We will gather & play at The Grief House with for an embodied breath and puppet practice.
Puppet play is an opportunity to offer the many facets of our grief actual bodies that can be seen, moved and comforted. Puppets are colorful, animated transformational creatures - they're happy to share the weight of our emotions. They offer us permission and encouragement to genuinely look at and hear parts of ourselves that might feel overlooked, hidden, shy or ashamed.
We will start our time together with a guided practice intended to help us come into relationship with our complex, varied grief creatures - to see and respond to their sticky/self-conscious/thorny/abrupt/direct selves and also with our own wise self - the part of us that sees our hurt bits and can hold them well and kindly.
Next, there will be an invitation to start an actual, out-loud dialogue between one hurt part of ourselves and our wise self. There will be some guidance and demonstration for this portion, which might feel a bit strange and under-practiced to many of us. Then we'll each choose a puppet (or puppets) and move to our own physically private space, so our conversations won't be overheard.
Finally we'll have a chance to let our hurt ones speak with each other's wise ones. We'll do this in pairs, taking turns giving and receiving our grief and our compassion.
Puppets can hold our grief in ways our public, grown-up personas cannot. They offer us an opportunity to witness our hurt from a different angle; to playfully share the deepest elements of the many faces of our feelings. They also offer us an opportunity to share the weight of our loss; both with them - with the magical, un-embodied, universal compassion they stand in for - and with each other.