In this conversation, Megan and Shauna explore how grief serves as a doorway to ancestral remembering, and why reconnecting with lineage and land through ritual is essential work for our times. Shauna shares the distinction between ritual as a personal, emergent practice and ceremony as a cultural structure that carries continuity across generations, and offers the metaphor of a river to understand how grief moves through us when we have the support to let it flow.
Together, they discuss animism and reciprocity, the responsibility of navigating complex ancestral legacies, and why our struggles are not individual failings but cultural wounds. This conversation offers a tender and expansive invitation into what it means to live a ritual life.
In a culture that has largely severed us from our ancestral practices, our grief, and our reciprocal relationship with the living world, many of us are left without the skills or containers to process the losses we carry. We often experience this disconnection as a personal failing, when in truth it is a cultural wound.
Shauna Janz reminds us that grief is not something to be fixed or moved past, but a form of intimacy that keeps our hearts open and responsive. By fortifying what she calls the “river banks” — through embodied presence, community, and ritual — we can allow grief to flow safely and vitalize our lives. This conversation offers both the framework and the felt sense of what it means to pass these ancestral values forward as profound cultural change work.
Shauna Janz, MA, is a teacher, mentor, facilitator and writer, and the founder of Sacred Grief, an online center for education, training and mentorship in grief, ritual and ancestral healing. Since 2007, she has been offering emotional, spiritual and ritual grief support to individuals, families, communities and organizations.
Her work integrates research-based approaches in somatics, attachment and complex trauma with reclaimed ancestral practices rooted in animist and nature-based rituals. Her offerings are trauma-informed, dignity-centered, and anchored in anti-oppressive and decolonizing values. She lives on the unceded lands of the Pentlatch and K’omoks First Nations on Vancouver Island, Canada.
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