RESCHEDULED
due to illnessÂ
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New Gathering Date:
January 12, 2025 • 5pm PTÂ
Dismantle the mental health stereotypes in grief and embrace your broken heart as sacred and human – not a problem to be fixed.
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with Monika Denise Burkholder & Willow Brook
Why this Topic?
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Dominant culture says that grief is a problem. Society tells us that Mental Illness is an issue and that if your heart is broken for too long you have a disorder. If someone died or a relationship is broken from factors related to mental illness, we are told to sweep it into the closet, because “that is not normal or ok”.Â
Sometimes, the mental health world’s attempt to understand and label the human experience winds up making us feel so much less human. Additionally, spiritual communities often bypass the depth of our pain with platitudes about transcending death. As a result, there are few settings that welcome expressions of grief as a sacred human and healthy reality. No wonder many of us feel stuck, ashamed, or forgotten in our sorrow. Or, we might feel terrified to open the door to our broken hearts, fearing complete collapse.
As a board-certified art therapist, an embodied grief tender, intuitive somatic practitioner and devotee of the sacred, Monika Denise sets a periscope beneath the lens of mental health and spirituality to a space where every part of us, including our grief, are welcomed home as [w]holy human. She explores how embodiment, earth reverence and community ritual offer soulful practices of remembering our humanness, widening our capacity to be with, honor and metabolize grief. The secret of it is, your grief is not a problem, and we aren’t meant to do this all alone.
About Monika Denise
Monika Denise Burkholder is a medicine woman of the soul, a songcatcher and grief tender at the intersections of stone and river.
With a background as a board-certified art therapist and trauma therapist, Monika Denise founded Four Moons Howl LLC where she offers Soul Medicine for the Souljourner. Her offerings include 1:1 sessions, Soul Medicine Through the Seasons workshops, and collaborations with other soulful practitioners.
Monika Denise has tended the community for Wild Heart since its inception and co-facilitates embodied grief rituals, personalized rituals, and retreats as co-founder of Medicine For Our Times. She is a potter, artist, paddleboarder and creator of My&Moon, a lunar calendar for cyclical living. Twice a year, Monika Denise can be found co-guiding soulful canoe trips on the Green River in UT for The River’s Path. Throughout every thread of her offerings, Monika Denise is in service to inner liberation and healing—braiding together intuitive somatic support, sacred practices and therapeutic art as resources for individuals to live a life of authentic freedom in connection with body, earth, spirit and community.
Learn more at: www.fourmoons.earth
About Willow Brook
Willow Brook is an earth-loving educator, creative director, and artist with over a decade of experience teaching in classrooms around the world. She combines devotional practices of earth ritual, mindfulness, yoga, and song to support people through life transitions, bringing the sacred into everyday life.
Willow is the co-founder of Wild Heart and supports grief gatherings and contemplative experiences rooted in the divine feminine. She has been practicing the tradition of yoga for half of her life with commitment to honoring the heart of the practice and its roots.
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Learn more at: www.soulinvocation.com
