Shauna Janz joins me in this episode of Belonging. Shauna is a sacred grief counselor who holds space for all the areas and intersections of grief — embodiment, rituals, ancestral connection, and the individual and group process. She is dedicated to tending belonging in our world — within ourselves, with each other, with our other-than-human relations and with the sacred. She creates space for reaching into the rough and beautiful places that are a catalyst for transformation and healing, personally and collectively. Her offerings are trauma-aware, somatic-informed, and culturally-inclusive and anchored in the resiliency of the human spirit, decolonizing, and animist values.
Shauna and I recorded this episode before the current uprisings, so our conversation about grief was mostly focused on COVID-19 (which is still a present reality), but working with our grief is absolutely relevant to our calls to dismantle white supremacy and police brutality and create a paradigm shift. Together we talk about questioning our relationship with grief, grief as an offering, the need to be witnessed in grief, disenfranchised grief, and inherited resilience vs. inherited trauma.
“Grief is gratitude. Grief is praise. That which is grief-worthy means it’s been inside our circle of belonging and to be in our grief becomes an offering of beauty.” -Shauna Janz
Resources:
- Shauna mentions some of the folx she’s learned from: Francis Weller, Martín Prechtel, and Sarah Kerr
- Belonging Episode #56: Hope in the Age of the Anthropocene with Ayana Young
More from Shauna Janz:
