The Wild Alchemy of Love and Loss: Temple of Grief and Eros

The Wild Alchemy of Love and Loss: Temple of Grief and Eros is a day-long intensive that invites participants into the sacred confluence where grief and eros dance as essential life forces. Recognizing that our capacity for profound sorrow feeds our ability to experience profound aliveness, this ceremonial container explores how grief—as a praise song to what we love—and eros—as the life force connecting us to each other, the earth, and the divine—can deepen and amplify one another when held in reverent community.

We'll explore how grief opens the heart to deeper intimacy, how loss can awaken dormant desires, and how embracing our mortality enhances the fire of our vitality. Over the course of the day, we will explore individual grief practices and communal rituals of heart opening, then transition into an evening temple space, eros as the exhale that follows grief’s inbreath. This intensive is particularly potent for those navigating significant transitions, carrying collective grief about systemic collapse, or sensing that moving closer to their deepest wounds is a path to creative power and erotic healing.

Together we will create a loving container to embrace the full depth of both our grief and our eros as an act of resistance against a world that would numb us to both sorrow and joy. Come prepared to be witnessed in your wholeness—your ebb and your flow, your endings and your beginnings, your sorrow and your wild desire. In this temple, we remember that to be fully alive means to be fully feeling, and that our deepest wounds often become our greatest sources of wisdom and power.

No experience necessary. Just the courage required to be alive and human in these times is enough. Trust that your body remembers how to do this.

Bios

Andi Chatburn is a hospice physician, ecophilosopher and ordained ceremonialist who guides people through life's most profound transitions by weaving together conventional medicine and ancient wisdom traditions. As an apprentice to death, she understands how intimate encounters with mortality—both our own and others'—can become portals to previously unimagined aliveness. Her own erotic journey has unfolded through the transformative mysteries of deep grief. With over 20 years of experience as a ceremonialist and spiritual director, Andi knows that authentic connection with the Divine requires venturing beyond conventional approaches into the deeper mysteries of human experience. Her work honors the understanding that transformation—whether through life transitions, psychological growth, or spiritual awakening—ripples outward, affecting not just individuals but entire webs of relationships. Go here for more about Andi’s offerings.

Desert Waters is whole-heartedly embracing the im/possibility of being human in these times. He is a guide, poet, r/evolutionary and trouble maker devoted to remembering our place in the wild family of things. His life has been deeply shaped by men’s work, both as a participant and assistant facilitator with Eliyahu Sills. Desert is a soul-guide-in-training with Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute, where he is helping nurture soul-initiated adults to (re)connect with the more-than-human wild world through dreamwork, deep imagination, conversations with the animate world, and embodiment practices. He is also a student of Bayo Akomolafe, who’s prophetic voice offers unsettling invitations for how to be a white man working for the end of Whiteness; and of Francis Weller, for whom grief and village stand as primary orientations in these troubling times. He is, perhaps primarily, the beloved life partner to Zionne and father to three children ranging from 8-13 years old. For more info, see here.