Life’s Poetry
A 6 month community programme exploring life through the lens of grief
When we accept + allow the deep waters of grief, it brings us closer to life
The next journey of Life’s Poetry starts on Monday 6th October 2025
In our culture grief is hidden in the shadows, it’s deeply suppressed. Life’s Poetry seeks to bring you into a different relationship with life through the profound wisdom of grief.
In these times of turbulence, turning towards our grief has never been more important.
This is a unique 6 month community journey that takes you on a deep exploration of grief in its many forms. Life’s Poetry will take you beyond what you think you know as grief and bring you into contact with yourself and life in a way you haven’t experienced before.
Using the Six Gates of Grief we will explore the relationship you have with life, with love and with grief. It will connect you back into something that you’ve always known but may never have touched on.
Grief is life.
Grief is the portal to life, your ability or willingness to meet grief, to dance with grief, mirrors that which you can experience life.
Dance with grief and you dance with the intimacy of life.
This is a deep and expansive exploration of both your inner and external landscapes.
The elements of the programme
This programme is based on Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief. These gates are a way of exploring your internal and external landscape.
The Five Gates of Grief go beyond what you will know as grief and allow you to enter into territory you may never have explored before.
Life’s Poetry uses the beautiful combination of teaching, sharing & coaching circles, and ritual.
We will meet on Mondays at 6pm BST/GMT.
All calls will be 1.5 -2 hours in length and will be recorded (live participation is necessary for this journey).
We will also have an online space to deepen our work in between our live calls.
Life’s Poetry invites you to turn towards all of life
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Coming together
The journey begins
Together we’ll lay the foundations of community, explore the landscape & context of grief, and set intentions.
Mon 6th Oct - Coming together
Mon 13th Oct - Laying the Foundations + Setting Intentions -
The First Gate
Everything you love you will lose
A gate you may be familiar with. To welcome in the work of grief is to come into this deep intimacy with life, to know that what we love we will lose. Together we’ll explore what it is to lose what we love.Mon 20th Oct - Teaching
Mon 27th Oct - Sharing & Coaching
Mon 3rd Nov - Ritual -
The Second Gate
The places that have not known love
Through this gate we’ll explore all the parts of ourselves that we have shunned, that have been exiled, and begin the journey of welcoming them back in. Shame is the keynote of this gate. This gate changes the relationship we have with ourselves.Mon 10th Nov - Teaching
Mon 17th Nov - Sharing & coaching
Mon 24th Nov - Ritual -
The Third Gate
The sorrows of the world
There is a collective grief we are all experiencing at the moment, as we watch the conflict of the world, the systems of capitalism and oppression and the impact to our Earth. This gate of grief feels more vital, more important than ever. We will turn to face the sorrows of the world.
Mon 1st Dec - Teaching
Mon 8th Dec - Sharing & coaching
Mon 15th Dec - Ritual -
The Fourth Gate
What we expected but did not receive
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, there are many things in our lives that we expected but did not receive. From the village, community, to a mother’s love. This gate runs deep into the well of our needs and what it is to be human.
Mon 12th Jan - Teaching
Mon 19th Jan - Sharing & coaching
Mon 26th Jan - Ritual -
The Fifth Gate
Ancestral Grief
Something unknown and not spoken about often is the grief we carry from our ancestors. This runs deep and is everlasting, until we turn towards it. The second element to this gate, is the grief we carry for having no relationship to our ancestors, the forgotten connections. Through this gate we’ll explore what it is to be with ancestral grief.
Mon 2nd Feb - Teaching
Mon 9th Feb - Sharing & coaching
Mon 23rd Feb - Ritual -
The Sixth Gate
The harms we’ve caused + all other untouched grief
There are two elements to this final gate, bringing in the work of Holly Truhlar, Racheal Rice & Desiree Adaway to explore what they call the sixth gate of grief, the harms we’ve caused.
We also explore all untouched grief that hasn’t been explored within the gates of grief.
Mon 2nd Mar - Teaching
Mon 9th Mar - Sharing & Harvesting -
Completion
Completion with intention
We will use everything we’ve learnt about grief, endings and ritual to complete our time together and our journey together.
Mon 16th Mar - Completion + Ritual
Why community is important
Whenever we’re experiencing anything uncomfortable our tendency can be to isolate, to move away from others, to tidy it up and re-emerge when everything is OK. We’ve lost the art of vulnerability and tending in community. To ask another for help and support, or to simply listen to another in their sorrow, their grief. In fact it can feel so vulnerable to open ourselves up in this way, it’s almost impossible.
But we were never meant to grieve alone. We were never meant to do life alone. This is why coming together as a group, as a community, to journey through the elements of grief is vitally important, and an important element of this journey.
Every time I sit with other human beings in grief something beautiful emerges. When we share our hearts, our sorrows, our vulnerable selves, we connect and create an intimacy in ways we haven’t before.
Knowing you in a way that some people never dare to know one another.
Sophie, Ireland, on Life’s Poetry
Why ritual is a fundamental part of Life’s Poetry
Ritual is a forgotten art, we’ve lost the act of ritual, although many of us are in ritual every day. We get up every morning, we shower and we brush our teeth, we prepare meals and eat, we may move our bodies. When we start seeing ritual as an intentional act it allows us to deepen into life. Ritual brings something mundane, into something sacred.
During this journey we will use the medicine of ritual to work with our insights and emotions. Ritual is a sacred act of remembering. Ritual is a way of bringing heat to alchemise grief, of letting the grief work beyond words. Beyond words is important, we put a greater emphasis on knowledge and thought, ritual works in a different way which is no less powerful. Ritual is meant to transform and change us, and this is what we bring into Life’s Poetry.
When I’m with others in grief, it’s the most alive I feel, this is the possibility, this is the invitation of Life’s Poetry.
Life’s Poetry can support you in many ways
Everyone and all grief is welcome to Life’s Poetry.
The nature of the gates of grief mean we leave no stone unturned, we will turn to grief in all its ways.
You’ll come to the understanding that grief and loss are part of life. You’ll know in your being that grief is allowed and necessary.
As are all the parts of you, the parts that have been outcast in shame, and those that you’re able to accept more willingly. We’ll welcome in all of who you are.
You’ll be able to put words and feelings to the grief that’s been within you but you’ve never fully understood, or even been aware of. The unconscious grief that needs our warmth, care and affection.
You’ll see that grief lives all around us and the extent to which we allow and nurture our grief aligns with how much beauty, gratitude and awe we allow into our lives.
You’ll know, perhaps for the first time, that you’re not alone. You’ll sit with others, you’ll hear their grief, their tenderness and it will open something within you.
You’ll see we’re in a time of deep grief, that needs our reverence. We’ll explore together the collective grief that we’re all part of and begin to unpick what it is to be with this grief from the perspective of we and us, rather than I and me alone.
We’ll let ritual undo us to create something different, a different, necessary way of being.
Life’s Poetry is for everyone, and it’s also supportive if you’re a practitioner and you want to deepen your understanding of grief.
Praise for Life’s Poetry
Come and join us
Coming into a programme like this may take courage. Fear and resistance is completely normal, as well as jumping in with two feet. I’m here to support you every step of the way.
This programme is for anyone who wants to deepen into life and grief. It’s also supportive for practitioners who want to expand their understanding of grief.
There are 20 spaces available, the aim of this journey is to be intimate and explore the inner landscape of who we are, as well as the systems and world we live in. This number of participants is designed to give space for this.
Pay in full
The full cost of this programme is £1800. You can pay in full or you can choose monthly instalments.
Payment Plan
You can also pay in 6 monthly instalments at no extra cost. If you need a longer payment plan get in touch.
I aim to remove barriers to participation, particularly for those in marginalised identities and communities, and therefore offer lower fee places and longer payment plans for those who need it. If you know you want to do this programme and need support, please get in touch.
Email me at nicola@nicoladuffell.com. Everyone is welcome.
