Grieving Ourselves Whole
Inviting our broken hearts to guide us home
FIVE TUESDAYS
BEGINNING JUNE 30
11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 8pm Paris
About the Course
As humans, we wayfind in all sorts of ways. Norse travelers built stone cairns to mark safe routes through harsh landscapes, each person adding a stone for the next. In Mexico in autumn, cempazuchitl petals are set out in paths so ancestors can find their way guided by color and scent. In the Ramayana, as Sita is carried away, she drops bits of jewelry along the path so Rama can trace her route. Hansel and Gretl left their breadcrumbs. Theseus followed Ariadne’s thread out of the minotaur’s labyrinth. Across cultures, we have trusted threads, stars, cairns, songs, flower petals; small, faithful signals that show us we are not lost. We can come home.
This grief course offers grief support as such a beacon; as a tender, steady guide that may trace a path through despair, leading us back toward connection, meaning, and a more beautiful world.
Approached through an animist lens, and guided by the five elements, grief can be a wild and liberating force, destabilizing the status quo and guiding us back into a regenerative relationship with the Earth and a life of heart and meaning. Over the course of these five lessons, we will learn skills to reclaim grief as a trustworthy ally, guiding us toward the world of which we dream.
About the Course
Intuition and connection to older ways of knowing can feel antagonistic to materialism and modernity. So many of our cultural systems and ways of life encourage numbness and disconnection from the sensorial, the imaginal, and deep feeling. For harmful systems to thrive, multi-dimensional ways of knowing and living must be repressed.
This course invites repair by nurturing an ecology where intuition can live and thrive through steady practice.
We’ll take a clear-eyed look at intuition as an ancestral strategy for becoming a thriving participant in the living world. Our focus will be to gently unravel the repression that severs us from our innate capacity to sense, feel, and know. We’ll cultivate ways to support a healthy, integrated relationship with visions, dreams, voices, inspired speech, and the quiet sensing of the body—our soma as an antenna in dialogue with the living world.
Learn practical techniques for reclaiming grief as a path of liberation to guide us toward the world we long for.
Build tangible skills to reclaim grieving as communal and learn how to better support yourself and others through life’s heartbreaks within shared grief support spaces.
Work with the elements and the other-than-human worlds to decolonize your relationship with your emotions and access their deep wisdom.
Engage the power of ritual and enlist the support of the non-ordinary to move stuck energy and restore flow in times of collective grief and personal loss.
Grief support rooted in community, ritual, and care
Drawing on animist perspectives and Taoist Five Element Theory, this grief course moves through the five realms of water, wood, fire, Earth, and metal to undomesticate and embrace grief as a source of wisdom and direction. Through guided meditations, community ritual, and movement practices we’ll invite the release of old stuck energies to access the wisdom of our present-day emotions.
Animist cultures have long understood that grief is a communal and relational force that has the power to return us to an embodied awareness of what we deeply value and what we’re being called to fight for and protect. In times of collective grief, this course offers tools for staying present and ethically aligned through endings, uncertainty, and radical change. This course will emphasize presence over closure or relief, which are often the finish lines our culture establishes for grief.
Together, with grief as our guide, we’ll cultivate a relationship with liberation not as a distant ideal, but as an embodied daily practice of coming back into flow with life.
Colonial cultures train us to look away from injustice, from the erosion of community, and from the daily harm inflicted on the living world in order to sustain extractive systems. When engaged skillfully and communally, grief support becomes a pathway to soften and dissolve this conditioning.
Five live 75 min teaching calls with Chi Young Kim and Langston Kahn
30 min breakout sessions with trained ritualists following each teaching, offering guided grief support
15+ carefully curated resources to deepen learning around grief, ritual, and collective grief practices
Unlimited access to recordings and course materials from this immersive grief course
Access to a dedicated community discussion space
Course Curriculum
Lesson One: Opening to the Waters of Grief
- Explore forms of grief and work with them as allies on the path to freedom through foundational grief support practices
- Learn Chinese Five Element cosmology and animist perspectives to safely access grief’s wild power
- Engage grounding techniques to put the mind in service to the body’s wisdom
- Practice entering the landscape of the heart to access emotions as a path to wisdom
Lesson Two: Releasing Repression and Reclaiming Innocence in the Wood Realm
- Unpack anger and grief and unlearn patterns of repression, distortion, explosion common in collective grief
- Recruit anger as an ally; transform it into clarity, boundaries, and embodied strength
- Connect grief and ancestry through calming, heart-centered practice
- Access the True Child: reclaim innocence, play, and vulnerability as strength
Lesson Three: Entering the Fire of Our Heart’s True Longing
- Grief and enoughness as antidotes to numbness and extraction
- Differentiate true longing from false desire; work toward purpose and right-relationship
- Work with Death as an ally to navigate endings with clarity
- Try on Ecstatic Dance as embodied grief support to liberate the body’s deepest yes
Lesson Four: Restoring Kingship and Feeding the Earth
- Examine grief’s domestication; reclaim grief’s wild, relational, world-shaping power
- Enlist ancestors, land spirits, and other-than-human allies in grief support work
- Reimagine community through animist lenses; build grief support networks and peer-based care
- Use elemental ritual to process grief alone and in community
Lesson Five: Metal Into Water: Grief as a Portal to the World We Yearn For
- Practice liberation as an embodied capacity, cultivated each day
- Anchor grief-revealed dreams into life through steady, co-creation
- Craft an invocation shaped by grief to guide a new way of being
- Weave simple, cyclical rituals to engage grief as a daily ally
Waitlist for Grieving Ourselves Whole
Register for Grieving Ourselves Whole
3 and 6 month payment plans available at checkout at 0% interest.
Early Registration | 20% Off
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Discount rate available for a limited time or until capacity is reached.
Supporter
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This rate helps us make our work accessible to those with modest means and applies if you have investments, a retirement plan, and/or access to economic abundance.
Standard
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Our standard rate allows us to sustain our work. This typically applies if you’re employed in the Global North, and you’re able to provide for your needs in a consistent way.
Reduced
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This rate applies if you’re relatively less economically advantaged in the ways listed under “standard rate” or that cost is simply out of reach for you financially.
Course Schedule
Five Teaching Calls with Langston Kahn and Chi Young
- Five Tuesdays | June 30, July 7, July 14, July 21, July 28
- 11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 8pm Paris
CLASS STRUCTURE
Each live session (1hr 45min total) will include 75 min of teaching, guided practice, and live Q&A with the instructors. 30 minutes in small breakout sessions will follow, and these sessions will be anchored by trained ritualists in the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network.
All calls will be recorded and available in your course dashboard indefinitely. Look for recordings 24-48 hours after the live call.
About the Instructors
Langston Kahn
Langston Kahn is a queer black shamanic practitioner specializing in radical transformation and the author of Deep Liberation: Shamanic Tools for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma. He stands firmly at the crossroads, his practice informed by Inner Relationship Focusing, initiations into traditions of the African Diaspora, the contemporary shamanic tradition of The Last Mask Center, and the guidance of his helping spirits and ancestors. Many of his mother’s people were brought early to North America as slaves from Nigeria, Mali, Benin, and Togo and include Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. His father’s people are Swiss, Scottish, English, and German Jews.
Chi Young Kim
Chi Young Kim is dedicated to helping people reclaim relationship with their ancestors, to one’s self, and to the larger community of the living Earth for a deeper sense of purpose and belonging. All her recent ancestors are from Korea and as a Korean American woman, she has learned to bridge multiple cultural realities and identities. Her offerings of ancestral healing and grief support are grounded, embodied and culturally mindful. Born in Seoul, Korea, raised in New York City, land of the Lenape, she currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina the ancestral lands of the Cherokee (Tsalagi) peoples.
Frequently Asked Questions
Main Teaching Calls | 90 min | Tuesdays
11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 8pm Paris
Call 1: June 30
Call 2: July 7
Call 3: July 14
Call 4: July 21
Call 5: July 28
To the very best of our ability, yes. All Ancestral Medicine offerings seek to embody an anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ-celebrating, decolonizing, and Earth-honoring ethic. They are also class-aware and internationally conscious. We offer a heartfelt, non-dogmatic approach that seeks to honor each participant’s unique life experiences and ancestral storylines. Resources included with each lesson favor ancestrally and geographically diverse voices.
All our live calls are held via Zoom. Shortly after you register, you’ll receive a welcome email with instructions for locating this event – and its call information – in your Ancestral Medicine account. There’s no need to wait for that email, however. Registration automatically enrolls your Ancestral Medicine account in the event and places it in your Student Dashboard.
All live teaching calls will be recorded and made available 24-48 hours later in the course portal to watch and listen to at your leisure, with indefinite access.
All of our lesson videos have auto-generated English subtitles, as well as downloadable audio-only versions of the lessons. If you have needs not met here, please feel free to reach out to us with suggestions at info@ancestralmedicine.org.
Should you wish to withdraw from a live online course or shift your registration to a future iteration, please contact us at info@ancestralmedicine.org to request a full refund within the refund window of that specific course. For this course, you can request a refund before the second session begins. After this, no refunds will be offered.
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