Holding Sacred Space
Companioning Grief and Loss for Spiritual Directors and Companions
A 4-Part Webinar Series
Presenters
Robyn Hubbard
Rev. Dr. Jamie Eaddy
Christy Marek
Rev. Marshall K. Hammer
Dates
October 14, 21, 28 & November 4, 2026
Time
Duration
6 hours (total)
Webinar will be recorded.
“Only by learning how to grieve can we hope to leave the past behind and come into the present moment.”
— Ram Dass
In this series, we will explore:
- Reclaiming Grief as a Natural Part of a Fully Lived Life with Robyn Hubbard
- Befriending Grief: Learning to LIVE With Loss with Rev. Dr. Jamie Eaddy
- Staying at the Threshold: Accompanying Life as Death Draws Near with Christy Marek
- The Practical Matters of Grief: A Toolkit for Companioning Suicide Loss with Rev. Marshall K. Hammer
“Our attitude of openness and inclusiveness is essential as a basis for working with dying, death, caring, and grieving.”
— Joan Halifax, Being with Dying
Session Outline
Session 1 - October 14: Reclaiming Grief as a Natural Part of a Fully Lived Life: Practices for Companioning Grief with Steadiness, Expression and Renewal (Robyn Hubbard)
In this session, we will explore a reliable framework for guiding people through acknowledging and authentically expressing grief, weaving a path toward renewal and integration. We will also discuss meaningful rituals that offer experiential support while reclaiming grief as a natural part of a fully lived life.
Honoring the full range of emotions is vital for lasting change. The authentic expression of difficult feelings and honest grief is the turning point where transformation truly occurs. Many spiritual directors and companions know how to create meaningful spaces and experiences for the people they companion, but when difficult emotions arise, they often wonder:
- How much space should I hold?
- What if the emotions overwhelm the individual or group?
- How do I move the process forward?
The Four Paths of Soulful Transformation framework, along with supporting experiential rituals, helps practitioners strengthen their container with confidence and keep the process moving, all while honoring grief as a natural and necessary part of meaningful change. This spiraling framework is useful for all of life’s emotional challenges, transitions, and thresholds, and can be integrated into professional offerings to deepen experiences or create a container for new work to emerge.
Session 2 - October 21: Befriending Grief: Learning to LIVE With Loss (Rev. Dr. Jamie Eaddy)
Grief changes us. It can disrupt our sense of identity, relationship, faith, belonging, and even our understanding of what life is asking of us. Yet much of what we have been taught about grief encourages us to move through it, manage it, or find our way beyond it.
In this experiential workshop, Dr. Jamie Eaddy invites participants to consider another possibility: befriending grief.
Drawing on her work as a thanatologist, spiritual care practitioner, and author of Re-Membering Ourselves: A Womanist Invitation for Befriending Grief as a Spiritual Practice, Dr. Eaddy will explore what becomes possible when we learn to live in relationship with grief rather than treating it solely as an experience to be overcome.
Participants will reflect on the many ways grief enters our lives, consider how loss can reshape identity and meaning, and explore practices of presence, reflection, and spiritual accompaniment that make room for grief without demanding its resolution.
This workshop is especially designed for those who accompany others through loss and want to deepen their capacity to remain present to grief with curiosity, compassion, and care.
Session 3 - October 28: Staying at the Threshold: Accompanying Life as Death Draws Near (Christy Marek)
Dying asks something particular of those who accompany it: a willingness to remain present to uncertainty, grief, changing bodies, unanswered questions, and what cannot be fixed—while remembering that life is still happening here. Drawing from more than a decade of end-of-life accompaniment and spiritual companionship, Christy Marek invites us to consider: What does proximity to death ask of us as companions? Together we’ll explore what we bring with us to the threshold—our own relationship with mortality, loss, fear, hope, meaning, and uncertainty—and how greater awareness of our own inner landscape can deepen our capacity to accompany another. Rather than approaching dying as specialized territory requiring all the right answers, we’ll explore how the practices already at the heart of spiritual companionship—presence, deep listening, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is—can make room for grief and mystery alongside agency, relationship, grace, and the life that remains.
Session 4 - November 4: The Practical Matters of Grief: A Toolkit for Companioning Suicide Loss (Rev. Marshall K. Hammer)
Suicide loss brings grief entangled with stigma, self-blame, and a silence most people don’t know how to break — often alongside a pile of urgent, practical decisions. Rev. Marshall K. Hammer, founder of Befriend Your Grief and a suicide loss survivor herself, offers spiritual directors a practitioner’s toolkit of concrete language and postures for companioning through this terrain, giving directors a chance to try these tools before they need them.
- Participants from all religious traditions and spiritual orientations are welcome to this webinar series.
- No experience is required to attend.
- Each session runs 90 minutes.
- All sessions will be recorded and be viewable for at least 12 months after the last session goes live.
“The human instinct is to block suffering and pain…We really don’t know how to hurt! The great wisdom traditions are trying to teach us that grief isn’t something from which to run… In fact, we can’t risk getting rid of our pain until we’ve learned what it has to teach us, and it—grief, suffering, loss, pain—always has something to teach us!”
— Richard Rohr, The Universal Need To Grieve, Daily Meditations, June 23, 2024
When
The webinar series will run 4 consecutive Wednesdays: October 14, 21, 28 & November 4, 2026: 10 AM Seattle/Los Angeles. Find your own local time here.
But if that timing doesn’t work, you can enjoy the webinar any time you like.
Each session is recorded so you can watch at your convenience.
Presenters
Robyn Hubbard
Robyn Hubbard, DMin, is a spiritual companion, grief counselor, and certified dreamwork facilitator specializing in thresholds of growth, grief and loss, life transitions, illness, and end of life. Robyn works with all ages identifying resource and resilience for living soulfully with the challenges of grief, loss, and aging.
Rev. Dr. Jamie Eaddy
Rev. Dr. Jamie Eaddy is a thanatologist, womanist theologian, educator, and grief care practitioner whose work explores the intersections of grief, spirituality, trauma, justice, identity, and healing. She is the author of Re-Membering Ourselves: A Womanist Invitation for Befriending Grief as a Spiritual Practice and creator of The Ratchet Grief Project®.
Christy Marek
Christy Marek is a soul companion and end of life guide walking the deep and complex terrain of transition and grief with those who desire practical, emotional, and spiritual support as they or someone they love navigate terminal illness, dying, and death. Her great joy is traveling alongside those in the in-between spaces helping them to engage meaningfully and purposefully with what is hard, accessing boundless possibility for growth and discovery along the way.
Christy is certified as an Anamcara (“Soul Friend”) End of Life Practitioner and as an End of Life Doula, and lives among the treetops with her husband and lovable pup, Ritter, in Lakeville, MN.
Rev. Marshall K. Hammer
Rev. Marshall K Hammer (she/her/they/them) has served in therapeutic environments for more than 10 years. She is the owner and sole practitioner of Reiki for Today and For Today Ministry, located on the unceded East Cherokee territory known today as Asheville, North Carolina.
Marshall is a Reiki Level III (Master) practitioner with an additional Animal Reiki Certification, an Ordained Animal Chaplain, as well as an Interfaith/Interspiritual Minister, focused on offering healing presence. She is also a Survivor of Suicide Loss and an active support to peers for nearly a decade.
Additional Information
- Everyone is invited to participate in SDI Webinars.
- Each session will run 90 minutes. We understand that the timing of the seminar will not be convenient in every time zone on the planet. For those who have trouble making this time, a recorded copy of each session will be made available to all those who sign up.
- CEU credits are available for all those who participate. SDI will provide a certificate of completion for self-reporting to agencies. More information can be found here: continuing education units (CEUs).
- Scholarships are available for those facing financial hardship. Please apply here.
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