If there’s one thing that changed my life more than anything, it was learning to honor and tend to my grief. To create loving space for it. In learning how to meet my grief, my capacity to feel whole—and to love myself—has grown exponentially.

This is also a prayer I hold for the world: that we learn to turn toward our grief with love, compassion, and curiosity. If we could do that, the world would be so different. And since we were never meant to carry it alone, it matters deeply that we gather in community to learn how.

I know it can feel strange to put grief and play in the same sentence. You might even feel a strong reaction to it. For me, ritual is a form of play—it becomes the bridge between grief and play, and it’s how I connect with both.

I was feeling some darkness and heaviness. Negative thoughts and beliefs started to sneak in, and I decided to practice what I preach: I asked myself, “How do you want to play with this?”

I got curious. What are these thoughts? What’s being triggered in me? Which parts of me are showing up?

As the answers came, I realized the artist in me wanted to play. Three distinct parts emerged, and I began to imagine what they looked like and how they related to one another.

I saw the part of me holding and growing the light—the one that trusts, feels the beauty of what I’m building, and stays connected to intuition and the path ahead. But alongside her were two other parts clouding that experience.

“Rage is unalchemized passion—absolutely a force for good, if it wakes people up to the truth in the world.” -Kasia Urbaniak

As someone who used to be afraid of my own anger—and deeply uncomfortable with others’—I carried a lot of shame around it. Learning to embrace the power and wisdom of anger has been a journey.

Anger is an emotion. It wants to move through us.
We don’t always get to choose when it arrives,
but we do get to choose what we do with it.

Imagine two women facing each other, experimenting with different NOs—like trying on outfits to see how they feel and how they land.

Have you ever played with different kinds of NOs?
(I’ll admit—I had to Google the plural of “no” while writing this.)

At one of my play groups, two women shared the challenges they were having with boundaries and saying NO. I could definitely relate—and I was excited to explore how we might play with it.

One thing I know about play: it creates low-stakes, low-risk spaces to experiment.

And yet, the body holds memories of when it wasn’t safe to say NO.