Image: Winter by Agnes Pelton
a 6 month Facilitator’s TRaining + community of practice for Grief tenders birthing new worlds in troubled times 🕸️
2 spots left!
“Mara holds grief space so tenderly and expansively. This cohort was full of magical humans, and was a nourishing portal to plant magic, creativity and care in this time of collective horror and heartbreak.”
— Lindsay, Tears of the Gods participant
Easing the Passage is 6 month facilitation training + community of practice for those looking to hold group spaces for grief with the joy, tenderness, rootedness, and tenacity these times call for.
Beginner's welcome!
This class might be for you if…
✨ You are brand new to this work, but feel called to hold space for grief in your community
✨ You are a grief worker who is exhausted or stuck, and want to find more alignment and nourishment in your practice
✨ You are a space holder dreaming up a new offering and want dedicated structure and support to bring it to life
✨ You're a space holder wanting to transform your work to meet your community's growing needs in these times
✨ You want to hone your skills and craft as a facilitator so that you feel confident & rooted in your work
✨ You want to build sustainable rhythms in your grief tending practice rather ones that leave you burnt out
✨ You want to sustain and nourish yourself as a tender of grief spaces (emotionally, logistically, financially)
✨ You're excited to learn & grow alongside a cohort of fellow grief workers & community care practitioners
✨ You are passionate about birthing worlds in which grief is held as sacred and welcomed
✨ You believe we need a diversity of spaces and ways to be together in grief
Please note: I am not a licensed therapist or grief counselor. This class is not a clinical therapy training, nor is it a substitute for professional mental health care, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are seeking therapy, treatment, or crisis support, please seek the care of a licensed professional.
Facilitators as Collective Doulas
Image by Naya Kotko
Doulas serve those as the thresholds, making transformations, life, and death more easeful and empowered experiences.
At it's root, to facilitate means to make easeful.
As facilitators of group spaces in precarious, transformative, grief filled times, we work to doula the collective.
Course Topics
Click on the headings below for a list of subtopics!
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Facilitation 101: What it is and why it’s needed
Overlaps in facilitation, care work, and community organizing work
Facilitation for Collective Agency & Remembering ourselves as multitudes
Skills of effective facilitators
Facilitating spaces for grief: from rituals to support groups and other processes
Facilitating community spaces where grief is present, but not the focus
Facilitation as a Collective Skill: Against Professionalization & Towards Proliferation of Facilitators
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Community Grief and Death Work: What is it?
Decolonizing Grief Studies
Grief as Holy Disruptor: Grief work as political work
Grief Tending as Culture Building
Grieving under Capitalism: Against the repression & co-optation of fear, loss, grief, and trauma
Towards Worlds of Many Worlds: The need for a diversity of grief tending spaces, approaches, and practices
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Identifying your whys, your values, your joys, your skills, and communities you might (or already) work with
Filling your cup, finding your ecosystem: Getting clear on the practices, mentors, relationships, & systems that will support you in this work
Setting boundaries and clear expectations for the scope of your work
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A short history of capitalism, industrialization of death care, and context for un/paid care work
Examining “Money Mindset”, Capitalist Ideologies, Neoliberalism, and orientations towards accepting pay and exchange for community care work
Demystifying LLCs, taxes, bookkeeping, budgeting, and financial literacy related to working for yourself
Is it possible to burn it all down AND pay the bills? Finding alignment in the mess of living and working under capitalism
Pricing structures and livelihood models that create access AND sustainability
Investing in community over capitalism
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Practicing, reflecting on, and strategizing approaches to facilitation
Developing & workshopping offerings with cohort feedback
Communicating about your offerings and the work you do
Identifying next steps, approaches, boundaries, and practices that make this work sustainable for you
Please note: this is the pilot of this course so this is a draft of things we might explore! Participants will shape this course by sharing what topics are most relevant to them. Our course will also be largely experiential, collaborative, and participatory, rather than a lecture-style course.
This course is designed to actively support you doing the work you want to do.
A mixed levels class - Beginners welcome 💗
This is a mixed levels class- meaning that this is a space for those at various levels of experience with facilitation and grief work - whether beginners or those who have been at it for a while!
Course SCHEDULE
Our class will meet 3x-4x per month for May - October of 2026.
There are 2 cohorts:
Cohort 1 - Wednesdays, 12-2pm eastern time
Cohort 2 - Wednesdays, 6-8pm eastern time
There will be a handful of sessions with guest instructors that will fall outside of these times, which both cohorts will be invited to, and which will be recorded for those who can’t make it live!
Unit 1: Welcome, Situating ourselves in grief work in times of loss + transformation
Wednesday, May 6th - Welcome + Opening the Space
Wednesday, May 13th
Wednesday, May 27th
Unit 2: FACILITATION MODALITIES, PRactices, + Approaches
Wednesday, June 10th
Monday, June 15th, 6-7:30pm Eastern Time - Q&A with Naila Francis
Wednesday, June 17th
Wednesday, July 1st
Monday, July 6th, 6-7:30pm Eastern Time - Somatic Workshop (part 1) with Lee Datura
Wednesday, July 8th
Monday, July 13th, 12-1:30pm Eastern Time - Q&A with Dori Midnight
Unit 3: Making a Living in Care, Grief, + Death Work
Wednesday, July 22nd
Wednesday, July 29th
Wednesday, August 5th
Unit 4: Honing your craft: Finding what works for you (a practicum)
Monday, August 10th, 12-1pm eastern time - Q&A with Camille Barton
Wednesday, August 12th
Wednesday, August 26th
Wednesday, September 2nd
Monday, September 7th, 6-7:30pm eastern time - Somatic Workshop (part 2) with Lee Datura
Wednesday, September 9th
Wednesday, September 23rd
Wednesday, September 30th
Unit 5: reflection, Integration, + Closing
Wednesday, October 14th
Wednesday, October 21st
Wednesday, October 28th - Closing the Space
Additional Guest Workshops TBA
All sessions will be recorded for those unable to make it live!
Easing the Passage members will also get discounted 1-1 mentorship sessions with me, which you can schedule anytime you like!
Instructors, Facilitators, + ecosystem
mara june
primary instructor + Facilitator
Mara June is (they/them) is an educator, facilitator, community weaver, writer, caregiver, death doula, and community herbalist. They’re excited about plant magic, story-telling, art + ritual making, shapeshifting, and dreaming together.
Mara’s death care and grief support work is community oriented, taking place in longer term, group settings to feed the collective work of growing more deeply attuned and resourced communities who love, care, dream, and create courageously in times of loss, change, and grief.
To learn more about my trainings, approaches, and background, check out my about me page.
Camille Sapara Barton
Guest instructor
Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, embodiment facilitator and movement artist that supports organisations to flow through transitions. Their work creates relational wellbeing by increasing connection to the body, care practices, grief and imagination. Camille supports people to reduce stress and increase resilience, while navigating change. They also offer trauma informed facilitation and consultancy to support cultural workers, funders and those working with socially engaged topics.
Camille’s movement practice explores the interplay between bodies, words and vibration by weaving dance, clowning, somatics and sonics. Their work aims to deepen ancestral communication technologies and grow imagination gardens.
Camille is the author of Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024). Based in Amsterdam, they designed and directed MA Ecologies of Transformation (2021 - 2023) which explored how embodiment and socially engaged art making can create change through the body, into the wider world.
Dori Midnight
Guest Instructor
Dori Midnight is a community care worker, ritual artist, theologian, writer, and deep listener oriented towards collective healing and liberation. For over two decades, Dori has woven rituals and practiced intuitive, community based healing in one-on-one sessions and in radical movement spaces, in collaboration with the seen and unseen, plants, stones, songs, and more. Dori offers workshops on rituals and remedies for unraveling times, re-enchanting Jewish ancestral wisdoms as a liberatory practice, and queer magic and healing. Supported and inspired by a wide web of dreamers, witches, artists, and web workers, Dori’s work is also rooted in feminist, decolonial and abolitionist scholarship, queer liberation, and disability and healing justice work. Dori has been in deep cahoots with movement work for Palestinian liberation, prison abolition, and queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice. Dori lives on the occupied lands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc, by the Quinnehtukqut River, also known as Northampton, Massachusetts.
naila francis
Guest instructor
Naila Francis is a certified grief coach and death midwife, an interfaith minister and a writer/poet. As the founder of This Hallowed Wilderness, she helps people transform their relationship to grief and loss through holistic, heart-centered individual support, workshops, community grief tending and rituals. Her work is often informed by her love of poetry, nature and community. She is also a co-founder of Salt Trails, a Philadelphia collective normalizing and holding space for grief through community rituals. An ardent joy enthusiast, Naila believes in grieving well as a liberatory practice that deepens our capacity for pleasure, connection and compassion.
Lee Datura
Guest Instructor, Group Somatic Coach
Lee is a somatic practitioner and biodynamic craniosacral therapist. Her work centers supporting folks healing from burnout, emotional and physical trauma and creating a deeply compassionate container for learning tools to support the nervous system. She offers 1:1 somatic coaching in person or online as well as group nervous system workshops and courses. She believes healing means coming home to our very nature, that we are fractals of the inconceivable magic of the ecosystem, planet and galaxy around us & that healing happens in relationship.
Cassandra Lam
Somatic PRactitioner and Liberatory rest Educator
Cassandra Lam (she/her) is a neurodivergent Vietnamese-Chinese politicized somatic practitioner, liberatory rest educator, and community grief-tender based on the unceded lands of the Cherokee (Asheville, NC).
In these times of collapse, her ancestors called on her to gather and guide communities to grieve, rest, and care for one another as a means of “survival pending revolution” (quote by Huey P. Newton). She founded Collective Rest in 2021 to help people feel safe enough to slow down, address soul burnout at the roots, and reawaken night consciousness (our soul-led ability to see, move, and create in the dark). Cassandra offers virtual and in-person grief rituals, collective rest experiences, 1:1 mentorship for individuals and practitioners, and workshops.
Rooted in Asian spiritual lineages and in service to collective liberation, Cassandra is passionate about creating spaces of refuge where people of the global majority can sing, cry, laugh, dream, remember, and accompany each other through The Long Dark in a good way.
Danielle Shilling
Administrative + Teaching Assistant
Danielle is a poet, herbalist, and teacher. As a self proclaimed Venusian, her life is guided by colors, textures and her all consuming enamorment with the Earth. She has found great friendship in plant allies and immense healing within the natural world. She is thrilled to be a part of the Motherwort and Rose team, assisting behind the scenes and supporting students. As a former participant of Tears of the Gods, she has a personal appreciation and tender care for the magic these spaces hold. She is looking forward to deepening her connection with you all, and the world of grief tending.
Her favorite flower at the moment, is Bleeding Heart, Dicentra spectabilis.
Additional guests TBA
Cost
1 payment of $1500, 4 payments of $375, or 10 payments of $150
Payment plans can be selected on the registration pages below!
Please choose a cohort time that works best for your schedule- as this will be your cohort for the full 6 months! All sessions are also recorded if neither time works for you live, in which case sign up for either!💗
Scholarships/sliding scale
Scholarships and sliding scale spots are available for BIPOC and low income students. If interested, please complete an interest form. Don’t be shy!