Grief Recovery Support groups
Moving with Grief into Community, Recovery, and Growth
Walking with Grief and Loss can be the most difficult thing in any life. And it can be the source of so much growth and creativity. Grief Recovery Support helps individuals recover, integrate, and grow through loss, grief, creativity, and connecting to meaning.
Together we practice self-care - meditation, movement, and activating the senses with music, food, and learning. We seek to move beyond suffering as we explore various coping and recovery strategies and practices, finding one or more that can support recovery and growth in the moment, and over time.
As grief matures and allows for growth, we look to experience greater interior freedom, deeper joy, more grace-filled decisions, a more integrated life, broader or more focused creation, and healthier relationships with self, others, and the world.
Register for our Upcoming Events Below and Contact Elizabeth Directly for Individual Support.
Navigating Loss: Essential Practices for Healing - Online
Navigating Loss – Essential Practices for Healing is a monthly morning practice series beginning February 27, 2026. Building on Elizabeth Becker and Melissa Maskell’s Conscious Leadership–centered grief work, this recurring 60-minute online gathering brings practical grief recovery tools into ongoing community practice.
Each session blends grounding practices, reflection, and gentle dialogue to support clarity, compassion, and emotional resilience amid loss. Participants will explore how tending to grief strengthens presence and boundaries, leaving with simple practices and a reminder that we don’t heal alone.
Together, we’ll explore ways to tend to grief without bypassing it, working with emotional triggers, expectations, boundaries, nervous system regulation, and the often-unseen impact of loss on leadership, decision-making, and presence.
Format: 1 hour, starting February 27th. Fourth Friday of each month
Time: 8:00 to 9:00 AM Pacific | 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Eastern
Who it’s for: Anyone navigating personal or collective loss seeking practical, conscious recovery–based tools
Facilitators: Elizabeth Becker & Melissa Maskell
Location: Online - Link upon registration
Suggested donation: $25 per session, with a $1 minimum to register online
Healing with Grief: Ongoing Support Circles - In-Person, Petaluma CA
Find compassion and healing in community. The Healing with Grief Support Circles are designed to support anyone carrying grief. Elizabeth Becker and Melissa Maskell will guide an ongoing small-group experience that blends practical coping skills, grief-transforming practices, and a heartfelt sense of community.
Each session offers grounding techniques, reflection prompts, and gentle discussion in a confidential space. We’ll explore tools for managing triggers and expectations, setting boundaries, tending to stress and sleep, and creating meaningful rituals to honor loved ones. You’ll leave each time with simple practices to use at home and the steady reminder that you’re not alone.
Format: 1.5 hours on the First Thursday evening of every Month
Time: 5:30 to 7:30 PM Pacific
Who it’s for: Anyone experiencing loss, recent or long-ago, seeking steadiness and support
Facilitators: Elizabeth Becker & Melissa Maskell
Location: Luminary Education Center, Petaluma
Suggested donation: $25 per session, with a $1 minimum to register online
Spiritual Direction/Companionship
A potential client wrote to me today. The subject line said, "Can I hire you? " The body of the letter said, "As my spirtual consultant?" We had just been together in a zoom meeting wtih breakouts and he shared his pain, anger and suffering over the state of the world, and his powerlessness in the face of the unending pile-on of our adult lives.
Sound familiar?
He wrote: "Really grateful that we were in a group together-synchronicity! Your words ring very true for me- incredibly difficult times- and we have to experience the suffering, but not dwell in that place interminably."
I responded:
You speak the universal. Be assured you are not alone in this kind of despair and I see you still holding the small, shy hope in your hands that it could be different, “if only” Be assured that the feelings you have are normal and typical of what is felt "at the threshold" or breakthrough.
The path of healing presents itself by accepting this kind of loss, pain and suffering. A whole new world can open up in a tiny chink in the armored world. A light creeps in. Hope. By looking that heaviness in the face and saying , “I see you” “I feel you”, a stabilizing practice emerges. From that place, recovery is possible. As the soul strengthens, it can eventually lead to calm and collected action to save the world.
We save ourselves first.
"Take the hand; Look ahead." Again and again.
It becomes easier, but not easy.
We can return to our practices often, to re-sort the balance of power from suffering to trust.
Being in community with others makes this practice sustainable and the eventual return to it, when we or it falls away, possible.
Contact Elizabeth directly for monthly or semi-monthly Interfaith Spiritual Companionship/Direction, to explore spiritual strengthening, on a sliding scale basis. I am under supervision from faculty at The Chaplaincy Institute, where I am also an ordained interfaith minister.
This practice arises as something you feel called to explore.
May natural great peace find you.
Ritual & Ceremony
Rituals and Ceremonies are the contemporary words for the ancient ways of marking a particular event, celebrating an occasion, person, or community, or raising energy for healing and creativity.
From weddings and celebrations of life to birthdays, there is a new way to do rites of passage that speaks to the heart, that can integrate tradition, and forge new ground.
Land engagements and dedications, project initiations, and completions acknowledging transitions, transforming heavy energies into creation, each ritual or ceremony is crafted with you, so this is YOURS.
And the energy of your design ripples out, beyond the waters, and horizon, as far as the heart can feel.
Grief support & Caregiving Resources
The Dougy Center
The Dougy Center
The Dougy Center
The mission of Dougy Center is to provide grief support in a safe place where children, teens, young adults, and their families can share their experiences before and after a death.
Grief.com
The Dougy Center
The Dougy Center
Their mission is to provide education, resources, and support to help individuals and professionals navigate the journey of grief with compassion and understanding.
Visit: https://grief.com/resources/
NY Zen Center
NY Zen Center
NY Zen Center
Rooted in the wisdom of Zen and inspired by the intimate neighborhood temples of Japan, their center is a sanctuary in the vibrant heart of New York City. Every First & Third Thursday of the Month
This group will address the caregiver’s unique and challenging experience while providing ongoing community and connection.
Visit: https://zencare.org/care-for-caregivers-support-group
SF Zen Center
NY Zen Center
NY Zen Center
SFZC consists of three temples located in the greater Bay Area, as well as an online community. Their Mindful Caregiving programs incorporate mindfulness and compassion-based approaches and tools to empower caregivers in providing better support to those in their care.