exercise · all tools
Grief Walking
Depth · what it can open●●●○3 — emotional
Holding · facilitation3 — space-holder
Trust · group readiness★★some
Disclosure · what is sharedoptional
A structured way for a community to accompany loss or hard transition: people move between four stations — each holding a different mode of being with grief (solitude, witnessing, expression, support) — in small groups with journals, at their own pace, with a recovery room always available. Social support made spatial: nobody has to talk, nobody has to be alone.
Prerequisites
- A real loss or transition the community shares or acknowledges; genuinely voluntary participation
Hold with care
- Grief invited in a work context needs an exit that carries no stigma — the recovery room is structural, not optional
- Facilitators should be resourced for strong affect and know local support options
Practical
- Time
- 35 min + 15 landing
- Group
- 12–∞ · individual, small-group, large-group
- Settings
- in-person
- Materials
- Four station areas; a recovery room; journals
- Mechanisms
- emotional-processing, ritual-container, stillness-silence
- Change scope
- state · one-off
Origin & where it lives
Fisher Qua & Keith McCandless (prototyped with the Seattle LS User Group) — Liberating Structures (newest depth-work addition)
Instructions: open online · CC BY-SA 4.0
In this directory via Liberating Structures
Related: truth mandala (pairs-with)
status: checked · added 2026-08-25