Tending Grief

Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community

By: Camille Sapara Barton

Narrated by: Camille Sapara Barton

An embodied guide to being with grief individually and in community—practical exercises, decolonized rituals, and Earth-based medicines for healing and processing loss

We live in a culture that suppresses our ability to truly feel our grief—deeply, safely, and on our own terms. But each person’s experience is as unique as the grief itself. Here, Camille Barton’s take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer people disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss.

Deeply practical and easy to use in times of confusion, trauma, and pain, Tending Grief includes rituals, reflection prompts, and exercises that help us process and metabolize our grief—without bypassing or pushing aside what comes to the fore. Barton includes exercises that can be done both alone and in community, including:

• Altar practices to honor and connect with ancestors known and unknown
• Locating, holding, and dancing your grief
• Sharing circles for processing communal loss
• Water, fire, and nature-based rituals
• Honoring the survival utility of numbness—and knowing when it’s time to release it
• Peer support and integration
• Herbal medicines and plant-based healing

Barton honors each and every experience: The loss of displacement from homelands, from severed lineages and ancestral ways of knowing. The grief of colonization and theft. The deep heaviness that burrows into our bodies when society tells us our bodies are wrong. Practical tools and rituals help listeners feel into their grief, honor what comes up, and move forward in healing.

Written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC listeners, Tending Grief is an invitation to reconnect to what we’ve lost, to find community in our grief, and to tend to our own suffering for our individual and collective wellbeing.

©2024 Camille Sapara Barton (P)2024 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

“Camille Sapara Barton is a gift to all of us, because they understand that every single one of us will grieve, and they have given us a way to understand how we can grieve in community and center care in the inevitable transitions of our lives. This is what emergent strategy looks like at the precipice.”—adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism

“Camille Sapara Barton is undoubtedly one of our generation's luminaries, as this offering makes crystal clear. Camille's capacity to bring forward an imaginative yet consistently grounded and honest perspective about life's biggest inquiries—love, liberation, and loss—has made them a powerful and piercing voice in the emerging psychedelic ecosystem. It can be challenging to balance the visionary and the practical, made harder in a world that perpetually attempts to flatten and reduce everything holy to something consumable. Camille invites us all back into balance with the grace of a teacher and the patience of a parent, gently waiting for the rest of us to catch up.”—Ismail Ali, Policy and Advocacy Director at the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

"In this beautiful little book, Camille Sapara Barton offers readers a powerful medicine, not only for being with and moving through grief, but for responding to the social injustice that sickens our world. Setting sharp, lucid political analysis alongside transformative somatic practices, Tending Grief is an essential map for anyone who longs for collective healing. This is an invaluable resource for changemakers everywhere."—Kai Cheng Thom, author, mediator, and somatic coach