In a culture so focused on achievement, progress, efficiency, youthfulness, and success, it’s hard to know how to be with grief — an emotion that completely disrupts our societal and emotional underpinnings. This course is here to accompany you through these rough and choppy waters by providing you with tools, education, and most importantly, connection and validation, to help you harvest the medicine grief has to offer. This medicine is well-articulated by the Mayan Shaman, Martín Prechtel, when he says, “Grief is the way love honors what it misses.”  Come join us as we make meaning of our grief and honor our losses fully in the support of a safe and non-judgmental community.

Is this program for you?

Do you feel stuck in your grief, feel like you need to grieve a recent loss but don’t really know how, or perhaps resistant to even going there? Perhaps you would just like more support and guidance during this sorrowful time. You may have recently lost a loved one, experienced the ending of a relationship, or are reeling from the humanitarian and planetary calamities of our times.

How do we turn towards our individual grief with compassion in the midst of so much collective grief? How do we bear witness to climate change and the multiple pandemics from police violence to COVID-19 over the past years? Come join us as we find a response to these questions with the help of weekly group meetings, guided meditations, and creative offerings to learn how to carry our grief with care, rather than ignoring, or being obliterated by it.

Together, we will explore the various types of grief that may be arising. As we gather in community, we find a sense of belonging in our shared grief, helping to metabolize our losses and transmute them into a balm to soothe our own hearts, and the broken heart of our world.

Grief is not something we can go through alone, no matter how solitary the work can be. Embracing our grief is a radical act in itself, a part of the paradigm shift that is so needed in our world right now. Come join us as we do this work for ourselves, for each other, and for the world. I look forward to meeting you.

"Amy is a gifted and committed grief worker who has devoted herself to cultivating the skills necessary to provide sanctuary to those willing to tend their accumulated sorrows. Her compassion, sincerity, and warmth help to coax our hidden losses into the open where they can be tended by others. She carries a much-needed medicine for these times."
— Francis Weller, Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow

“Amy is a gifted space holder–tender, caring, warm, kind, and grounded–who knows how to create a safe container so that participants can explore their grief in a loving community she helps create.”
— Phoenix Song, Performer, Teacher and Healer

About Amy (she/her/hers)

Lead Facilitator

Alongside working as a grief therapist for over a decade, I’ve personally been in apprenticeship with grief since early childhood when my dad died unexpectedly. It has been a passion for me to help others feel supported in their losses as this was not my experience due to our societal and cultural views towards grief. It was not until my mid-twenties that I finally began to turn towards my own loss — something I was so terrified of — and began to feel more fully alive, connected to myself and others, and less exhausted and dissociated from running from the past.

Being multiracial second-generation Korean American and white (Western European and Jewish) from a blended family, my loved ones represent a handful of races, native tongues, cultures, sexual orientations, socioeconomic and educational statuses, and spiritual beliefs. I honor the unique impact that these identities have upon one’s life story. It is my intention to provide a safe space for those of all intersectionality of identities to feel seen, welcomed, and accepted.

I bring in my lived experience as somatic-based grief and trauma therapist, expressive arts therapist, yoga and meditation teacher, artist and writer, to welcome your whole self to feel seen, heard, and understood on your journey through grief.

I have faith in the healing power of connection and collective liberation through group work, and feel honored and grateful to my teachers who have informed my work: Francis Weller, Aki Hirota Baker, Manuela Mischke-Reeds, Ken Hardy, Sarah Lotus Garrett, Karen Rachels, and the work of Shawna Murray-Browne.

Read pandemic grief article that features interview with Amy published in WIRED Magazine here

Read interview with Amy on collective grief published in San Francisco Chronicle here