Learn to Hold Space for Grief in Community Circles
grounded in 15 years of expertise · trauma-informed · practice proven
for your teams, networks, friends and community events
What?
Online-Training
in a small group with only 16 participants
When?
17. October 2026 bis 17. Februar 2027
5 Months
7 x 3-4h Group-Calls
+ One Personal Supervision-Session for You
For whom?
For Everyone Who Wants to Open Spaces for Collective Grieving
Therapists, activists, organizers, team leaders, facilitators, educators, networkers, and more
In order to?
To Offer Solace and Strengthen Belonging and Collective Resilience
in Times of Personal and Collective Crises and Losses
Why Grief Circles Can Be Immensely Helpful
Large multi-day grief rituals like our Grief Fires are essential in these times, yet they require a wide range of skills, a high level of commitment, and a lot of time from everyone involved.
In everyday life, we also need smaller formats that are (relatively) easy to facilitate and can fit into already full calendars.
With a grief circle, you can offer relief, strengthen connection and belonging, and help participants find renewed courage to live – even in very difficult times.
What Does Our Online Grief Circle Training Offer You?
In this training, you learn what it takes to open a shared space for grief in your professional, personal, or activist contexts – in a clear and specific format: the grief circle.
You will complete the program with a certificate in Grief Circle Facilitation.
We prepare you to:
- guide people safely and trauma-informed through spontaneous grief processes
- design and lead grief circles in your private life or as part of your existing professional roles – and embed them meaningfully into your context
- hold emotionally intense group spaces with more calm and confidence, without overwhelming yourself or others
- support people in moments of loss and crisis in a grounded, helpful way
- co-create an affirming, compassionate and empowering culture of grief – together with us and our growing network of facilitators
How the Training Is Structured
You receive:
- focused, condensed learning in seven live group calls of three-four hours each (Tuesday evenings CET)
- flexible integration invitations/tasks between sessions to help you adapt your learning into your own context
- written course materials and clear practice manuals
- learning in community with others on a similar path
- explicit permission to share the content with a buddy or peer group at home
- regular spaces for reflection on your own experiences and challenges
- one additional supervision sessions (1–1.5 hours) for you and your grief circle practice
- connection within our network of already 80+ grief facilitators and access to our community online space, where you can stay in conversation with us and other graduates well beyond the training
What Makes Our Approach Unique
Our approach to grief work is:
- community-centered and relational
- trauma- and shame-informed and sensitive to discrimination
- anti-colonial and attentive to power dynamics
- somatic and body-based
- committed to not appropriating cultural symbols from Indigenous traditions – while honoring our teacher Sobonfu Somé and our many years of running events and trainings for, with and alongside her as the essential foundation of our approach – and seeking ways to relate to her influence respectfully and responsibly, and towards not further perpetuating colonial patterns of harm
- dedicated to authentic and vibrant spaces for grief for today’s times, that are accessible/adaptable for people of different cultural backgrounds
- oriented toward collective resilience and solidarity and the capacity to act, especially in hard times
After the training, you can stay connected with us and our network of alumni, continue to share questions and challenges and get support from us. Together we can foster grief expertise as the essential cultural competence it really is – so that grieving can be met with more welcome, encouragement and support in our societies.
Who is this Training for?
This training is especially for you if you work with groups of people who are facing personal or collective distress, loss, or crises.
You might be a:
- Facilitator of seminars, workshops, trainings, or conferences
and you want to create space for visible or more subtle grief and be able to hold it safely. - Psychotherapist, counsellor, or coach
and you wish for more tools, confidence, and experience in accompanying both personal and collective grief processes for your clients. - Educator in schools or other educational settings
and you want to support young people and their families with genuine grief competence. - Community weaver or organizer
for example within friendship circles, neighbourhood networks, activism, parent initiatives, refugee support, human rights work, community-supported agriculture, or other associations and networks – and you sense how important a culture of grief could be, where people can stand by each other in difficult times. - Companion for dying people and their loved ones in group settings
whether in professional or volunteer roles (such as hospice, palliative care, funeral services), or in informal and self-organised groups – and you want to bring more skill, grounding, and care into these spaces.
What We Will Explore
1. Foundations for grief tending and grief process facilitation
- A broad, inclusive understanding of grief and grieving, which includes many different emotions and experiences
- Why and how grieving can support the processing of loss and the transformation of emotional pain into renewed agency, creativity, and capacity to act.
- Core ethical principles and meta-skills for grief tending and facilitation
2. Somatic, psychological and spiritual aspects of grieving
- Somatic, body-based, and neuro-psychological aspects of grieving
- Understanding the interactions between grief, stress, anxiety, and shame
- Ways to strengthen the capacity to grieve before, during, and after grief circles
3. Trauma-informed facilitation
- Trauma-informed facilitation of grief circles
- Specific considerations when working with traumatic grief
- Understanding and accompanying the effects and after-effects of grief processes from a trauma-informed perspective
4. Theory and practice of Grief Circles
- Foundations of ritual work
so you can understand what makes rituals safe, meaningful, and responsive to the people present. - The origins of Western-style talking circles
including the specific Indigenous roots many of these practices draw from and strategies for more reciprocity in how they are used. - Designing and leading authentic grief circles
that feel true to you and supportive for the groups you serve – in professional, community, or personal contexts. - (Group) supervision for your grief circle practice
so you can refine your facilitation, learn from real-life situations, and grow your confidence over time.
Find Answers to Most Frequently Asked Questions
What if I myself also hold a lot of grief?
The main focus of this training is on designing and leading grief circles for other people. At one of the sessions we will run a grief circle together that will also leave space for some of your own grief. If you feel like you need more space and time, we recommend additionally attending one of our Grief Fire workshops. We might be able to arrange for translation for you, or – if enough people are interested – we can also run an all English version of it.
How does grieving via Zoom work?
We can say with confidence that even in a Zoom call it is possible to create a safe, nurturing, and genuinely fruitful space between us, where we can work through content, reflect together, and even find deeper connection with one another — including for actual grief circles.
Most important for this to work: you need to keep the whole session free and be in a place where you will not be disturbed, or at least be able to shut out what is happening around you with headphones, so that we can really share a common space during the live calls.
You also need a stable, strong internet connection plus a smartphone or, even better, a computer to join from.
During the call, you do not need to focus on the screen the entire time. You are very welcome to:
- eat dinner
- lie on the couch.
- close your eyes or look out the window.
- raise your computer so you can stand for a while.
- walk around, do some stretching, yoga, or even bounce on a trampoline.
- work on something with your hands, like crafting, carving, knitting, and so on — that can feel really good and fits in very well.
- turn off your camera too (it is absolutely fine for us, just as long as not everyone of you does it at once :-))
Whatever helps you stay present and relaxed is exactly right.
You can also switch to another room, change your seat, or move your laptop or phone from time to time if that feels helpful.
What structures do you offer for integrating what has been learned?
In each training block, we give you concrete recommendations for optional activities or reflection questions to support integration between sessions.
We will also be working with:
- Buddies / learning partners
You can choose an optional learning partnership with another participant, so you have a reliable person to connect with at home. - Homies / anchor people at home
We also invite you, at the beginning of the training, to find someone in your environment with whom you can process all the training content and who may even support you in facilitating your first grief circles in your own context. - Exchange via our online Basecamp
Our shared online platform for the training group also allows for exchange about personal and professional questions during the breaks between sessions – and if you like to, also way beyond the duration of the course. - An integration project or context is key
In our experience, it becomes much easier to actually practice the content and conduct we teach if you have a context in which you can facilitate at least one grief circle during the training period and reflect on it together with us – including the surrounding framework before and after, for preparation and integration.
What if I miss a call?
In an emergency, for example in case of illness, an accident, or pregnancy, you can listen back to all the content at home via recordings.
You can also follow up on the exercises together with your training buddy, or with people from your home context, using our event script as a basis.
What is your awareness-/anti-discrimination-concept?
Building a solidarity-based, equitable society is, for us, one of the two most important tasks of our time — the other being a life-nourishing relationship with the more-than-human world.
We see this as a collective process that needs all of us. Many of us have been socialized in a profoundly unequal society and have internalized different forms of discrimination. As a result, we often reproduce these patterns unconsciously through distorted ways of perceiving, thinking, and behaving. We see the repeated, conscious dismantling of these patterns of dominance and dehumanization — and their gradual replacement — as a crucial part of this process.
As an organization, we have also been in a learning process for several years. This means we cannot promise a space that is 100% free of discrimination. But we take feedback seriously, work to reduce discrimination within our events through solidarity-based facilitation, and keep questioning ourselves along the way. We also seek support from external experts, such as anti-racism and power-awareness specialist Evein Obulor, who supports and supervises us.
You can read our continuously evolving awareness / anti-discrimination concept here.
What are the roots and origins of your grief work?
Our approach to grief work has grown primarily out of many years of practical experience and learning by doing. The central entry point for us came directly through the work of Sobonfu Somé, who grew up in Burkina Faso in West Africa and as long as we knew her spent roughly half of each year there.
For several years, Elke hosted Sobonfu’s ritual workshops, created a framework around them and increasingly helped facilitate them. From Sobonfu’s perspective, allowing grief and actively grieving was not optional, but a recurring necessity in order to remain connected to inner aliveness and to other people despite heavy losses — and also in order to act peacefully as a society.
After her death in 2017, we began to develop and cultivate our own ways, forms, and formats for communal grieving. To do this, we combined Elke’s practical experience with communal grief and the perspectives inspired by Sobonfu Somé with current insights from Western psychology, neuropsychology, and Western grief-support theory and practice.
Our purpose is to use this combination to develop and practice truly helpful, trauma-sensitive ways and forms of grief process facilitation for here and now. By now, we have been able to create communal grieving spaces for many hundreds of people and have already trained more than 80 people in our approach to community-based grief process facilitation.
Sobonfu Somé developed the rituals she led for workshop groups in Turtle Island/the USA and Europe specifically for a Western context and deliberately left out many cultural elements, viewpoints, symbols, and practices from the start. Since Elke was the organizer of her grief rituals and other offerings here in Germany, in addition to experiencing the practice itself, she was also able to have countless conversations with Sobonfu about why she did certain things. Most of the time, Sobonfu was here with us twice a year for almost two weeks. During those visits, Elke spent countless hours with her, discussing how we could support Western-socialized people in general — and our specific participants and the people in our large volunteer teams — in strengthening their relationship to grieving, ritual work, and ultimately to the web of life.
Decolonial development for all was and is the central point
At its core, this to us never seemed to be about making life even more comfortable for Western, mostly white people. Rather, the intention we understood behind Sobonfu’s work in the West was to address the roots of the harm caused by ongoing colonial violence. Sobonfu’s homeland was and is itself massively affected by different forms of colonial exploitation, oppression, and destruction. She herself and her elders at home saw one major driver of the many obvious and subtle forms of this violence in something that is largely missing in the Eurocentric and Western world: deep, emotional access to our more-than-human world and to the experience of real belonging and safety within living, supportive community — and all of that in our full humanity, just as we are.
Those violent lies of racism, white „supremacy,” and the forced extraction from nature that emerged from parts of Europe are only a few centuries old. Their still seemingly unstoppable spread has been and remains linked to the reality of many people whose roots to land were systematically severed or left to wither. Connected to this is a lack of lived experience of being part of the larger community of life. And for many, there is also a lack of loving, affirming, and at the same time open-hearted, inclusive human community.
In all of our conversations Sobonfu was very clear that none of these enormous losses could be adequately addressed without community-based grief work. As we understood her, communal grieving spaces are a prerequisite for peacefully processing painful life experiences in general — and especially the losses, shame, and systemic (psychological) violence to which people in Western contexts have been subjected for many centuries. She frequently named community-based grief work as an essential ingredient for ending the cycle of (colonial) violence spreading into nearly every corner of the earth and for creating a more life-giving way of living together.
Sobonfu’s perspectives and her attitude were shaping Circlewise profoundly, right from the beginning. It was a great blessing and good luck, really, that Elke was able to learn side by side with her during that time, in close exchange about everything we did together, until Sobonfu died in 2017 after a serious illness.
During the years with Sobonfu, Elke herself was able to shape much of the framework, methods, and increasingly also the content around Sobonfu’s rituals through “Verbindungskultur,” with a great deal of emotional and practical support, especially from Judith Wilhelm and Julie Langhorne. Since then, Elke and Noraa have continued to develop this work – always with loads of support by our teams of volunteers and by the genuine experiences and feedback from all our participants.
Navigating respect and reciprocity
As white people learning from an Indigenous teacher, we are confronted with big and uncomfortable questions. How can we share from the experiences we have been able to make in a way that honors and supports Sobonfu’s core concerns, but without ultimately reproducing colonial exploitation?
This is a question that is continually accompanying our work at the Circlewise Institute.
Our current approach is as follows:
- To clearly name and honor the significance of Sobonfu’s work in everything we do, both in general and in each specific context, just as we also honor other Indigenous influences.
- Not to copy or pass on the relatively few cultural symbols or elements that Sobonfu actually showed in her work here, something she herself often deliberately avoided.
- To work consistently as a non-profit organization, that is, without personally profiting from it (in 2025 we were also able to adapt the legal form of the Circlewise Institute accordingly).
- To make free or strongly discounted access available to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in all of our learning spaces, and to learn and practice solidarity-based, power-aware facilitation.
- To make authentic Indigenous voices and perspectives visible and accessible in our events — not in terms of what privileged people might extract for themselves, but in line with what Indigenous people themselves want to be heard saying. This includes, in particular, calls for Indigenous rights, freedom, sovereignty, and an end to colonial land theft and violence, as well as the need for reparations or restitution for crimes and atrocities that are often still barely acknowledged publicly.
- To provide financial and other support, both personally and structurally, for non-white people, projects, and initiatives.
- To systematically and continually reshape all of our projects in an anti-racist and decolonial way.
- In general, to create access to spirituality, community, and the web of life that is based on the concrete, real, experiential, and cross-cultural connection of all people to actual landscapes and living beings — not on the transmission of other cultures or on an inherited European past that could be exclusionary for people with other cultural roots.
On the origins of talking circles as a method
Another key aspect of our grief circles in particular goes back to the practice of talking circles. When talking circles are practiced, people often point out that humans in earlier times must everywhere have gathered in circles like this. This is certainly true in many respects, and for example there have been circular gathering places on the European continent for many thousands of years. But the specific form of passing a talking object around, which has been used for many years in countless contexts in Europe as well — from kindergartens to far-reaching Restorative Justice projects — clearly comes from Indigenous traditions in Turtle Island/the USA and Canada and has been and is taught there by specific people and communities from there.
Failing to name this means not honoring Indigenous knowledge and its concrete influences, but rather making them invisible — a sadly still common practice of colonial exploitation. By withholding visibility, the flow of recognition, reputation, and ultimately material appreciation is also prevented from the outset.
In our grief circles, we consciously do not use cultural symbols from Turtle Island cultures. Nevertheless, the basic form, including the use of a talking object, is based on parts of that knowledge, specifically the knowledge taught by Harold and Phil Gatensby of the Carcross-Tagish and Dahka T’lingit First Nations in the 1990s and still taught today. The Gatensbys were survivors of the horrific boarding school system, and looked for ways to change the justice system, the juvenile justice system, and also the school system so that the massive racist structural violence against Indigenous people — still ongoing today — could be reduced. This violence, among other things, causes an incredibly high percentage of First Nations people to spend long periods in prison even for minor offenses, immensely reducing their chances to build a free life and livelihood for themselves, their families and communities.
To this end, the Gatensbys and other teachers deliberately trained many non-Indigenous people in Turtle Island to lead talking circles, in order to make community, belonging, and peaceful conflict resolution more possible. During this time also white authors such as Kay Pranis and the then judge Barry Stuart were given access to the knowledge and practice of circles. Together with Mark Wedge (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), they wrote the book Peacemaking Circles – From Conflict to Community (published by Living Justice Press), which describes the use of talking circles in detail and with many variations, especially as part of the justice system within Indigenous nations in Turtle Island, but also with recommendations for practicing them in other contexts. Our understanding of talking circles at Circlewise is also based largely on this book.
Recognition paves the way to reciprocity
We believe that talking circles, even when done with only a few of their original elements, have immense value for our work and certainly for all of the many Western contexts in which they are used today. They are now so widespread in Western contexts that even a small amount per circle could already amout to a meaningful support for community projects. Because appreciation needs more than words, we have started to give a portion of our income back, specifically to the Native American Rights Fund, which among other things funds the Indigenous Peacemaking Initiative. This network of judges and other practitioners trains and advises a growing number of communities in Turtle Island to implement and recover traditional peacemaking processes.
Meet Your Training Team
Elke Loepthien-Gerwert
(she/her)
Elke is the founder of Circlewise and works like a kind of gardener for social spaces. She has been exploring, developing, and practising the art of weaving social and inter-species connections for over 15 years in many different settings.
She speaks English as her second language, is positioned as a white, able-bodied, neuro-divergent mother, born and raised in socialist Eastern Germany before, during and after the fall of the wall, is trained as a counselor and Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, a body-based trauma approach developed by Peter Levine. In her work, Elke tries to bring together Western scientific insights with a power-aware, anti-oppressive perspective – inspired especially by voices from Indigenous communities (such as Sobonfu Somé), as well as from queer-feminist, Black, and People of Color movements.
You can learn more about Elke on our team page.
Noraa/Aaron Gerwert
(they/no pronouns)
Noraa has been co-director of the Circlewise Institute since 2019 and has many years of experience accompanying a residential group for people with disabilities. They are a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, which is a body-based trauma approach developed by Peter Levine.
Living disabled with severe chronic illness and neuro-divergence, Noraa accompanies people through personal and collective processes of crisis and transformation with loving attentiveness, empathy, compassion, and a warm sense of humour. Their guided mindfulness meditations, nervous system co-regulation practices, and music – rooted in deep, authentic connection with life – touch and inspire people in lasting ways.
English is their second language. You can learn more about Noraa on our team page.
Dates & Prices
Dates and Schedule
We meet online on Tuesdays (Central European Time, Berlin/Amsterdam):
- 15 October – 17:00–21:00
- 22 October – 18:00–21:30
- 19 November – 18:00–21:00
- 03 December – 18:00–21:30
- 17 December – 18:00–21:00
- 21 January 2027 – 18:00–21:00
- 18 February 2027 – 18:00–21:00
One 1:1 supervision session with us for you personally is also included.
Pricing
Our pricing system follows a solidarity principle: it is designed to make this training more accessible to structurally disadvantaged groups.
- 1,590 € – Standard fee
- 1,290 € – Reduced fee
for people with limited financial means (limited number of places, early registration recommended) - 1,690 € – Solidarity fee
your contribution helps to make it possible for less privileged participants to join
Your employer might be willing to support or cover this training – it’s worth asking.
In exceptional cases, instalment plans are possible by arrangement from the time of registration.
Circlewise RISE Fund
For more equitable participation, our RISE Fund supports BIPoC, Jewish people, Sintizze and Romnja, and Trans* people with free or strongly reduced places in our educational offerings.
RISE stands for Reparation, Involvement, Solidarity, and Empowerment – a concrete strategy to strengthen participation and agency for historically and currently marginalised communities.
You can support the fund with a donation, easily transfered via our online tool.
If you belong to one of these groups, you are warmly invited to contact us – for most of our programs, we reserve several reparation places or significantly reduced spots.
Our Commitment to Solidarity-Based Facilitation
With our work, we commit to making visible the many forms of historical and ongoing injustice, oppression, and exploitation – both in society and in ourselves – and to creating spaces where these realities can be addressed and transformed.
We aim to foster more safety, justice, freedom, and belonging for everyone, and we understand this as a continuous learning and development process. We welcome critique, suggestions, and feedback as part of this shared journey.
Here You Can Register
Important Safety Note
Participation in this training cannot replace therapeutic support.
If you are experiencing anxiety, depression, or other difficult mental states, please know that you are not alone – and that professional help is available.
In Germany, you can find licensed psychotherapists and trauma therapists via professional directories, for example Somatic Experiencing therapists, maybe also in your region.
In acute and life-threatening situations you can also call the emergency number 112 and ask for an ambulance, doctor or other medical or psychological support.
There are also telephone counselling services available, that are mostly free of charge and anonymously, and further information for services in different countries and with different languages can be found in a list here.
Tom Dils
circlewise 2025
Rafael Heygster