TONIGHT! Stretched Wide Open: A Grief and Gratitude Ritual for the New Moon in Scorpio

My loves, 

When I was 19 my dad died unexpectedly. Our relationship was joyful, easy, unconditionally loving, and one I had expected to continue for decades. But it didn’t.

I had just started college across the country from my childhood home, did not yet have close friends, and had no idea how to create a holding space to process my grief. So I didn’t. I numbed out instead.

The only problem was that, in distancing myself from my grief, I also distanced myself from joy, gratitude, and the love that lay at the heart of my sadness.

My zest eventually returned, but I now ache for that young woman who had nowhere to turn but away from her life force energy.

Almost twenty years later, I went through an unexpected and hurtful breakup. But this time, I decided, I would greet my grief like an old friend. So, my well of sadness and I spent a long winter walking and skiing along Lake Michigan. I allowed it to be there, even greeted it warmly despite the stomach flips and heart fires that came with it.

Alongside my grief that winter, there was so much joy. I look back on that period as one of the sweetest, richest times of my life. My heart was broken wide open and everything became saturated with an expanse of feeling and color. Zooming down the sledding hill with my nibling, eating pizza and drinking wine with my family, and my deep acquaintance with sorrow became a portal—not into the black hole of misery that I had feared, but into the vast and sparkling sea of love that has continued to carry me through the many joys and pains of the past twelve years.

This evening I am facilitating an online gathering to honor the new moon in Scorpio. Through guided meditation, freewriting, ritual, and song we will connect with our grief and gratitude so that we may continue to show up for ourselves and one another with the tenderness and love the world so dearly needs. Please join me!

Online, 4-5:30pm PST, today (Sunday, November 16th). 

And if you can’t make it but are drawn to creating more space to connect with all the stirrings of your sould, check out my one-on-one private sessions for tarot, astrology, and somatic parts-work for radical self-love. 

In love and beauty, 

xo Bex