GRIEVING OURSELVES WHOLE
with Chaya Leia Aronson and Kaitlyn Cronin
Earthdance Creative Living Project
Feb 27th - March 2rd, 2025
GRIEVING OURSELVES WHOLE
with Chaya Leia Aronson and Kaitlyn Cronin
Earthdance Creative Living Project
Feb 27th - March 2rd, 2025
Join us for 4 days & 3 nights IN PERSON for a deep dive exploration of grief through embodiment song and ritual.
Co-Created by: Chaya Leia Aronson and Kaitlyn Cronin
We do not grieve to feel better. We grieve to feel more alive.
After a number of sacred grief ceremony collaborations, it is our deep pleasure and honor to offer three days of ceremony in community at Earthdance in the hills of Western MA, a place many of us call home where we have been building a lineage of grief work for some years now.
Our greatest desire in hold these spaces is to create sacred space to grieve in community, with the central premises that all grief belongs, and that grief is meant to be witnessed.
Join us for 4 days & 3 nights IN PERSON for a deep dive exploration of grief through embodiment song and ritual. We will have a one full day Saturday option as well.
With Love,
Chaya Leia Aronson
Grieving Ourselves Whole
In person offering February 27 - March 2, 2025
In these heartbreaking times, grieving together is essential. The individualism and isolation our of culture creates numbness, apathy, and overwhelm. When we come together to grieve, we clarify our vision and purpose in this time of great change. We remember how to be whole.
We invite you to join us for three days and nights of tending the sacred waters of our e-motions, through ritual, movement, and song. We gather at Earthdance, a beloved place to many and has become home to a lineage of ever-evolving grief work.
Coming together to move, sing, and feel has great power to connect us more deeply to our wholeness and purpose, opening the door to the unique and necessary ways our Soul can contribute to healing on this planet.
If we think of grief as an expression of our love, we remember that grief is one powerful facet of the human experience, inextricably woven with growth, play, pleasure and joy. Rage might arise too. If grief is an expression of love, then rage is an expressed need for a boundary. So let us come together and stoke the sacred fire of our longing, belonging, grief, rage, repressed resentment, hope, fear, and so much more.
In our time together we will explore and create:
- Web-weaving & grounding practices to establish safety and connection
- Embodied pelvic movement and breath practices to source and move stagnant energy from our centers
- Song as a channel for emotional release and tether to the sacred
- Relational work with our human and other-than-human kin
- Ritual work
- Dance and Authentic Movement
- Laughter and tears
- Day-long grief ritual that will be open to the wider community
- The emergent magic created through our open hearts
There is an option to attend for the entire weekend, and an option to come for a single day on Saturday, which will be a full day long grief ritual.
Kaitlyn Cronin will co-facilitate this full weekend with Chaya, and Charlotte Althaea Collins will support the music and song aspect of the full day ritual on Saturday.
A note about Earthdance:
Earthdance resides in the hills of Western Massachusetts, native to the Nipmuc, Pocumtuc and Wabanaki tribes. The center has held many intimate, beautiful gatherings over a number of years. The site includes beautiful hiking trails, two beautiful movement and ritual studios and a wood-fired sauna, facing a quarry. It is a sister companion to Earthdance, a contact improvisation center next door. It is a sacred place for me and my family, and I am excited to share it in a deep beautiful dive with you.
The retreat includes:
- Food: One meal on Thursday, three meals on Friday and Saturday and two meals on Sunday. The chef is incredibly talented so these meals will be divine.
- Single day Saturday participation includes lunch and dinner that day.
- Use of the sauna
- A bed in the shared dormitory
- Towels and bedding
- Access to hiking the land
Scholarship Application deadline is January 20th. Contact us to apply.
Full Weekend
Thursday, February 27th
3:00 pm Arrival begins
6:00 pm Dinner
7:30 pm Mycelial communication
Friday, February 28th
8:30 am Breakfast
9:30 am Embodied practices to awaken and prime us
11:30 am Authentic relating and authentic movement
1:00 pm Lunch
3:00 pm Herbs for grieving // Death and Chocolate Grief Ritual
6:00 pm Dinner
7:30 pm Fire & Song Circle
Saturday, March 1st
Full Day Grief and Song RItual (More details »)
Participants of the full weekend will support in the preparation and holding of the full day ritual. All will have space to grieve.
Sunday, March 2nd
8:30 am Breakfast
9:30 am Integration Circle
10:30 am Remember who you are Ancestor Dance
12:00 pm Logistics and closure
1:00 pm Lunch and Final clean
3:00 pm Till next time!
Saturday March 1st One Day Option
This day will be a full day Community Grief and Song Circle. We have been hosting these with consistency at Earthdance for a long time now, and the community around this practice is building. We are delighted to offer a day long option, to come and be in ceremony, song and ritual for a full day together, held within the sweet container of the weekend long retreat.
Charlotte Althaea Collins will join us for this full day option, and offer her love, wisdom and musical accompaniment.
Lunch, Dinner and Sauna Access are included in this option.
Reach out with any questions!
Meet your Hosts
Chaya Leia Aronson, RN BSN
Chaya Leia Aronson, RN BSN has been apprenticing with the womb for nearly 20 years, and has great passion for supporting women / womb bearers to connect to health, pleasure and vitality and can be found mothering, communing with flowers and dancing in her free time. Working with wombs and mothering have been some of her greatest teachers about grief. She has also been blessed to learn from incredible teachers in her life, including Rosita Arvigo, Tami Kent, ALisa Starkweather, Sheri Winston and Zahava Griss. In grief work, she is influenced by the Dagara teachings of Sobunfu Some.
Kaitlyn Cronin
Kaitlyn Cronin's work lives in the intersection of mycology, creativity, spirituality and the reintegration of ritual to sanctify potent life transitions. She is a certified death doula and feels pulled to thresholds, transitions and the in-between spaces.
With the mycelial web as her greatest teacher and creation as her devotional practice, Kaitlyn weaves stories through visual art and immersive experience; embedding us into our ecosystems and sparking a remembrance of our interstitial and unique place in the expansive web of life.
Guest Facilitator
Charlotte Althaea Collins
Charlotte Althaea Collins is a musician, singer/songwriter, teacher, and healer guiding people into direct, communal, and transformational encounters with music and Soul. She is passionate about using music and ritual to conjure deeper presence, emotional expression, and vulnerability. Her offerings include grief rituals, body shame recovery mentorship, holistic concerts, sound healing journeys, song circles, and compositional sound projects for dance, film, and podcasts. She is currently working on her first full album of original music, titled Welcome Home. Malin currently serves as the Viola Instructor at Amherst College and lives in Northampton, MA.