Tending our Hearts Through the 5 Gates of Grief: A 7-week Journey With Grief and Love.

This fall, Larisa and Clare are embarking on a journey of grief tending in service of integration, please join us.

Seven Fridays: 9:30am -11:30am

October: 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th, November: 1st, 8th, 15th

“Grief is the best friend of Praise, because Praise is a grandiose griever! Grief and Praise are renters whose landlord is Love” —- Martin Prechtel

As Fall approaches and the veils grow thin, we invite you on a journey into the sacred water of personal and collective grief.

We will tend these waters by leaning into Francis Weller’s work on the gates of grief. Stepping through and abiding in each of the 5 gates, we will have the opportunity to unpack our places of longing and cultivate pathways of integration. Through this practice of tending to our grief, we begin to see openings into vistas of praise, joy, and unconditional love. We deepen our remembering of how grief is the thread that weaves us into the collective and holds us just as we are, with all we carry.

Here is an invitation to shift the emphasis from grief being hidden; “a solo act or private affair” to being witnessed and expressed in a “village”. During our 7 week journey, we will create and cultivate a grief village.

We will build this village with the clay of ritual, song, poetry, movement, journaling and group sharing.

CCLD Member/Volunteer Fees: $355, sliding scale available, payment plan available, with 2 payments of $177.50

Public Fees: $444, sliding scale available, payment plan available with 2 payments of $222

Payment Made to Clare at: 

Paypal: @CDuplace

Venmo: @Clare-Duplace

Larisa Byely M.A., RYT, CPT

I am a certified yoga instructor, Yoga Therapist, trauma-informed somatic psychotherapist, and a grief tender. My greatest passion is to help others join the path of life long self-inquiry.

With a background in various movement traditions and psychology, I have been involved in the synergy of psychological and somatic practices as they relate to the path of self-exploration and healing for the last 30 years. In all my teaching and facilitation, I integrate psychological mindedness with the wisdom of the body and the healing power of movement.

My current passion is to welcome back and re-weave the vital process of grief and grieving into our culture.  It is my honor to facilitate grief tending circles and hold space for individual grievers. My grief support sessions and circles are an individualized and eclectic blend of body-oriented psychotherapy, trauma-informed somatic work, breath, restorative movement, sound, and ritual making. In creating grief circles and rituals, I lean into the wisdom of Francis Weller, Malidoma Some, and Martin Prechtel. They serve as a lighthouse, welcoming my work home.

By tending grief, we open into vistas of praise, compassion, and unconditional love. We reconnect to a shared humanity, for all people know loss and grieve. May we become a community that knows how to grieve, for then we become a people more willing to live expansively.

For a complete bio and more information, please visit www.livingyogalab.com

Clare Duplace

Clare Duplace has lived in and around Black Mountain for 20 years. She currently lives in Swannanoa, with her husband, two boys, a sweet pup named Rosie and a flock of chickens.

Clare received her undergraduate degree in Elementary Education from Warren Wilson College. While living in Vermont after college, she worked as a Waldorf preschool teacher and a children’s librarian at a small library, that still stamped books. Clare has received her level 1 & 2 Reiki training, a level 1 course in acupressure, graduated from a local herb school and is a flower essence practitioner.

Clare makes flower essences for grief and bereavement support, end of life support, for caregivers, and for the cycles of the moon.

Clare is also trained as a children’s yoga teacher through Black Mountain Yoga, trained in girls rites of passage and was a teacher for 11 years at The Learning Community School.

Clare has been on her own grief journey since the death of her mama in the fall of 2017. Since that time, she has been studying, diving deep into, networking, practicing and training in all things grief and death related. She is a part of the positive grief and death movement and is a trained full spectrum doula- birth, postpartum, loss, abortion and end of life.

Clare is a grief consultant through The Institute for the Study of Birth, Breath, and Death. She is an end of life doula, lead of the grief team, after death care/home funeral team member, and story keeper,  through The Center for Conscious Living and Dying. She has been certified in numerous grief related trainings- Integrative Thanatology (the study of death), certified grief educator, and as a grief movement guide.

Writing has always been the greatest healing tool for Clare. She has taken both the “Poetry as a Tool for Wellness” facilitator course and a course on using poetry to support those with dementia and Alzheimer’s, through the Institute for Poetic Medicine. She created and facilitated “Writing Your Grief” circles, incorporating cherished poems and excerpts from authors on grief and prompts for writing and reflection, holds monthly poetic medicine and grief tea/story circles monthly at the Center for Conscious Living and Dying, and is currently enrolled in the Narrative Healthcare Certificate program at Lenoir Rhyne University.

Clare received an MA in Mindfulness Studies from Lesley University, and focused on the intersection between mindfulness, grief and death, and supporting children. Clare is a certified creative grief practitioner at Be Well Black Mountain Wellness Collective and Boutique and a trained Yoga Nidra Teacher.

Clare wishes to continue this work of weaving stories, creative practices, healing, with bereavement and end of life support, supported with the use of mindful modalities, somatic and trauma-informed/aware practices  through a social justice lens and rooted in the remembering of the old ways people would gather in community during all thresholds of life and in death.