The Creative Grief Studio

Looking for connection in your grief support work? Join us today at 1 PM Pacific for Studio Hour: Conversations for Grief Workers. A relaxed space to share, listen, and feel supported. Free to attend, registration required: https://creativegriefstudio.com/short-courses/

Grief doesn't happen just inside a person. It happens in a social world. The voices around us, the cultural scripts we've internalized, the rules we absorbed without ever examining them. All of it shapes how people grieve and how they make meaning after a loss.

The latest post on the CGS Substack looks at three things every grief practitioner needs to understand: the social forces shaping grief, what happens when the relational landscape fractures after a loss, and the relationships that continue long after someone dies.

Read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/creativegriefstudio/p/meaning-making-is-not-a-solo-act

Grief can shrink the world. The places we used to go, the people we used to see, the small choices we used to make without thinking, all of it can start to feel like it belongs to someone else.

Part of our work with clients is helping them notice where agency still lives. Not pushing them toward action. Just opening the possibility that choice is still available, even in small ways.

In this week's post, a creative tool from Kara Jones for clients who are ready to explore where their world has narrowed, plus a Friday night story from Tamara about one small email that changed everything.

https://creativegriefstudio.substack.com/p/opening-a-new-doorway

The Creative Grief Studio is on Substack! Subscribe for creative tools, stories, and reflections that help grief practitioners grow their work with imagination and heart. https://creativegriefstudio.substack.com/

Who decided frogs have to be green? Marla Zapach, End of Life Doula and Creative Grief Studio alumna, opens with that question, and uses it to explore something practitioners don't discuss enough: how grief shows up differently in the intellectual and developmental disabilities community.

Loss of autonomy, cumulative grief, limited agency to process it may come into play. This article talks about what IDD grief can look like and offers questions to sit with in your practice. Grief belongs to the griever, whatever form it takes.

https://open.substack.com/pub/creativegriefstudio/p/why-not-a-red-frog

Judgment in grief is exhausting, for the person grieving and for the practitioners sitting with them. CGS co-founder, Kara Jones, offers six practices for moving from judgment toward curiosity. This is a article on the CGS Substack, shares a tool built for practitioners to use with their clients.

Curiosity is not a destination. It is a practice.

https://creativegriefstudio.substack.com/p/from-broken-heart-to-broken-open

An important lesson from one of my pottery teachers is this: let it be ugly. It turns out that's good grief advice too. There is no perfect version of grief, no tidy sequence of stages on a precise schedule. It's not pretty or tied up with a lovely bow.

Clay and the grief have this in common: press too hard and it shows, rush through and you don't just get a flawed piece, you may get an explosion. There is only the movement through what is required, and the waiting, and trusting that what comes out the other side can be beautiful.
https://creativegriefstudio.substack.com/p/let-it-be-ugly