This passing year (2020) brought with it huge challenges and significant losses to us all. As we’ve just marked a year since the first national lockdown, my hope is that we can begin to heal. As such, I’m grateful to be part of the ‘Good Grief Festival 2021’.
The Good Grief Festival offers a free virtual festival exploring the human experience of grief, loss and love. It’s taking place this weekend from the 27th to 28 March 2020.
To watch my interview (in full), where I discuss Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Somatic Body Mapping – ‘Unlocking Grief with Movement’, Please register for your free space via the link in my Bio. Or visit the Good Grief Festival to view the full program.
This virtual online festival explores the many faces of grief, reaching thousands of people all over the UK and internationally. It is also working with Marie Curie to host a series of events for the National Day of Reflection on March 23rd, which Marie Curie is spearheading to mark one year since the first Covid-19 lockdown.
With host 50 events in total, including panel talks, interviews and conversations. Working with the themes of ‘hope and meaning’, the festival will explore the universal human experience of grief at a time when the UK is mourning over 100,000 lives lost to Covid-19.
Over 70 speakers will take part, including Michael Rosen, Julia Samuel (This Too Shall Pass, Grief Works), best-selling authors Nikesh Shukla (The Good Immigrant, Brown Baby) and Katherine May (Wintering), Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird (Good Grief: Embracing life at a time of death), palliative care doctors Rachel Clarke (Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss, Breathtaking) and Kathryn Mannix (With the End in Mind), illustrator Gary Andrews (Doodle-A-Day/Finding Joy) and Stuart Lawrence, younger brother of Stephen Lawrence and author of ‘Silence is not an Option'.
Topics up for discussion include: Behind the ‘Numbers’: Humanising Covid-19; The Grief Gift: Finding Meaning + Purpose After Loss; How the Seasons Teach us to Grieve; The Importance of Storytelling in Grief; The Guilt Monster: Grief’s Complicated Sidekick; What Harry Potter Teaches us about Grief; Reflections on Death + Dying: Finding Hope, and Finding Your Grief Tribe: The Importance of Community + Connection.
The festival will also include a Grief School featuring 40 hours of on-demand video content categorised by type: from childhood bereavement to the death of a partner, traumatic loss to complicated grief, sibling loss to pet bereavement. It will also include conversations between grievers, expert panel talks, and webinars with bestselling authors.
“Around the world, millions of people are mourning the deaths of loved ones, friends and family members at an extraordinarily difficult time, when social networks and our usual ways of coping have been profoundly disrupted,” said Dr Lucy Selman, Founding Director of Good Grief, from the Palliative and End of Life Research Group at the University of Bristol.
“This spring, when it is needed more than ever, we are holding the festival to bring people together for solace and support. We are delighted to partner with Marie Curie to shed light on the many dimensions of grief and provide time and space to share experiences and remember those who have died.”
The Festival is a collaborative event led by the University of Bristol and supported by charity partner Marie Curie.
All events are free to attend. To pre-register, visit goodgrieffest.com