Life’s Poetry
A 6 month community programme exploring life through the lens of grief
Grief brings us closer to life, always
The next journey of Life’s Poetry starts on 7th October 2025
In our culture grief is hidden in the shadows, it’s deeply suppressed. Life’s Poetry seeks to bring you into a different relationship with life through the profound wisdom of grief.
In these times of turbulence, turning towards our grief has never been more important.
This is a unique 6 month community programme that takes you on a deep exploration of grief in it’s many forms. This programme will take you beyond what you think you know as grief and bring you into contact with yourself and life in a way you haven’t experienced before.
Using the Five Gates of Grief we will explore the relationship you have with life, with love and with grief. It will connect you back into something that you’ve always known but may never have touched on.
Grief is life.
Grief is the portal to life, your ability or willingness to meet grief, to dance with grief, mirrors that which you can experience life.
Dance with grief and you dance with beauty and joy of life.
The elements of the programme
This programme is based on Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief. These gates are a way of exploring your internal and external landscape. They go beyond what you will know as grief and allow you to enter into territory you may never have explored before.
Life’s Poetry uses the beautiful combination of teaching, sharing, coaching circles and ritual.
We will meet on Tuesdays at 7pm BST/GMT (there is one call on a Thursday), all calls will be recorded and we’ll use Mighty Networks (a community and learning platform) to deepen our work in between our live calls.
Life’s Poetry is about turning towards life
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Coming together
The journey begins
Together we’ll lay the foundations, exploring the landscape of grief and setting intentions.
Tues 7th Oct - Coming together
Tuesday 14th Oct- Laying the Foundations + Setting Intentions
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The First Gate
Everything you love you will lose
A gate you may be familiar with. To welcome in the work of grief is to come into this deep intimacy with life, to know that what we love we will lose. Together we’ll explore the losses
in our lives.TBC - Teaching
TBC - Sharing & Coaching
TBC - Ritual -
The Second Gate
The places that have not known love
Through this gate we’ll explore all the parts of ourselves that we have shunned, that have been exiled, and being the journey of welcoming them back in. This gate can change everything.TBC - Teaching
TBC - Sharing & coaching
TBC - Ritual -
The Third Gate
The sorrows of the world
There is a collective grief we are all experiencing at the moment, as we watch the conflict of the world. This gate of grief feels more vital, more important than ever. Together we will turn to face the sorrows of the world.
TBC - TeachingTBC - Sharing & coaching
TBC - Ritual -
The Fourth Gate
What we expected but did not receive
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, there are many things in our lives that we expected but did not receive. From the village, to a mother’s love. This gate runs deep into the well of our needs and what it is to be human.
TBC - TeachingTBC - Sharing & coaching
TBC - Ritual -
The Fifth Gate
Ancestral Grief
Something unknown and not spoken about often is the grief we carry from our ancestors. There’s a second element to this gate, the grief we carry for having no relationship to our ancestors, the forgotten connections.
TBC - Teaching
TBC - Sharing & coaching
TBC - Ritual -
Completion
Completion with intention
We will use everything we’ve learnt about grief, endings and ritual to complete our time together and our journey together.
TBC - Completion + Ritual
“Working with Nicola was a genuine pleasure and an education. Nicola has an appetite to explore and test new ideas. As well as her incredible resilience, she always brings a different and all too rare but powerful perspective; a very human, empathetic and compassionate viewpoint that infuses her work and her relationships.”
ANDY
Why community is important
Whenever we’re experiencing anything uncomfortable our tendency is to isolate, to move away from others, to tidy it up and re-emerge when everything is OK. We’ve lost the art of tending to ourselves in community. To ask another for help and support, or to simply listen to another in their sorrow, their grief or whatever they may be feeling. In fact it can feel so vulnerable to open ourselves up in this way, it’s almost impossible.
But we were never meant to grieve alone. We were never meant to do life alone. This is why coming together as a group, as a community, to journey through the elements of grief is vitally important, and an important element of this programme.
Every time I sit with other human beings in grief something beautiful emerges. When we share our hearts, our sorrows, our vulnerable selves, we connect in ways we haven’t before.
Why ritual is part of Life’s Poetry
We are in ritual every single day, although we may not know it as that. We get up every morning, we shower and we brush our teeth, we prepare meals and eat, we may move our bodies. These are all every day rituals. When we start seeing ritual as part of our days, it allows us to deepen into life. Ritual brings something mundane, ordinary even, into something sacred.
During this programme we will use the medicine of ritual to work with our insights and emotions. Ritual is a sacred act of remembering. Ritual is a way of alchemising grief, of letting the grief work beyond words. Beyond words is important, we put a greater emphasis on knowledge and thought, ritual works in a different way which is no less powerful. Ritual transforms.
When I’m with others in grief, it’s the most alive I feel, this is the possibility, this is the invitation of Life’s Poetry.
Life’s Poetry will support you in many ways
Everyone is welcome to Life’s Poetry, it is profound and has many dimensions that will deepen your life.
Life’s Poetry is for the grievers, if you’ve experienced bereavement of any kind in your life.
If you are watching what’s unfolding in the world and either feel helpless, hopeless or know that you want to be part of the difference.
If you know you carry grief within you but don’t know how to be with it or come into relationship with it.
Perhaps life isn’t as you’d quite expected or hoped, and grief lives in your heart.
If you want to deepen into life and live more intimately.
It will also support you if you’re a practitioner who wants to deepen your understanding of grief to support those you work with.
Come and join us
Coming into a programme like this may take courage. Fear and resistance is completely normal, as well as jumping in with two feet. I’m here to support you every step of the way.
This programme is for anyone who wants to deepen into life. It’s also supportive for practitioners who want to expand their understanding of grief.
Pay in full
The full cost of this programme is £1500. You can pay in full or you can choose monthly instalments.
Payment Plan
You can also pay in 6 monthly instalments at no extra cost. If you need a longer payment plan get in touch.
I offer lower fee places, if you know you want to do this programme and need support, please get in touch. Email me at nicola@nicoladuffell.com. Everyone is welcome.
