Grieving Ourselves Whole
Inviting our heartbreak to guide us home
FIVE TUESDAYS
BEGINNING JUNE 30
11am Los Angeles | 2pm New York | 8pm Paris
About the Course
Grief is not limited to moments of personal loss. It is suffused into the air of our times. We feel its pull as we witness institutions crumble, old ways of life prove unsustainable, and long-held illusions fall away to reveal difficult truths. Many of us are carrying personal losses alongside this wider cultural sorrow; mourning loved ones, health, belonging, livelihoods, and futures we once assumed were stable.
And yet, we have very few shared containers for this magnitude of grief. Let alone to stay in relationship with it and work with it as the ally it can be.
Left alone with grief, it can curdle into numbness or spin us into overwhelm. It can leave us disoriented, unmoored, unsure how to metabolize what we’re feeling. We may sense that something profound is happening—that an old world is ending—but we lack the skills or support to move with that ending in a way that serves life.
Across cultures, our ancestors did not treat grief as a private burden to manage or suppress. In the wake of rupture, they created ritual spaces strong enough to hold wailing, shaking, silence, prayer, song.
Over the course of these five lessons, we will learn skills to reclaim grief as a trustworthy ally. We will greet it as the destabilizing intelligence that interrupts business as usual, loosening our grip on what no longer serves, tenderizing our hearts, and re-orienting us toward deeper belonging, great joy, and life-affirming futures.
Follow grief as a trailhead into courage, clarity, and freedom
Break grief out of the therapy room and bring it back into the village
Use elemental ritual to transform overwhelm into wisdom
Leave with tools to metabolize loss without shutting down
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 grief support
15+ carefully curated resources to deepen learning around grief, ritual, and 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 different expressions of grief as allies on the path of liberation
- Learn Chinese Five Element cosmology and animist perspectives to safely access grief’s potency
- Engage grounding techniques to invite the mind to align with the body’s wisdom
- Practice entering the landscape of the heart to access strong emotion as a path to wisdom
Lesson Two: Release Repression, Reclaim Innocence
- Gently start to unwind patterns of repression, distortion, explosion common in collective grief
- Recruit anger as a sturdy ally in welcoming greater clarity, boundaries, and embodied strength
- Connect grief and ancestral lineage support through calming, heart-centered practice
- Access the true child by reclaiming innocence, play, and vulnerability as strength
Lesson Three: Entering the Fire of Our Heart’s True Longing
- Grief and "enoughness" as antidotes to numbness, dissociation, and extraction
- Differentiate true longing from false desire; work toward purpose and right-relationship
- Work with death as an ally to navigate necessary endings with courage and clarity
- Gently welcome ecstatic dance as embodied support to liberate the body’s deeper yes
Lesson Four: Restoring Kinship and Feeding the Earth
- Examine grief’s domestication and 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, grief support networks, and peer-based care
- Use elemental ritual to process grief both alone and in community
Lesson Five: Metal Into Water: Grief and the World We Yearn For
- Practice liberation as an embodied capacity, cultivated daily in connection with the greater
- Invite grief-revealed dreams to insure waking life with their wisdom
- Craft an invocation and clear grief-inspired intention toward new ways of being
- Weave simple, cyclical and seasonal 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 and Chi Young
- Tuesdays | June 30, July 7, 14, 21, and 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 Portland, Oregon, the traditional lands of the Clackamas, Kalapuya, Molalla and many other river peoples.
Frequently Asked Questions
Main Teaching Calls | 105 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
The timing of the main calls favor participants in Europe, Africa, West Asia, and the Americas. Thanks to our international community of learners for your understanding around the challenges of time-zone inclusivity. All who register get lifetime access to recordings, and you’re welcome to send in questions for our teaching team to answer during live calls or in written form.
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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