Tending Grief

An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community--practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing loss.

We live in a culture that suppresses our ability to truly feel our grief--deeply, safely, and on our own terms. But each person's experience is as unique as the grief itself. Here, Camille Sapara Barton's take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer readers disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss.

Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes rituals, reflection prompts, and exercises that help us process and metabolize our grief--without bypassing or pushing aside what comes to the fore. Sapara Barton includes exercises that can be done both alone and in community, including:

• Altar practices to honor and connect with ancestors known and unknown
• Locating, holding, and dancing your grief
• Sharing circles for processing communal loss
• Water, fire, and nature-based rituals
• Honoring the survival utility of numbness--and knowing when it's time to release it
• Peer support and integration
• Herbal medicines and plant-based healing

Sapara Barton honors each and every experience: The loss of displacement from homelands, from severed lineages and ancestral ways of knowing. The grief of colonization and theft. The deep heaviness that burrows into our bodies when society tells us our bodies are wrong. Practical tools and rituals help readers feel into their grief, honor what comes up, and move forward in healing.

Written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC readers, Tending Grief is an invitation to reconnect to what we've lost, to find community in our grief, and to tend to our own suffering for our individual and collective wellbeing.

Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist, and embodied social justice facilitator. They have been tending grief since 2017 and have developed public resources, programs, and tools to cultivate the practice with others. Rooted in Black Feminism, ecology, and harm reduction, Camille is dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures. Based in Amsterdam, they designed and directed Ecologies of Transformation (2021 - 2023), a masters program exploring socially engaged art-making with a focus on creating change through the body into the world. Camille curates events and offers consultancy combining trauma informed practice, experiential learning, and their studies in political science. They love plants, music, and dancing.