Help for your grieving heart

These resources have some practices and self-care that may be useful for you as you lean into the work of grief

  • Recent Loss

    Urgent Self-Care & How to Help Others

    The first few lessons are tailored to those who have experienced a recent loss.

  • Grief as a Practice

    Letting Grief Transform Us

    The remainder of the course dives into the benefits of grief work as a practice for fresh grief and old, frozen grief as well, and how to do that.

  • Helpful Adjunct to Communal Grieving

    Join Us in Zoom

    This course is helpful as a support in between live sessions. Check out the page for our regular Grief & Praise meetups, surprisingly intimate and somatic Zoom sessions for the communal holding of grief.

    As with everything else online in Stellar Village, that offering is free for members.

Grief tending is a core offering of Stellar Village! If you're looking for a chance to grieve in community, we have suprisingly deep and connective live Zoom sessions for members.


Please log in if you're a member.

Membership is an affordable all-access pass to everything online in the village - grief spaces, Village Hall, community singing, and workshops. Co-create with us!

Learn More

These grief resources are provided by:

Grisha Stewart

Certified Dog Trainer, Author, Singer-Songwriter, Stellar Village founder

I'm a collaborative dog trainer, author, international presenter, singer-songwriter, and keynote speaker of European ancestry (best guess based on DNA and some genealogy is Scotland, "England & Northwestern Europe," Wales, "Germanic Europe," Ireland, and Norway). I've been helping people and dogs professionally since 2003. My passion projects are community weaving, grief tending, community singing, and woodturning.

I'm fascinated by animal behavior (including humans), somatic awareness, spirituality, psychology. My work is directed at wholehearted living for all beings, including dogs with a history of aggression, frustration, or fear as well as puppies and my other favorite species: humans.

My Behavior Adjustment Training (BAT 2.0 book and BAT 3.0) is used worldwide to help dogs gain confidence and social skills. Well over 200,000 people have learned about BAT so far.

Diane Redding and I co-host a podcast called The Lesson is Love.

As an outgoing introvert, I refresh my batteries by singing, expressing grief in community, and savoring life with my husband (Tom), Labrador (Joey), cat (Garbanzo aka "Adventure Kitty" and "Baby Panther"), and Little Brown Dog (Zuki). I identify as a queer (pansexual), neurodiverse, middle age, white, raised in poverty and now of middle class, and US citizen, spiritual non-Christian leaning toward neo-Druid (but raised in Christian culture). My pronouns are she/her. I am working to live in reciprocity on the stolen river watershed of the Siuslaw people, who are part of the CTCLUSI.

Some quotes that inspire us!

“- [ ] When we don’t have healthy connections, when we don’t have community, when we don’t have our family really seeing who we are, we begin to be sick. To say something is not working.

And that’s why in my tradition, there’s no such thing as a personal problem. No such thing as a personal grief. A grief is collective. The grief is the problem of the community not dealt with. And that’s why we feel it.”

Sobonfu Somé was the author of "The Spirit of Intimacy : Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships"

“They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

Pema Chödrön is the author of "When Things Fall Apart"They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

“At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence.

This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species.”

Francis Weller is the author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.

“Grief is about a broken heart, not a broken brain. All efforts to heal the heart with the head fail because the head is the wrong tool for the job. It's like trying to paint with a hammer—it only makes a mess. no one can make you feel bad about yourself without your permission.”

John W. James is the author of "The Grief Recovery Handbook: The Action Program for Moving Beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses"

“We must first be able to feel grief, our own, before we can truly become an ally to anyone else. Rituals are the churches without walls, the antidote to our denial. Feeling together can both bring us together and free us.”

Prentis Hemphill is the author of "What It Takes to Heal"