense of it all. 

Within a grief-phobic society, the overwhelming desire to numb in order to avoid all of these feelings can express as denial, dissociation or escapism, with or without the aid of addictions and compulsive behaviors. The inability to mourn, for various reasons, prevents us from fully returning to the land of risking loving once more, and drinking from nectar of beauty, purposefulness and aliveness.

In the world of trauma recovery, we say that with all new awarenesses and transformation comes grief, for we are now able to recognize the depth of what was lost, taken, or given away, in order to survive. We can now grieve over what we did not get and the impact of the missing experiences on our inner landscape and life course trajectory.

And yet, the vast realm of grief encompasses more than individual, personal losses. Collective losses and the loss of the collective – culture, ancestors, ecosystems – also need to be named so that they, too, can be mourned.

I invite you to join me on a journey of grief and reclamation, where we will invite movement, breath and sound, alongside song, story and silence. To dance at the wild edges of personal and collective grief and sorrow, to uplift with tenderness the beautiful, melancholy thread that weaves it way through all that we cherish and hold dear.

Titles for 6 sessions:

Week 1

Grief and reclamation as generativity and resource for social change: A somatic practice for re-membering and re-embering.

Week 2

Transforming the numbness of grief and shock through reconnection, rhythm and sound.

Week 3

Releasing the armor that imprisons the breath and the voice.

Week 4

Transforming pain into empowerment by moving through loss with love.

Week 5

Songs for your inner child.

Week 6

Ancestral and cultural loss, grief and reclamation.

Meet Your Instructor:

Linda Thai

Linda is a trauma therapist, storyteller, educator, yoga instructor, and former child refugee. She is highly sought after for her trainings about adult children of refugees, trauma and the body, and compassion fatigue resilience and vicarious trauma recovery skills for human services professionals. As an adjunct faculty member in the Social Work Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Linda’s decolonized approach to education and engaging teaching style makes her well-loved with students. She has assisted Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and Licia Sky with their  private small group psychotherapy workshops aimed at healing attachment trauma.