We warmly invite you to join our Circles of Grief session. A gentle and supportive space to explore your personal experiences of grief and loss in all their forms. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, this gathering offers a compassionate place to share what may be laying heavy on your heart.

Our intention is to create a loving and safe environment where everyone feels comfortable and supported to meet whatever arises during the session. This group will run monthly, and we are pleased to be launching it as part of National Grief Awareness Week in the UK.

We are honoured to offer this collaboration between The Sacred Death Centre, Amy Lou Martin, and Emmelaine Leighton-McCardell.

About the Facilitators

Amy Lou Martin – End of Life Companion, Soulmidwife
“My name is Amy, I live in Street, Somerset, with my fiancée and two sons, who are 12 and 5 years old. I am currently training to become a Soul Midwife and Psychopomp (Guide of Souls) practitioner.
Through various trials and traumas in my life, I have come to this work from a place of deep spiritual peace and acceptance. The journey from life to death is fascinating to me, and it can be a beautiful one, if we allow it to be. I hope to help ease this transition for those going through it, whether themselves or with a loved one. Through the Circles of Grief sessions, we can honour those we have loved and lost, allowing the light of our loved ones to shine through the pain. My prayer is for that light to become more present for all those living with grief in their hearts.”

Emmelaine – Psychotherapist and Nature Therapist
My name is Emmelaine and I am a psychotherapist and nature therapist in the local area, with experience in holding space for individuals and groups across all walks of life.
I am passionate about bringing people together to explore shared experiences and experiences within the collective. I feel that we all deserve a place to express both our personal and shared experiences around grief and what it means to be in relationship with it.
I believe that when we allow ourselves to feel deeply and authenticity, we also open our hearts to what is beyond, and being able to assist the facilitation of this feels like deeply important work that I am honoured to participate in.

Event Details

Sunday 7th December 2:15pm – 3:45pm Avalon Room, The Courtyard, 2–4 High Street, Glastonbury BA6 9DU

We look forward to welcoming you into this loving space of remembrance and connection.

With love,
Amy & Emmelaine
Please Note

This is a community grief sharing circle, not a therapy group. You are responsible for your own well-being during and after the gathering, as well as for seeking any follow-up support you may need.

If you are currently experiencing acute mental health challenges, we warmly encourage you to seek guidance from a qualified professional to assess your capacity to attend and to ensure you feel safely supported.

This is not a course about “moving on.”

It is about being moved by grief into a deeper, more integrated version of yourself. 

Grief takes us inward and downward. It pulls us away from the familiar structures of our lives and into terrain that is quiet, slow, disorienting, and profoundly human. This journey is not linear. It is full of shock, pauses, mini-griefs, disorientation, unravelling, and slow reorientation. It is a descent — but when it is supported, it becomes a tender and necessary descent that ultimately returns us to ourselves. 

This six-week container offers a gentle, somatic, ritual-led path through this process.

Here, grief is honoured in its full depth. You do not have to rush. You do not have to be strong. You do not have to know where you are going. 

Who This Is For 

This journey is for anyone who: 

• Is grieving – whether your loss is recent or lives quietly in you from long ago
• feels disoriented, overwhelmed, stuck or frozen
• longs for a gentle, embodied way to process grief
• wants to understand what is happening inside them
• needs ritual, rhythm and somatic support
• wants to reconnect with their body and inner landscape
• desires community but not pressure
• seeks a supported descent and a grounded return

No dance experience needed.

You can arrive just as you are. 

What awaits you 

This course provides the container and structure for a gentle descent — and a supported return. Through dance, ritual, community, talking circles, somatic inquiry, and simple altar practices, you will begin to: 

• meet yourself honestly
• understand the terrain of grief
• orient your body slowly and safely
• feel again from the inside out
• soften into what is true
• sense the first flickers of return
• reorient toward life
• begin to emerge differently
• Reconnect with community
• remember who you are becoming

What is Movement Medicine? — a refined integration of psychotherapeutic dance, shamanic practice, and neuroscience- it forms the embodied heart of this journey. When we put the body into Motion, the Psyche can heal


Movement Medicine teaches us to: 

• feel our true interior (interoception)
• Awaken the vertical axis of mind, body, and heart
• Re-establish coherence in the nervous system
• Honour the elements within us
• Grow in responsibility and soul maturity
• Integrate with the wider web of life
• Allow the breath to return and thaw the frozen places
• Find true orientation and sense of wholeness
• Dance for ourselves, for each other, for community, for the Great Spirit, and for the Mystery

27th  January – Module 1 — Initiation – The Descent: Softening Into What Is True 

Orientation • Grounding • Naming the Landscape of Grief 

A gentle arrival and welcome into the container, establishing an agreement on how we wish to be together, opening the space for Ceremony, the invocation of the 4 Gates, Intention setting, ritual action & blessing.  

Once we have set the tone and created the container.

We begin by acknowledging that grief often pulls us into a slow, heavy, disorienting descent — one we didn’t choose and cannot bypass. When someone we love dies, our inner sense of order collapses. Identity shifts. The world becomes unfamiliar. Grief creates shock, numbness, fog, confusion and a deep loss of the inner compass. 

We take time to tell the truth about where we actually are, without judgment or expectation. 

Through gentle somatic practices, we support the body to soften into this reality: 

• grounding into the floor
• orienting through the senses
• slow breath work
• feeling what is present without forcing change

We explore the concept of descent as natural, not pathological — a psychospiritual movement downward that allows the psyche to catch up with what has happened. 

This module is about arriving honestly, feeling supported, and realising you do not walk this path alone. 

3rd Febraury – Module 2 — Movement Medicine Journey I: Grief dance  –  An Embodied Descent

Interoception • Thawing • Body-led Truth • Elemental Descent 

This is the first full Movement Medicine journey where we begin to bring our grief into motion.

Earth and Water guide us downward in a safe, supported way.

These elements help reduce internal pressure, soften held patterns, and restore the ability to feel from the inside. 

We explore: 

• interoception — the true felt sense inside the body
• thawing frozen areas that grief often creates
• reconnecting to limbs and body parts
• giving weight to the Earth for support
• allowing emotions to flow like Water, without collapsing or pushing away

Movement becomes medicine here: 

• It heals the psyche by restoring movement where grief has created immobility
• It re-establishes orientation in the nervous system
• It allows the body to express what words cannot

This journey marks the embodied acceptance of where we are — not resignation, but recognition. 

10th February – Module 3 — Ritual, Community & Being Held as We Go Down 

Liminality • Talking Circle • Ritual Slowing • Underworld Mapping 

Grief needs time, space, and structure to metabolise.

This module is the “held descent,” where you are supported by community, ritual and shared humanity. 

We begin with a talking circle (always optional), where you can speak or simply witness others. The shared field of sorrow, truth-telling and presence creates a container that holds what is too heavy to carry alone. 

We explore: 

• the mini-griefs that accumulate (identity, daily life, roles, home, meaning)
• the fog and flattening that grief creates
• the liminal space — where the old life has fallen away, and the new one hasn’t formed
• the exhaustion and slowness of descent
• Why people get stuck, and how ritual helps unstick
• Why descent is a normal, healthy response

Ritual slows time, and it gives the psyche something steady to hold onto while everything else feels uncertain. You begin to understand your place in the grief cycle and feel less alone in it. 

17th February – Module 4 – Movement Medicine Journey II: Air & Fire — First Flickers of Return. 

Vertical Axis • Breath • Warmth • Expression • Reawakening 

This Movement Medicine journey marks the first emergence after descent.

Nothing is forced. We simply create the conditions where the body may begin to move differently. 

Air brings: 

• breath
• spaciousness
• clarity/new perspectives
• room around the heaviness

Fire brings: 

• warmth/ heat
• courage
• small or large expressions of life
• subtle ignition of energy

Together, they support the reawakening of the vertical axis:

mind → heart → body in alignment. 

We explore: 

• How grief matures us
• How strength and vulnerability dance together
• The first signs of wanting to engage with life again
• Early reorientation after disorientation

This dance honours flickers, not fireworks.

It acknowledges the smallest movement toward return, which in grief is profound. 

24th February – Module 5 — Reorientation: Emerging Identity & Gentle Coherence 

Integration • Identity • Returning Sense of Self • Soul Growth 

After descent and the early stirrings of return, something new begins to take form.

Grief shapes us. We do not return to who we were. 

This module explores: 

• Whom am I becoming through this loss?
• What is returning to me?
• What is no longer true?
• What sense of self is emerging?
• How is my body reorganising itself?

We explore the difference between: 

• trying to “go back”

  and
• allowing a new orientation to grow

Gentle somatic mapping helps you sense: 

• coherence
• inner strength
• subtle readiness
• new desires or needs
• reorganisation of identity after rupture

This is the beginning of the supported return — not a leap, but a slow rising. 

A reflective, somatic week focused on:

Whom am I becoming through this?  What is returning to me? What choices are now possible?

Grief begins to reorganise the inner world, revealing new coherence and meaning. 

3rd March – Module 6 — Movement Medicine Journey III: All Elements — The Supported Return, the road ahead and Completion

Integration • Emergence • Wholeness • Returning to Life 

This final Movement Medicine journey integrates all four elements: 

• Earth — grounding, belonging, steadiness
• Water — emotion, flow, release
• Air — clarity, breath, perspective
• Fire — energy, courage, vitality

We honour: 

• The descent you allowed
• The being held you received
• the transformation you’ve undergone
• the return that is beginning in you

This dance acknowledges the truth:

You are not who you were before your loss — but you are also not who you were when you began this course. 

A closing ritual offers blessing, support, and integration as you step into the next phase of your grief journey — carrying newfound coherence, wisdom, and presence. 

About us – Your guides in this work: 
Melanie Philip 

I am a Movement Medicine teacher-in-training, end-of-life doula, ritualist and somatic guide with a lifelong devotion to supporting people through grief, loss and life’s most tender thresholds. For more than twenty years, I have companioned individuals and families across a wide range of caring environments — homes, hospices, hospitals, community settings and private practice — offering presence, steadiness and embodied support through dying, death and the grief that follows. 

My work is shaped by decades as an intuitive bodyworker, holding clinics across Dorset and Devon. This deep practice of listening to the body — its patterns, its memories, its contractions and its resilience — continues to inform everything I do. It has taught me how grief lives inside the tissues, breath and posture, and how somatic awareness, touch and movement can gently help the body soften, express and release. 

Movement Medicine forms the heart of my approach: a refined integration of psychotherapeutic dance, elemental practice, ritual and the alignment of mind, body and heart. Through movement, ceremony and interoceptive inquiry, I support people to meet what is true within them, to honour what has been lost, and to rediscover the steadiness that lives in their own bodies. 

As an end-of-life doula, I accompany the dying with grounded presence, while also supporting families and loved ones as they navigate anticipatory grief, loss and the early stages of bereavement. This work continues to deepen my understanding of how grief moves, how ritual restores connection, and how community can hold what feels too heavy to carry alone. 

Across all of my offerings, my intention is simple and unwavering:

to create warm, safe, sacred spaces where people feel witnessed, welcomed and supported exactly as they are. Spaces where the body can breathe. Where movement becomes medicine. Where grief is honoured, not rushed. 

A Gentle Descent, A Supported Return arises from this devotion — a tender, grounded six-week journey for those navigating grief and longing to come home to themselves. 

I’m grateful you’re here, and I look forward to walking — and dancing — this path with you. 

Lucy Lord

I am a Grief Recovery Specialist, grief tender, and the founder of the Sacred Death Centre in Glastonbury, a community organisation dedicated to supporting people through the thresholds of death, dying, and grief. My work is rooted in the belief that grief is not a problem to be fixed, but a deep human process that deserves time, space, and reverence.

After working for many years in the corporate world, my life changed direction through a series of profound personal losses. These experiences brought me into the Grief Recovery Method, which became a pivotal turning point in my own healing and the foundation of the work I now share with others. Over the past years, I have supported many individuals through this evidence-based programme, helping them to gently meet and integrate the emotional pain they have carried.

Recognising that how we die shapes how we grieve, I trained with Felicity Warner as a Soul Midwife, deepening my understanding of the end-of-life journey and the importance of compassionate presence. My grief tending work is further grounded in the teachings of Francis Weller, whose wisdom about community grief, the necessity of ritual, and the “descent” shaped the vision for this offering. His reminder that “grief and gratitude are two sides of the same coin” is central to my approach.

At the Sacred Death Centre, I hold spaces that bring grief and death back into the heart of community — through circles, clinics, ceremony, ritual work, and education. This course, A Gentle Descent & A Guided Return, weaves together all strands of my practice: the science-based tools of Grief Recovery, the ritual lineage of Soul Midwifery, and the soulful grief-tending traditions inspired by Francis Weller.

It is my deep honour to co-facilitate this journey with Melanie Philip, whose Movement Medicine brings the body, breath, and innate wisdom into each step of our descent and return.

You are welcome here exactly as you are — with your story, your tenderness, and the truth of your heart.

All sessions are 90 minutes. Each one will be recorded and sent to you within 24 hours of our time together, so you can revisit the material whenever you need.

We look forward to sharing this journey with you.

Much Love,
Melanie & Lucy