When my son Koa died and it was my time to grieve, I found that I didn’t know how, and that our culture no longer knows how to support it —that it in fact actively suppresses grieving. As I traveled the world and journeyed within to find my way in grief, I realized that part of my life’s work is to help others find their way in their own Grief Journey.

The Community of Grievers that came together in my own grieving process was one of my most important resources, so the course participants will form a virtual community, sharing their expressions as we move together in a course journey of learning to grieve and heal through honest sharing and personal transformation.

I want to give you a sense of the course and a sense of my approach to grief and bereavement. At the end of the post will be information on how you can apply or contact me for more information.

The Grief Journey course is designed to:

• Build a non-judgmental community for those who have experienced the death of a significant person in their lives

• Provide non-denominational resources for grievers from all faiths and lifestyles.

• Hold a safe container for the darkest depths of grief

• Provide a virtual gathering space to support one another during life’s most difficult times

• Be a space where feedback and platitudes are not part of the journey

This is the time to be with our own grief and find ourselves in each others’ reflections with no need to save anyone. 

We are not broken and we don’t need fixing. 

We are grievers who need space and time to heal. 

Sitting in circle is an ancient practice used cross culturally to bring collective voices together to mirror and reassure. Our virtual circle will prove that we are not alone on this strange and painful path. We will bring our voices and our hearts together for the kind of deep authentic connection that heals. We will become stronger, together.

Why this course & how it can help

There is a spiritual hunger deep in our Western psyche. Our cultural norms often exclude the heart and spirit that we need to fully experience, embrace, and heal the realities of our lives.

Although death is intrinsic in our own lives and the lives of those around us, it has yet to be accepted fully as a normal rite of passage.The pain of being a griever in a culture that has lost the support systems for grief is unbearable in itself.

We have been reduced to having one-and-a-half-hour sessions in small offices once a week to find ways to deal with our new and unwanted reality.

It’s just not enough!!!

When we try to go out into our culture “as we are”, we can see how little the human collective knows about being with another’s pain and anguish. We are often met by such great discomfort in others over “our pain” and fed platitudes of recovery and hope. 

Not cool. 

This writing program was designed as a modern meeting of the need of grievers to be held and share openly with other grievers without weeding through other people’s projections of how or where we should be at.

It is up to us to create the new normal. 

We have the power to create a community that embraces the great discomforts of life alongside the joys. This work is a deep dive into the unnecessary pain that results when we as a culture fail to fully accept grief. This course is an opening to the expansive possibilities available to us when we accept and invite grief into our lives.

When grief takes hold, it can cause paralyzing, immobilizing retreat into the deepest, darkest depths. Writing provides an avenue to the truth. In honest, open, unbridled creativity and flow, we can find our center.

How this course works…

This four-week online course brings an intimate group of people together for the purpose of mutual support through writing. Together, in the midst of our isolation, we will join in community to remember who we are, to delicately weave and heal our true selves through the written word. 

Together we will share the personal stories, innermost thoughts, struggles, triumphs and deepest understandings gleaned from our journeys. This group is ideal for those in search of sacred connection with a community of grievers.

Course includes:

• Access to a private Facebook group of participants in this course, our community of grievers

• Small groups limited to 35 writers

• Daily writing prompts, shared within the group

• A new community to grow with, share with and unfold into as you devote this special time to your own Grief Journey

• Sharing of my own Grief Journey, cross cultural wisdom I have walked with.

• Access to grief and trauma education materials upon request

The course starts every month with a new group on the first of the month.

Further support: Go to my website and sign up for individual guidance for your own grieving process.

Why write?

There is often a deep need within grief to remain stagnant and stabilize our life force energy. Stillness and holding oneself steady can be a saving grace for the long journey through anguish, but isolation from daily living outside of our homes, communities and relationships wears on us over time. 

The temptation to reach out and belong again in the world often leads to having to hide our feelings and dampen our grief for others’ comfort. In our own time, we will be ready to consider life in motion once again, but mostly what we are seeking is to be met, witnessed, understood within the radical grief we are now a part of.

Writing in this group will bring the needed community and connection to us regardless of where we are at and regardless of our ability to co-mingle with those who are not yet on the bereavement path.

By writing and sharing with other bereaved people in this group we can authentically Journey.

• We can be honest without the shock or platitudes or advice given by well meaning people wanting us to recover.

• We can say what we need to say, what we must say to Life itself, to the ones who have hurt us, to each other, to our God.

Writing moves otherwise frozen energy and allows us to develop a relationship with our own Grief Journey and with each other. In writing, we remember ourselves. We can hear the weaving of who we are within our words.

We can finally tell the truth.

IMPORTANT:

In modern times, we use the convenience of media and web sharing in a private but open forum to reach us right where we are physically, emotionally and mentally. It is original wisdom meeting modern needs.

Our personal myths…

We tell our stories to bring ourselves into a purposeful convincing whole. 

As humans, we have been using storytelling as a way of connecting since the beginning of time. Certain tribal peoples believed that without the telling of each person’s individual story, the tribe would not survive and have what they needed to continue the hardships of primitive living. Art, dance, music, and the enactment of one’s story connected our ancestors with spirit and allowed the gods to speak through them. In modern times, our culture has lost the art of storytelling. 

By telling our own myths and being witnessed, we have the opportunity to bring the fragmented pieces of our lives into a coherent whole. Within that space lie the gifts we have to share with others. Our collective wisdom can then be passed onto the next generation. 

In this four-week session, we will use writing to create a safe, non-judgmental, sacred circle where we will witness each other’s personal life myths. Unedited, raw, and with the truth of what is it to walk the Path.

Writing through grief together…

This program is designed for those who are ready to be a part of a virtual community of grievers. We will create intimate writing groups with a foundation of trust and privacy. Most important is that we will not be advice giving or feeding back anything but our own relationship to the words we read. 

Together, in a private and safe container, we will denounce silence and confront the pain that lies deep in our souls. We will redesign our lives to carry on anew after trauma and loss, what I refer to as “The Hard Rain.” We will emerge, ready to stand and share our stories. 

The whole story, unedited. The shadow, the pain, the beauty, the grace, the fumbling. The messy parts. The parts where we hurt someone else. The parts where we were hurt. Unrefined. The real story is our medicine for the world. Whole stories make whole people.

We will come together to grieve openly within a safe container while we learn to let go of our lives as we have known them.  

You will be amazed at the tapestry we are about to weave. Pain, joy, beauty, anguish, the unimaginable grace…it will all be there! I look forward to hearing from you.

Join the course now.

Victoria Markham

What makes me a unique and powerful guide, teacher and educator and now filmmaker is the culmination of life experiences that have tested me down to the core. 

I am someone who knows that in order to guide others, you must go to the depths and back. I have been there. I still, and always will go there. I have been brought to the bottomless pit of grief thinking I would not come out, but against all odds, I did come out.

I have died and come back to life, literally, physically. I have walked through the fire of the court system after turning my father in for sexual abuse, I have buried a child, I have gone through foster care system and  I have known addiction. And lived. Fully.