Death and Transition Series at LICHEN CENTER presents a class on “THRESHOLD TENDING: cultivating communities of care around grief” with Catelynn Hendrick
“This course is founded on gentle inquiry: What happens when we honor our grief, rather than shutting it out? What are the ways we have been taught to hold grief, and the ways we have not been taught to hold it? What do we miss when we wall off a portion of our own - and other's - emotional experiences? What does grief teach us about what we hold as precious, dear, tender life? What does grief teach us about death and transition?
Encased in a threshold nook of the year, this course aims to help us rewrite the collective narrative about grief - offering it a soft & responsive place to land, shift, and inform our meaning-making processes. We will address community resilience in times of grief-full turmoil and how to create spaces of care rooted in a framework of radical mental health and models of peer support & crisis intervention. A gentle container for exploration, we begin by cultivating our own awareness around holding & tending to our grief as a model for how we can hold the grief of others.” - Catelynn
Course objectives:
Gently inquire into death and grief-phobia - the ways in which it is culturally-transmitted and individually internalized.
Create space of personal integration, with the aim of building tolerance to take with us into the future of our communities.
Foster a practice of identifying your own needs within times of grief or crisis, and aid others in doing the same.
Dream into alternative models of community-support crisis intervention & grief-tending.
Explore a wide variety of potential interventions that are responsive, compassionate, person-centered, and honoring of both self & community.Address & push back against the stigma surrounding grief & other experiences of deep feeling.
We will draw inspiration from folkways living & past, the medicine of the animate world, and ancestral time - these are not rooted in idealized escapism, but function as models for future resilience, connection to continuance, and the taproot of deep & ever-shifting time.
This course is rooted in a grief-positive framework and asks us to step into the potent and necessary medicine of our full emotional experiences. Spaces of pause and integration will be provided.
Catelynn (she/her) is first and foremost a compassionate and ever-evolving human & threshold tender -- beyond that, she is an herbalist with a framework rooted in experience, emergence, reciprocity, and nuance. Her approach to mental health & grief-positivity came through years of formal training in direct care mental health and end-of-life work, filtered through the lens of her own experiences with mental illness and the lack of holistic & critical spaces provided for these experiences. This all led to an underlying philosophy of interdependent listening, growing, and healing.
Her herbal practice thrives through a structure of support from ancestral reverence, death tending, folk practice, ceremonial research & resistance, wonder, and disruptive queerness. Her toolkit is deeply indebted to the labor of activists & educators of abolition, radical mental health, and body-based healing modalities such as somatics.
Catelynn’s approach to education aims to be non-hierarchical and responsive to indescrepencies in power, presented in a way that is trauma-informed and steeped in reciprocity. Her offerings are life & death honoring both. You can find the hub of her work at atetheredgod.com, or on Instagram as @atetheredgod. She lives, tends, and bakes lots of treats on both Penobscot & Southern Sámi lands, although her heart is forever scaffolded by the saltmarsh magic of Timucua territory.
When: Sunday, November 7th, 10am-12pm
Where: This class has shifted to an online offering due to COVID safety guidelines. You can now sign-up directly on Catelynn’s website: www.atetheredgod.com/classes-events
Cost: Sliding scale $25-$50
Sign-up by November 4, 2021