Broken Open
MARCH 21ST-23RD, 2025, BEN LOMOND, CA
Vision
We envision a world where grief is honored and seen as a medicine for our breaking hearts and our swiftly changing world.
We are a part of a growing movement of grief tenders that are remembering and dynamically recreating a living culture that knows how to wisely work with our grief as medicine. We know grief as a pathway for our personal and collective healing and liberation through the wisdom and support of the elements, the more-than-human world, our ancestors, and our bodies.
We are dedicated to allowing grief to hospice what is dying in these precarious times, and birth a new way in our culture that acknowledges our interdependence with all of creation. A way that is based in fierce, loving wisdom and compassion. One that stands for protecting, nourishing, and praising life.
Broken Open celebrates what grief offers us. Greater trust in and ecstatic surrender to embodied aliveness.
Community grief ritual is an ancient way to be with grief, recreated for these modern times. Community and ritual create a container to access and meet grief, allowing it to transform us, so it may be a life-giving, strengthening energy and process in our lives and in the world.
Grief is a natural response to loss. It’s the surrender that is required of us to meet the ever changing cycles of life and death. All griefs, no matter how big or how small, how old or how new, are worthy of being honored and released with loving presence. We are not meant to hold our grief alone!
Sobonfu (& Malidoma) Somé were two wisdom keepers of the Dagara lineage in Burkino Faso. They were sent by their elders to bring the medicine of grief and the ways of grieving communally to the grief-heavy, grief-phobic Western World. They gifted us with a grief ritual crafted specifically for the western psyche that we may re-connect to the magic of life and creation. We bow in gratitude to their wisdom, generosity and sacrifice.
Grief Ritual
Who We Are
Broken Open is founded by Dana Schlick and Mikyö Black Wangmo. We are wild, weird, and loving beings who live our life in service to freedom. You have to be weird to be as joyful about grief as we are!
We have been strengthened and softened by the initiations of loss we have each gone through. We weave our different pathways and approaches to grief in complimentary patterns to create the beautiful fabric of our grief work together.
We share a devotion to the Great Mother and the Deep Feminine, which is the Creative Force of Life beyond all gender and binaries. This provides a unique relationship with grief as a raw energy that opens us to the vital force of Life that underlies all of creation. We are remembering in our bones that tending to our grief has always been a human necessity to fully be with impermanence and the cycles of life.
We honor and acknowledge all of the teachers, ancestors, lands, waters, plant beings, wisdom keepers, spiritual lineages and practices, friends and beloveds, animal allies, foods, healing modalities, education, and grace that have held and nourished us that we may be in service to grief medicine. To learn more about us click below.
*Thank you for your patience! We are currently building the rest of this website and anticipate it’s completion by April 2025. If you have any questions you can contact us by email at brokenopenlove@gmail.com