Cultivating Grief, a guide by myisha t. hill
is the goal.
Most of us were taught to keep our grief small, quiet, and quick. Griefmaxxing is the practice of feeling it all the way through, on purpose and in good company, so that what you have lost can become soil for what grows next.
A working definition
To give your grief the full room it is asking for, instead of the corner you were told it could have.
The culture we live in is very good at minimizing grief. It hands you three days of leave, a casserole, and a quiet expectation that you will be back to normal by Monday. When the grief does not leave on schedule, you start to believe that something is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. Grief that has nowhere to go does not disappear, and it tends to come out sideways as numbness, as irritation, as the wall you put up with the people you love most.
Cultivating Grief is my invitation to stop shrinking it. You are allowed to tend your grief the way you would tend a garden, with attention and patience and your hands in the dirt, until it starts to feed you back.
What counts as grief
You do not need a funeral to qualify. If something in you has been lost, changed, or cut off, you are already carrying grief, and you can bring any of it to this practice.
The people who left, the people you had to leave, and the ones who are still here but can no longer be reached in the way you need them.
The versions of you that never got to exist, the years you spent surviving, and the body and life that have changed along the way.
The violence, the losses, and the headlines that stay lodged in your chest long after you have closed the app and tried to go to sleep.
The lineage you cannot name, the community you were promised and never given, and the distance between you and your own body.
Inside the guide
I wrote this guide in the same voice I use when I write to my community, because grief does not need another expert talking at it. It needs company, a few good practices, and permission to take as long as it takes.
Simple ways to meet your grief in the middle of an ordinary day, so that tending it does not have to wait for a retreat or a breakdown.
A way to close the day that lets you set down what you carried, because grief has a habit of getting louder once the house goes quiet.
The communication practice I created, offered here so that you can tell the truth about your grief to yourself and to the people around you.
The complete chapter from my book Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirator's Guide to an Antiracist Future, which is where this work on grief first took root.
The guide honors Ruslana Remennikova and her Kosmos Journal piece "Composting Grief," whose language of compost and soil runs alongside this work.
Listen first
On the Hard to Love podcast, Jen Gergen and I sat down with Camille Sapara Barton, author of Tending Grief, and let ourselves get to know the artist and the human behind the work. We talked about how grief found its way into Camille's life and practice, and about how tending what hurts can become a form of creativity and not only endurance.
Because we're all a little hard to love, and we do it anyway.
About our guest
Camille Sapara Barton is an author, advisor, embodiment social designer, and interdisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam. Their work brings together political economy, somatics, and creative facilitation, and it is rooted in Black feminism, ecology, and harm reduction. They are the author of Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community, and they designed and directed the MA Ecologies of Transformation.
One page, one dollar
If you are not ready for the full guide yet, begin here. For $1, I will send you a single page that you can keep by the bed or on the fridge for the moments when grief shows up and you are not sure what to do with it.
Your guide
liberation education · healing justice · joy
I am a liberation practitioner, a somatic educator, and a joy dealer. I founded the Heal Your Way Forward Collective, wrote Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirator's Guide to an Antiracist Future, and created the Four Capacities for Liberation and Direct Compassionate Communication.
I teach grief because I have learned that joy and grief live in the same body, and that a person who cannot grieve will struggle to feel much of anything else. Joy is the revolution, and grief is the soil it grows in.