Grief & Poetry:
Bringing Our Hearts to the Page
A Sacred Conversation with Naila Francis & Mirabai Starr
Sunday, July 6th, 2025 | 11am Pacific | 75 minutes
A gathering for those seeking to transform grief into creative expression and silence into sacred voice
Suggested Donation: $25-35 | No one turned away for lack of funds
Recording available to all registrants
What if the words you're afraid to speak could become medicine for your soul?
When loss leaves us speechless, when grief feels too vast for ordinary language, we need containers strong enough to hold the unspeakable. In a world that turns away from mourning, poetry offers something revolutionary—a sacred practice that transforms our deepest wounds into vessels of healing, our silence into song, our isolation into connection.
Poetry doesn't rush us past our sorrow or demand we find meaning in our pain. Instead, it meets us exactly where we are, offering witness to our truth and companionship for the journey through loss.
In this heartfelt conversation, poet and grief tender Naila Francis and spiritual guide Mirabai Starr explore how bringing our hearts to the page becomes a pathway through grief—not around it, but directly through its sacred center.
Together, they reflect on how creative expression can honor our losses while revealing the resilient beauty that emerges when we dare to put our broken hearts into words.
This Gathering Is For You If You Are:
- Seeking creative ways to process and honor your grief
- Drawn to poetry as healing practice but don't know where to begin
- Looking for permission to let your loss speak through you
- Wanting to move beyond thinking about grief and into feeling it fully
- Longing for community with others who understand loss as sacred ground
- Finding yourself asking: "How do I give voice to what feels unspeakable?"
Through Our Time Together, You Will:
- Discover how poetry becomes a companion through the landscape of loss
- Learn practices for accessing the embodied wisdom of grief that lives in your heart
- Understand how creative expression can transform mourning into medicine
- Gain tools for moving from your thinking mind into your grieving heart
- Connect with a community of fellow travelers on the creative path through loss
Questions We'll Explore:
How does poetry help us access emotions that everyday language cannot reach?
What does it mean to "grieve well" through creative practice?
How can writing become a form of ritual, prayer, and communion with our losses?
What happens when we stop trying to fix our grief and start listening to its wisdom?
How do we honor our stories of loss while remaining open to transformation?
Your Guides for This Journey
Naila Francis
NAILA FRANCIS is a certified grief coach and death midwife, an ordained interfaith minister, a poet, and an accomplished writer. Over the course of her journalism career, she profiled artists and entertainers such as Brandi Carlile, k.d. lang, Pink, Bobby McFerrin and Elizabeth Gilbert.
Since the death of her father in 2012, poetry has been a steady companion in Naila's life. A longtime writer who had penned her own poems and delighted in the words of other poets for years, she discovered that with this gaping absence in her life, poetry became vital balm. Whether writing or reading poems, this creative practice allows her to open up to parts of herself, and to emotions, that can be challenging to access in a world that turns away from grief.
As the founder of This Hallowed Wilderness, she helps people transform their relationship to grief and loss through one-on-one coaching, workshops, presentations, rituals and community grief tending. Naila is also a co-founder of Salt Trails, a Philadelphia collective normalizing grief through community rituals, and a recipient of a Leeway Foundation Art + Change Grant. Her poetry album, "Wonder Unsung," a collaboration with guitarist and producer Paulito Muse, is available on multiple streaming platforms.
Mirabai Starr
Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker, and interspiritual teacher. Drawing from 20 years of teaching Philosophy and World Religions and a lifetime of practice, Mirabai shares her wisdom worldwide on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss.
She has authored over a dozen books including Wild Mercy, Caravan of No Despair, and renowned translations of sacred literature. Her work bridges the mystical teachings across traditions with a focus on how personal heartbreak can open us to the suffering of the world and catalyze our commitment to alleviating it.
Event Details
Date: Sunday, July 6th, 2025
Time: 11:00am-12:15pm Pacific Time
Format: Live Online Gathering via Zoom
Suggested Donation: $25-35 (No one turned away for lack of funds)
Recording: Available to all registrants
Please offer what is possible and generous to you to support our team in continuing to share these events.
We're Eager to Hear Your Voice
Participants will be asked to submit questions before the event to inform what our speakers share. You will also have an opportunity to ask follow-up questions during our time together live.
You are an important part of the conversation.
Grief Conversations Happen Every Month of 2025
Join the Wild Heart community in other heart-to-hearts exploring the full spectrum of grief.
These conversations are for those who may be feeling alienated in their grief experience, longing for community and supportive resources. We hope these dialogues with companions on the journey will offer new perspectives and aid in exploring grief as a spiritual process.
Explore All Grief ConversationsA Note from Naila & Mirabai
Dear Friends,
We recognize how challenging it can be to find your voice when grief has rendered you speechless. We too have wrestled with the silence that loss can bring, searching for ways to honor our pain while remaining open to the healing that creativity offers.
In a culture that often treats grief as a problem to solve rather than wisdom to receive, we've each discovered that poetry provides something precious—a sacred container where our deepest truths can find expression, where our broken hearts can speak, and where our losses become teachers rather than wounds to hide.
Naila's journey into grief and poetry began with the death of her father in 2012. From that devastating loss emerged her understanding of how creative expression can transform mourning into medicine, silence into sacred voice.
Mirabai brings her experience as a grief companion and translator of the mystics, having discovered how putting words to our wounds can become a form of prayer, communion, and ultimately, healing.
Together, we invite you into a conversation that honors the full spectrum of grief while celebrating the wild, resilient creativity that emerges when we dare to bring our hearts to the page.
We hope you'll join us in this sacred space of creative expression and collective healing.
With tender witness and creative courage,
Naila & Mirabai
