Grief Unmasked: A Place to Ask Your Questions About Grief
Grief Unmasked: A Place to Ask Your Questions About Grief will be a panel discussion hosted by Breathing Wind. Honoring healing, growth and change, we invite our listeners to ask us anything in their hearts about grief and loss.
Breathing Wind is a podcast about grief, parent loss, change and healing. Founded by Sarah Davis, season one was an exploration that centered around sharing stories about the experience of losing parents at a young(er) age. Season two’s focus was on healing, growth and change.
About the panelists:
Sarah Davis
Sarah is the producer and founder of Breathing Wind. She lost her father to cancer in 2016, and since then, has been exploring her relationship to loss, grief and mortality through hiking, spirituality, community, and writing. She has a business as a learning experience designer, where she focuses on empathy in learning design.
For season 2, Sarah hosted a mini-series titled “Caregiving Journey” where she explored:
- How stories of other caregivers can help us feel less alone
- Ambiguous grief and caregiving at end of life
- The shifting roles of the caregiver
- How and why to seek self-care
- Joy in the caregiving journey
Wendy Rolón
Wendy is a grief counselor with a background in birth and death doula work. She is particularly awed by grief's ability to transform and expand our lives. A long-time supporter of those in transition, Wendy believes fervently in the healing power of meditation, guided visualization, yoga, music, storytelling and laughter, and is always looking for ways to incorporate these elements into her healing practice with those who are grieving.
Wendy received her training with the International End of Life Doula Association and her MS in Counseling Psychology from California State University East Bay. She has three kids, three dogs, three cats and loves gardening, reading, singing and knitting.
In season 2 of Breathing Wind, Wendy hosted a mini-series, called “Transforming Grief,” where she explored the following questions:
- How do we work with the fact that death is unavoidable?
- What can we do as humans to embrace grief as a tool for growth?
- The year 2020 brought the inevitability of death into focus. What has this focus taught us about grief?
Ken is an Oakland, CA-based Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Certified Yoga Therapist with a grounded passion for nudging the Western mental health paradigm in regards to safe, legal and ethical integration of sacred plant medicines or psychedelics. With a thanatological (study of mortality) approach to holding space for others, Ken has a deep reverence for Spirit while acknowledging each of us must find our own way of making sense of the experience of being human. Combining the essence of Kierkegaard's "Live life forward, understand it backwards" with Ram Dass' "We are all walking each other home" provides a hint at how Ken is attempting to understand his own being human.
Ken hosted a mini-series entitled “Meaning Making, Mortality and Medicine”. Here are his central themes:
- The universality and uniqueness of finding meaning and purposeful actions through exploring our finitude or mortality
- The search for meaning in loss
- How particular sacred plant medicines have helped him and others in dealing with the loss or the anticipatory loss of a parent
Siena Tenisci
Over the past decade, Siena walked a committed path to excavate and reclaim her village roots, much of which was lost over generations of assimilation to a more modern pace of life. In her mother’s homeland, a rural farming region of Abruzzo, Italy, community gatherings that honored each passage through life were once the foundation of communal health and her family’s flourishing. In her father’s lineage, keening women, or mnàthan-tuirim, once held dedicated and respected roles in Gaelic society as vocal ritualists that helped move communal grief through the honoring of sound and beauty. However lost, each one of us comes from ancestral memories like these. Siena has helped many claim greater wholeness in self and community by rediscovering how to tend collectively to sorrow. By grieving together, we reweave our lost connection to each other.
Siena brings her background in body-based somatic healing practices, group therapy, and ceremonial work to circles. She is committed to a lifelong practice of cultural sensitivity and to dismantling systemic and internalized oppression. She is currently studying Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Antioch University in Seattle and stands on the shoulders of great teachers, including Sobonfu Some, Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, and many others.
Serena Malkani
Serena Malkani M.A. is an internationally recognized Sound Practitioner, Ayurvedic Counselor and Intuitive Coach. Serena integrates her psychology expertise with the medicinal qualities of Sound, Ayurveda, and Yoga to develop long term preventative health care rituals. With over 10 years of education and practice, Serena offers a unique way to help people create change, find balance, release stuck emotions, and reduce stress and anxiety.
