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_Join The Slow Work Garden for an 8-week group learning journey exploring grief as a portal for creativity , imagination and world-building _

✨ A collective action inquiry: What if we learnt to grieve together?
📍 London and Online: In-person gatherings at the beginning and end, and online sessions in between
📆 **Sessions dates: **
2 x in-person gatherings: Sunday 13th September & Sunday 15th November , 11am-3pm UK time , in cosy & soulful London locations
6 x online sessions: Thursdays 5.30-9pm UK time on 17th September, 24th September, 1st October, 15th October, 22nd October, 5th November

🌱 We'll come together to explore grief through the lens of eight different creative practices: Care, Hands, Time, Embodiment, Poetics, Relationship, Ritual, Emergence

🌱 We'll explore questions like: How might we slow down enough to feel? What does our unacknowledged grief do to our bodies, each other, the world? What does our grief want to say?

🌱 If you see the potential for grief to be a guide and source of deep wisdom and learning, or you're itching to disrupt the way our culture currently faces grief and loss – come and grow ivy into the cracks with us in this hopeful and grief-ful journey…

What if we learnt to grieve together?

In the west, we live in a largely grief-phobic culture. Society tells us who has permission to have grief, and what about. That grief is one-dimensional, linear, with an endpoint, and we must do it alone. That grieving is for others, and to be avoided, especially in a work context – it’s too loud, too messy, irrelevant; something to be cleaned up, fixed, hidden.

As practitioners, we see a deep connection between grief and creativity, grief and love, grief and compassion, grief and imagination. Our experience of grief could not be further from these stories – and it’s this incongruence that can often be one of the most painful parts of grieving in our culture.

Building on the work of elders, poets and practitioners such as Sophy Banks, Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, Francis Weller, Camille Sapara Barton, Joanna Macy, Vanessa Andreotti, adrienne maree brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Andrea Gibson and many others, we believe, that grieving together is an essential part of what it means to live and work in these times. Our grief, when acknowledged and tended to together, can be a truly creative and connecting force that allows us to explore the deeper parts of ourselves, access our soul-work, and reshape the ways we understand and move in the world.

Lucy and Christina invite you to ‘grow ivy into the cracks’ with us in this hopeful and grief-ful action inquiry. We’ll come together to explore the expansiveness of grief through the lens of eight different creative practices – Care, Hands, Time, Embodiment, Poetics, Relationship, Ritual and Emergence. Together we’ll have space to be fallow, existential and messy, and imagine and feel into more creative, ritualised and communal ways of tending to grief, loss and endings.

We offer a space for slowing down enough to feel, for dancing between learning, unlearning, reflection and creative practice, and for opening up enough to imagine alternatives. Our hope is for you to leave with a sense of what’s needed and what’s possible, and to bring fresh ways of thinking, being and doing into the way that you live and work.

The details

We’re excited to be offering this action inquiry as a hybrid experience, with in-person gatherings at the beginning and end, and online sessions in between. Over the course of 8 sessions across the Autumn, we’ll explore the expansiveness of grief, what it means to grieve as a practice, the potential of grief as a portal for imagining and world building, and be invited to play with ideas in creative, experimental and thought/feel-provoking ways.

In-person sessions:

We’ll meet twice in person, gathering for the first time on Sunday 13th September 2026 , and once again to close on Sunday 15th November 2026
Both in-person sessions will be 11am-3pm in a cosy & soulful London location (TBC), and will include a delicious home-cooked veggie/vegan meal and snacks

Online sessions:

In between the in-person sessions, we’ll meet six times online on Thursdays 5.30-9pm UK time (see below for exact dates)
These sessions will be on Zoom and will be recorded, and we’ll use other methods of capture to document our journey, such as Google Docs and/or Mural

We take care to create an intimate, cosy and inclusive space, and will be asking about needs and preferences along with your registration. You can sign up now, or email lucy@theslowworkgarden.com if there's anything you'd like to ask or discuss with us first – we can find a time to chat.

“A beautiful, gentle and profound exploration into grief through many lenses – looking grief in the eye and taking it by the hand. I now understand better how grieving is a part of living well.” – Laura, 2025 participant

Is this action inquiry for you?

You might:

Have lived experience of grief of any kind and be longing for a space to explore this creatively and collectively
Be supporting others with grief, loss or endings, or bringing people together around grief, either personally or professionally
See the potential for grief of all kinds to be a guide and source of deep wisdom and learning, in different contexts
Be itching to disrupt the way our culture currently faces grief and loss
Sense that grief could be a ‘way in’ for you or your work in the world
Be drawn to cyclicality (cycles of life and death) as a response / resistance to living and working in systems of linearity, extraction and growth

In this journey, we will:

Engage with grief kaleidoscopically through different creative practices
Have space and permission to be with and welcome in grief, and to listen to what our grief wants to say
Explore how living and working in a grief/death-phobic culture has affected the way we move and feel in the world
Have space to imagine and practise more creative, ritualised and communal ways of tending to grief, loss and endings
Hear, share stories, and be inspired by others doing 'quietly rebellious' things in this space
Explore what grieving as a practice means for our selves, lives and work, and think about how we can nurture the 'sore bits' where new ways of being hit up against the status quo

If you’re curious but still unsure, or have something you’d like to discuss before signing up, email lucy@theslowworkgarden.com and we can find a time to chat.

“Christina and Lucy left a lot of space for us to explore where in life we held grief and gave us useful tools to support ourselves and each other in this journey. Each session was like a warm bath. I would recommend anybody to become part of this community of deep care and listening.” – Sieske, 2024 participant

The journey flow

Our approach to action inquiry is not about crystallising answers, but rather to help us hold questions as guides for living, moving and feeling in the world. Each week will be guided by a question or questions, and centred around a different creative practice. The invitation is to live into these questions and practices with us, and to explore what arises as a response to the various activities, images, frameworks and provocations we offer throughout.

Session 1 (in-person) – Sunday 13th September, 11am-3pm

**Holding question: **
What does it mean to grieve together?

**Creative practice: **
CARE: We’ll connect for the first time in our new constellation, and feel into what it means for each of us to step into this tender work together.

Session 2 (online) – Thursday 17th September, 5.30-9pm

Holding question:
Where is grief showing up in our lives and work?

Creative practice:
HANDS: We’ll make, draw, craft, to make our grief visual.

Session 3 (online) – Thursday 24th September, 5.30-9pm

Holding questions:
How might we slow down enough to feel? What can the world around us teach us about grief?

Creative practice:
TIME: We’ll recalibrate time, drop into cyclicality, and seek guidance from the more-than-human world.

Session 4 (online) – Thursday 1st October, 5.30-9pm

Holding question:
What is unacknowledged and individualised grief doing to our bodies, each other, the world?

Creative practice:
EMBODIMENT: We’ll tune into embodied knowing, and access the wisdom of movement, music and song.

Fallow Week (break from sessions)

Session 5 (online) – Thursday 15th October, 5.30-9pm

Holding question:
What if we fell apart?

Creative practice:
POETICS: We’ll use storytelling, myth and metaphor to step into the Underworld together, and dance with the poetics of grief.

Session 6 (online) – Thursday 22nd October, 5.30-9pm

Holding question:
What does our grief want to say?

Creative practice:
RELATIONSHIP: We’ll explore our relationship with grief through the eyes of our inner child and our hidden parts.

Session 7 (online) – Thursday 5th November, 5.30-9pm

Holding question:
What does our grief need?

Creative practice:
RITUAL: We’ll explore ceremony and ritual as ways of being with and alchemising our grief communally.

Session 8 (in-person) – Sunday 15th November, 11am-3pm

**Holding question: **
What kinds of new stories are emerging that tell us about how we can grieve / be / do / feel / gather / organise differently?

**Creative practice: **
EMERGENCE: We’ll harvest the collective seeds of our journey together, and create a beautiful ending that’s also an opening to new possibilities.

Pricing

This journey is priced between £300-£900 per person joining, with the following suggested pricing structure:

£300 – low income / reduced price
£475 – medium income / standard price
£625 – high income / abundance price
£900 – place paid for by organisation or other institution

We ask you to self-select a payment that honours your capacity and doesn’t leave you feeling resentful. Higher payments will go towards providing a bursary place/places. We don’t want cost to be a barrier, so please get in touch if you’re unable to pay the reduced price or any amount. We are also open to exploring other-than-financial gifts and skills exchanges. Let’s chat – you can email us at lucy@theslowworkgarden.com.

This action inquiry will be capped at 15 places to ensure that there is enough intimacy and spaciousness for it to be meaningful.

If you’re unable to join the journey this time but you're interested in future dates and other slow offerings, fill in our short expression of interest form.

Your facilitators

Christina Watson

I’m a Brighton-based learning designer, facilitator and collective imagination practitioner. I’m also a song sharer, sea swimmer and proud aunt. I’ve spent the last 15 years designing and delivering educational programmes for young people and adults, ranging from mental health to climate action and creative arts. My work now focuses on re-connection – to ourselves, to each other and to the earth.

My route to this work began with early childhood bereavement and a lifelong relationship with grief. Over the last three years, I’ve taken a deep-dive into grieving in community, training in grief tending and experimenting with the wisdom of peer-to-peer spaces, in search of creative, generative ways of relating to loss and grief, as much as to life and love. I’m obsessed with the power of these spaces to cultivate the acts of resistance, learning, support and collective care we desperately need to face these times.

Lucy Williams

I’ve worked in education and learning for 20 years, and my experience brings together learning design, facilitation, inner work and systems change. My work now is about creating spaces to ‘not make sense’, and helping myself and others to notice and navigate the (inner and outer) contradictions of living and working in these times. Through this work, I’m experimenting with emergent ideas in learning design and facilitation, and developing practices in slowing down and cyclical living, working and learning. You’ll also often find me tending to my actual garden (a love passed onto me from my late mum), and walking in the woods near my home with my dogs Phyllis and Prue.

My route here involves dysregulated and hyper-speedy work cultures, burnout and more recently multiple bereavement, cumulative grief, late-discovered autism, and the subsequent knowing in my body and soul that slow work and deep inner learning are critical to practise and pursue in community.

Come and grow ivy into the cracks with us in this hopeful and grief-ful journey!