Joanna Groves
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It's through my work, exploring the edges of loss and love in relationships, that led me to delving into the world of grief rituals and grief tending.
To live well, we must learn to grieve well.
So much of our experiences of life - the changes, upset, loss and grief - are stuffed down and moved on without the appreciation of what the true cost of "moving on" really means.
My interest in grief, loss, and change is influenced by my training and mentoring with Francis Weller and the wonderful team at the Rowe Centre. As I continue to weave my own path of tending to grief I am thankful to and grateful for Sophy Banks and Jeremy Thres, Joanna Macy, William Cornell and Mick Landaiche who each shape my work. Thanks too to Kate Codrington, Sharon Blackie, and The Red School, who started this whole journey off way back when.
I am a committed apprentice to grief.
I'm also a Certified Transactional Analyst (EATA), Certified Imago Relationship Therapist (IRI), and a Humanistic & Integrative Psychotherapist (UKCP).
I've been co-presenting Imago psycho-educational workshops with my husband and business partner since 2016. These official Imago workshops are delivered worldwide for couples and individuals interested in exploring and developing conscious relationships with self, others and the Earth.
Apprenticing Grief
Seasons of Renewal was borne from my own need to connect in such a way.
Feeling lost, adrift in life's seemingly never-ending changes, and absolutely furious at what was happening to me, I realised I was going to need a new way to support myself.
Embracing grief and gratitude has enriched my life and psychotherapy practice in ways no academic training could ever give me.
I realised that it's not enough to accompany my clients through a journey of healing. I must also guide them towards places they can grieve and have that grief witnessed and honoured.
My Motivation
The dawning realisation that I was awash with grief came in 2019. There was no big event. In fact, grief arrived during a brilliant year of academic success, a move to our ‘forever home’, and a lovely long business-holiday with dear friends.
And so I did what I knew best and threw myself into therapy and holistic endeavours to heal my aching body and ease my troubled mind. Though my strength is an unwavering belief in figuring out the seemingly un-figure-out-able, I was no match for griefs calling. Or the Pandemic.
Menopause
Until I was ill in 2015, I took my body for granted. I’d suffered bouts of burnout most my adult life. I'd be floored for a few weeks a couple of times a year. A familiar cycle that became part of my landscape. I was active, vivacious, exercised and ate well, and wildly over-functioned in most areas of life. It worked until it didn’t.
Perimenopause cracked me open. That’s her job and I’m grateful I heard the call. I visited homeopaths, naturopaths, and healers. All these things worked, and they didn’t work. Because although I’d heard the call, I didn’t yet know what I was experiencing was grief. I saw perimenopause as a problem to be solved, a challenge.
Grief cannot be solved, it’s an invitation to connect deeply within.
The direction of grief is slow and down (Francis Weller). This is soul-work. Developing a relationship with my body has shown me not only the grief I carry, but the sheer level of denial and dissociation that left me disconnected from myself and my closest relationships.
Love after Love, Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved youall your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Anticipatory and Disenfranchised Grief
I didn’t know I could grieve for myself in menopause. Like many, I didn’t grow up in a culture that values grief and so to grieve something that is a natural part of life didn’t occur to me. I'm a psychotherapist, I have ways of holding space for these things, right?
Disenfranchised grief at not being witnessed and heard at a deeper level, having my pain and sadness pathologised and dismissed as 'normal', prolonged the process of being able to feel my way through the underbelly of mid-life.
I am blessed and privileged to have found a menopause doula who guided me with seasonal medicine circles, using Earth’s natural cycles of the seasons to discover the seasonal cycle in me. As I connected within, I anchored myself with our ecosystem, and we became one - cliche maybe, and also true for me. Like a bubbling spring from an Other World the grief flowed. It hasn’t stopped since.
Part of what bubbled to life was memories of my father’s first cancer diagnosis in 2008. The anticipatory grief of living with health scares and operations as the cancer reappeared and spread over the years has been agonisingly painful. Again, society tells me "he has the best kind of cancer because it’s treatable”, “he has good care”, "he's a good age". The unspeakable truth is he is dying. We all are, but he is dying in a raw and open way, year after year. Uncertain. Unpredictable. I'm thankful grief woke me up to this knowing.
Martín Prechtel writes beautifully that grief and praise are the two beating chambers of the heart of love. Embracing anticipatory grief has shaped the relationship my father and I have. We share the joy and the ordinariness of life. One day I'll grieve him in a different way and I hope I'll have this experience within me as a guide.
Grief Tending Matters
Apprenticing grief is at times like travelling a familiar Welsh mountain path, but in a boat! The mentoring, deep learning, and grief rituals I've been so tenderly held in, all shape the workshop I'm now bringing to you.
Grief is sacred ground. It is part of the vitality of life and a return to our essential nature. We are one.
Without grief I truly believe life is dimmed.