Annee Bury and Lilly Hill

Grief and Love for Our World

This workshop is a regenerative opportunity to join together in circle, share and be witnessed in our collective grief, to share the truth of what we feel but find hard to voice.

What is grief if not an acknowledgement of our deepest love for life? How often do we sit with our grief, allowing ourselves to experience the emotion fully, knowing its presence is a gift? And how can honouring our grief move us to a deeper space of gratitude for our present realities? This workshop is a regenerative opportunity to join together in circle and share our collective grief, the truth of what we feel but find hard to voice. This is a space to honour our grief – whether that be for the world or for our personal lives – as a sacred expression of our deep love for life on this earth.
This will be through writing, sharing and being deeply held and witnessed. We will then move to exploring ways of nurturing ourselves, cultivating gratitude which moves us through grief and enables us to find resilience in these times.
We will create a safe, sacred and confidential container for those who find the courage to join us. Bring your whole self, a journal and pen and a stone or item from nature for the centre space.

Dancing the Circle of Life and Death

In this workshop, we will hold you through an inner journey in which, through movement, you express and share your own story of life and death.

In the past life and death was seen as one cycle, part of a whole, like dark and light, night and day, sunset and sunrise, two parts of the same…. but somehow our culture has separated death from life, and death is seen as a linear end of a physical life. In such a culture, we so
often fail to acknowledge our times of transition and change despite the rapid changes we may have moved through… and we rarely give ourselves the opportunity to collectively acknowledge the radical changes occurring in our society in these times.
In this workshop, we are creating a space to honour these changes by holding you through an inner journey in which, through movement, you will be invited to dance your own story of life and death. We will then invite you to share a little of your experience with each other as well as your own thoughts and experiences of death. Finally, we will explore how acknowledging and embracing death can give us the courage to more fully step into our life.
We will create a safe, sacred and confidential container for those who find the courage to join us. Bring your whole self, a journal and pen and an item from nature for the centre space.

Bio

Annee is a 68 year old medicine woman, death and grief doula and workshop leader, ceremonialist, activist and elder.. I have over 25 years experience in holding workshops and courses on death, dying and grief. As an older person I grew up in what I thought were stable times, where life had some predictability and I believed the dominant narrative of the times. I trained as a children’s nurse and wanted to make a difference. My main concerns were poverty and injustice especially in countries such as Africa. However, I went on to study and teach. Sociology which opened my eyes and led me to fully see the ways in which power and privilege played out, especially in relation to class, ethnicity and gender. I became a mother, a single parent in the late 80s and juggled full time work and parenting. I was in survival mode for many years working as an educator in hospices and it wasn’t until my son left home for University that the environmental crisis began to fully dawn on me, and I trained as a shamanic practitioner and healer, developing a closer understanding of our relationship and interconnectedness with the natural world. My greatest teacher in all of this was my son, who became an eco poet. I saw the crisis
through his poetry and his deteriorating mental and physical health and his healing through a rite of passage from his fear of extinction to his birthing a vision of a new world. I am now a sacred activist, I hold all of life as sacred within the opportunity of this great turning and have a commitment to the children’s fire and to supporting young people on this journey of transition.

Lilly is a 22 year old climate and social justice activist, youth mental health advocate and facilitator of the Work that Reconnects.
As a young person growing up amidst these turbulent and uncertain times, I, like so many of my friends and comrades, threw myself into the world of activism at age 19 after reading the science on the climate crisis. At this time, I was pushing through the eco-anxiety that I was feeling by working myself into the ground; in doing so, I was unknowingly replicating the same processes that have resulted in this crises in the first place, and quickly burning myself out. Last summer, however, my life was transformed (in the best way possible!) when I undertook a rite of passage ceremony which enabled me to understand and draw strength from my deep interconnectedness with all of life on this Earth. Now I understand the importance of granting ourselves the time and space to really feel the pain for the world that we experience, knowing that it results from our interconnectedness, and I recognise this time as a collective period of composting, where the old paradigm of ‘human as destroyer’ must fall away to make space for a new way of being in this Earth, for new life to emerge, for humans to become a ‘restorer species’.
Recognising how essential this has been for my own mental wellbeing has prompted me to train as a facilitator of The Work that Reconnects, enabling me to hold spaces to offer restorative practices to others. As well as being involved in various branches of climate and social justice activism, this year I have begun running workshops for youth activists which focus on sharing tools and practices for resilience and wellbeing. I currently live at a protest camp in Chorlton, Manchester, where we are actively occupying Ryebank Fields in order to stop developers from destroying this beautiful, biodiverse, rewilded land.

https://www.rising.earth/

Instagram: @lillyhill_ and @ryebankcommunitycamp

Facebook: @ryebank.camp