Radically Open Connection

### About the Workshop

Grief moves like breath — contracting and expanding, pulling us into ache and then offering small moments of relief.
This rhythm isn’t a sign that something’s wrong; it’s how the body and brain adapt to loss.
In this 60-minute experiential workshop, we’ll explore what neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor calls oscillation — the gentle movement between pain and restoration.
Through grounding, guided reflection, and paired exercises, you’ll experience this rhythm directly, learning how to work with grief rather than against it.
This is an embodied, relational practice space — a place to honor what hurts, make room for what soothes, and leave feeling a little more resourced in the space between the two.

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### You’ll Experience

• Grounding to arrive in your body
• Exercises exploring the swing between grief and ease
• Group reflection and closing circle

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### Why It Matters

Research shows that oscillation — moving between loss and restoration — helps the brain slowly rewire after loss. But tonight, we’ll experience it through connection, curiosity, and presence rather than science.
By allowing both grief and relief, you teach your nervous system safety again.

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### Facilitated by Avery Collura

A guided grief workshop that blends science, imagination, and ritual. You’ll explore how grief lives in the body and use visualization to create “memories that could have been” — reconnecting with love, not just loss.

About the Workshop

When we lose someone we love, the mind often clings to pain while the body shuts the door on joy. This 90 minute session offers a gentle way to reopen that door — through memory, imagination, and shared ritual.
Together we’ll explore how the brain and body hold grief, and how imagination can help us access love that’s been overshadowed by trauma or illness. You’ll be guided to “weave” both real and imagined memories — tender, ordinary moments that never happened but could have — as valid containers of love and healing.

You’ll Experience:

• A guided grounding to settle the body and invite safety
• Journaling exercises for naming what’s missed and what’s still felt
• A visualization practice to imagine “memories that could have been”
• A bridging process to reconnect with real joyful memories

Why It Matters:
Research in grief neuroscience shows that imagining connection can activate the same neural pathways as memory itself. By allowing the body to feel love again, we help rewire the brain’s attachment maps and soften the ache of absence.
Come as you are — whether your loss is fresh or many years old. You don’t need to “be ready.” Just willing.

We’ll end together in circle, weaving what’s been remembered and imagined into something whole. You’ll be invited to name one thread you’re carrying forward — not to move on, but to move with.