Community Event
Grief Ritual
Date: Sunday July 20, 2025
Location: 1400 Coleman Ave, Ste G13, Santa Clara, CA 95050
Time: 1:00 P.M.- 3:00 P.M.
Reclaim Joy Medical invites you to join us for a special grief ritual, offering a space to honor and process your feelings of loss in a supportive environment.
What to Expect
Background
Please confirm your free RSVP here.
This ritual exercise provides a simple, respectful, whole group structure for owning and honoring our pain for the world, and for recognizing its authority and the solidarity it can bring.
We will have a group ceremony which will be based on Joanna Macy’s Truth Mandala and using Francis Weller’s concept of the Five Gates of Grief. Pens and water-dissolvable paper will also be available for writing down names or descriptions of things you’re ready to let go.
Five Gates of Grief
1) All That We Love, We Will Lose
2) The Places That Did Not Receive Love
3) The Sorrows of the World
4) What We Expected But Did Not Receive
5) Ancestral Grief
The ceremony will be followed by light refreshments and water/tea.
Directions and parking instructions: https://reclaimjoymedical.com/office-location/
Please confirm your free RSVP here.
The Grief Ritual
Dr. Freerksen acted as a guide at a previous, indoor ritual at Reclaim Joy Medical offices which borrowed heavily from Joanna Macy’s work. Her suggested ritual can be viewed here. Below is a photo from that ritual.
“…A stone, dead leaves, a thick stick, and an empty bowl.”
Items used in our last grief ritual.