Community Grief Ritual Facilitator Training:
September 4 – 7, 2025 Bay Area, California
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This training is dedicated to graduating competent, confident, compassionate group facilitators, who desire to offer the Dagara-style Community Grief Rituals in their communities, in heart-centered service.
If you feel a calling to facilitate or even assist a Community Grief Ritual, I would like to offer you an opportunity to develop your skill-base in our growing community of facilitators in the Bay Area of California.
I have offered the full Facilitator Training four times now, once in Israel, once in California and twice in Hawaii.
At the heart of the training is an…
- Exploration of one’s calling to the work
- Exploration of one’s own grief
- Exploration of one’s fears and expectations around leadership
- as well as, Development of leadership skills, individual and as a team
WHAT WE WILL EXPLORE IN THIS 4-DAY TRAINING:
- We will explore and discuss the nature and energetics of Grief from the lenses of Ecopsychology, Somatic Wisdom, and Emotional Intelligence.
- We will work with the earth-based ritual template given to us by Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, which most of us understand as Community Grief Ritual.
- On Day 2, students will experience a Community Grief Ritual as a participant.
- On Day 3, we will dive into facilitation skill and leadership ethics
- On Day 4, we will break down production and promotion aspects
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DETAILS:
Tuition: $1400.
Three-month payment plan is available of $500/mo.
Location: TBA
Thursday, Sept 4 2:00PM – 7:00PM – Training Orientation
Friday, Sept 5 10:00AM – 6:00PM – Community Grief Ritual
Saturday, Sept 6 10:00AM – 6:00PM – Training
Sunday, Sept 7 10:00AM – 3:00PM – Training
REQUIREMENTS
- Everyone interested in attending must fill out an application and submit it no later than 2 weeks before the training begins.
- This training in the North Bay, north of San Francisco, California. Students are responsible for arriving to every day On-Time and staying through to the end each day.
- Students are responsible for providing their own beverages, snacks and lunches.
Maria Christina Owl is an international transformational leader, healer and full-body channel. She has worked with over 18 different indigenous elders around the world, and is deeply rooted in her own indigenous identity. Maria credits her healing from post-traumatic stress to earth-based ritual work, which she discovered at age 19. She has held hundreds of people around the world through deep transformation through wilderness quests, grief rituals, women’s initiation, and many other forms of ritual and ceremony.
Maria began training in Community Grief Work in 1999, focusing her bachelor’s degree on community healing through the Work That Reconnects, the modality developed by Joanna Macy. In 2005 she participated in a 10-month Dagara-style women’s initiation process, later she participated in a Village experience with Sobonfu Some, and participated in many grief rituals with Sobonfu after that.
Maria has offered Community Grief Rituals in the Dagara style for over 15 years, while also training facilitators to carry on the work in Tel Aviv, Israel, the Big Island, Hawaii and California.
Maria holds a Master’s degree in Integral Counseling Psychology with an emphasis on ecopsychology and trauma, and has taught Indigenous Wisdom at many institutions of higher learning, including Naropa and Dominican Universities. In 2012 she founded Sacred Future, a school devoted to re-integrating human culture back into harmony with Nature and Cosmos through the development of intuitive, authentic leadership.
