Let's Take Action: Rituals for Renewal
Writer and grief educator Stephanie Sarazin facilitates a conversation with ritual designer Rabbi Sara Luria, founder of Beloved Garden, and spiritual teacher and healer Brenda Salgado about how actions, gestures, words, and objects allow us to metabolize our grief.
Following their discussion, we invite you to take action by sharing your stories with others in small, peer-led breakout rooms.
Sara Luria (she/her) is a rabbi, founder, and, at her best, cultivator of ideas and dreams. She is currently leading Beloved Garden, a network of spiritual leaders planting new projects and communities, after 4 years as founder and spiritual leader of Beloved Brooklyn. Prior to Beloved, Sara was the founder and executive director of ImmerseNYC: A Community Mikveh Project, now part of the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan. A Brooklyn native, Sara now happily lives in Northampton, MA with her husband, 3 kids, and their pandemic puppy.
Brenda Salgado is an author, wisdom keeper and organizational and movement consultant. She has experience in transformative and spiritual development, nonprofit management, facilitation, interspiritual dialogue, mediation and circle work, movement building, and community health and social justice. Brenda has trained with various elders in ceremony and traditional medicine, and she draws on the healing powers and relationship with the natural world to guide her work. She also holds degrees in Biology, Psychology, and Animal Behavior.
She is the Director of the Racial Healing Initiative and is the Founder of Nepantla Healing and Consulting. In the past, she has served as Director of the East Bay Meditation Center, Associate Director at Wisdom & Money, and Senior Fellow at Movement Strategy Center. She has also served on the boards of Movement Strategy Center, Lion’s Roar Foundation and Unity San Leandro. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for The Charis Foundation for New Monasticism & InterSpirituality, as well as The Center for Healing and Liberation. She is author of Real World Mindfulness for Beginners: Navigate Daily Life One Practice at a Time.
Brenda is committed to co-creating a society filled with community wisdom, belonging, wholeness and beauty. She is focused on racial healing work, land and ancestral healing, sacred economics, and the weaving of mindfulness and indigenous teachings for the times we are in. She is grateful to her ancestors for their support in collective healing and liberation work.
https://www.nepantlaconsulting.com/
Stephanie Sarazin is a writer, researcher, grief educator, and experiential expert in ambiguous grief. Her work began with her own experience of traumatic nondeath loss, which sparked an ambitious journey – spiritually and around the world – to understand, name, and heal the grief she found within. Her work revealed a first-of-its-kind definition for ambiguous grief whereby grief is onset by the loss of a loved one who is still living, and wherein hope presents as a defining component of the grieving process. Her book, Soulbroken: A Guide for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief (Balance, 2022) was named the Gold Winner by the 2023 Nautilus Books Awards and has received praise from leading voices including Adam Grant, Elizabeth Lesser, and Maria Shriver. A Psychology Today monthly contributor, her articles on grief and loss have also been published by several notable outlets including Newsweek, HuffPost, Spirituality & Health Magazine and The Sunday Paper. Stephanie is a graduate of Michigan State University and earned a Master of Public Policy from The University of Chicago. She is an avid reader, recreational runner, aspiring camper, and lives in North Carolina, where she is training to trek to Mt. Everest’s Base Camp in October 2024.
About the Series
Pieces of Me: Identity Loss and Ambiguous Grief
Our identities are not fixed. They evolve and dissolve over time, and often, friends and family, and society ignore or dismiss the sorrow associated with transitions of selfhood. These losses can occur across the arc of our lives: leaving home, breakups, estrangement, job termination, infertility, menopause, retirement, disability, and illness. This three-part series – along with additional events hosted by Reimagine’s community of collaborators – illuminates the grief experienced when our sense of self or belief system shifts or shatters.
We’ll also learn about ambiguous grief – the profound experiences of sorrow, anger, anxiety, numbness, hope, and other emotions associated with identity loss and other non-death related losses. A number of questions emerge:
- How does the end of a relationship or marriage affect your identity among family, friends, and communities?
- Whether impacted by a devastating diagnosis, struggling with infertility, or a chronic illness, how do we grieve the loss of a dream?
- If you are a caregiver to a parent, how do you manage letting go of your role as the child and becoming the adult responsible for your person’s care?
- As a parent, how do you process the wide range of feelings associated with empty nesting?
- How do you experience loss when your spiritual or religious community evolves? And if you leave a faith, do you yearn for certain rituals and fellowship associated with your spiritual past?
- As someone entering mid-life or elderhood, what are you grieving?
Register now to explore these topics and others related to the challenges of being in flux, the pain of letting go, and transforming the core elements of who we are.
About Reimagine
Reimagine is a nonprofit organization catalyzing a uniquely powerful community–people of different backgrounds, ages, races, and faiths (and no faith) coming together in the hopes of healing ourselves and the world. We specifically support each other in facing adversity, loss, and mortality and–at our own pace– actively channeling life's biggest challenges into meaningful action and growth.
