Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community

“Camille Sapara Barton is a gift to all of us. ... This is what emergent strategy looks like at the precipice.”
—adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism

An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community—practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and metabolizing 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 speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer readers disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss—and offers grief rituals, somatic practices, and reflections for healing.

Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes personal stories, reflection prompts, and exercises to help you process and metabolize your 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 your ancestors
• Locating, holding, and dancing your grief
• Sharing circles for processing loss in community
• Water, fire, and other nature-based rituals
• How to honor your survival responses—and know when to release them
• Peer support and integration
• Herbal medicines and plant-based healing

Sapara Barton honors each and every experience of grief: 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 somatic 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 queer and 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 souls.