Yoga for Grief Love Loss – Retreat
August 17 – 23, 2025
Welcome to So’Ham –
‘Yoga for Grief, Love, Loss’ Retreat
August 17 – 23th, 2025
Dear Ones,
The storm of grief and loss takes a toll on the body, mind, and heart. Our hearts are broken and open at the same time. Often seeking connection with others with similar experiences gives us a bit of relief in our pain, some hope and guidance.
This retreat is specifically for parents that have lost a child to substance use.
Supported by a daily schedule designed to nurture your heart and connect with others who “Get It!”
Grief can get stuck in our bodies in many different ways. The retreat uses tools such as sharing, gentle yoga, guided meditation, relaxation, creating meals together, healing music, nature walks, creative writing and art workshops to help make space for our grief to move and integrate.
Our retreat is nestled in the peaceful and beautiful countryside, in the heart of Bergslagen, Sweden. A quiet respite from the noise of the world, surrounded by pristine swimming lakes, nature walks and fresh clean air!
Whether it’s yoga, going for a walk, connecting in nature, music or art…through creativity and connection our feelings can find their way to the surface and out into the world, creating a bit more space around our grief and heart for new possibilities to grow.
Our hope and wish is for this retreat to be a healing respite and space for your journey with grief.
We welcome you this summer for a week together in the peaceful Swedish country side.
Ps. In honor of our son, Lance Paxton, we are offering a full scholar ship for the retreat to one parent.
“I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life. . . . There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
2025 Retreat Information
Arrival: Sunday, August 17th, 2025
Dinner: 6pm
Welcome Program: 7:30 pm
Departure: Saturday, August 23rd after lunch
Retreat Facilitators
Prema
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Prema's Bio
Prema is our lead Yoga & Meditation instructor for the Grief & Love Retreat.
She has practiced and taught yoga and meditation for over 35 years.
She’s a Yoga Alliance approved Yoga teacher, and is certified in many healing modalities such as Shiatsu, energy balancing work and lymphatic massage. She is steeped in deep wisdom of the body.
Prema has studied with two leading experts in death and grieving-
She is certified with David Kessler as a Grief Educator
She is also certified by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore; she received her Compassionate Bereavement Care Certification® by the Center for Loss and Trauma in partnership with the MISS Foundation and the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Family Trust.
Prema offer’s her work with Grief & Love in honor of her beloved son Lance, and the many other children’s lives lost to the fentanyl/opioid epidemic, and to substance use disorder.In 2022 she suffered the sudden death of her 20 year old son Lance, to accidental fentanyl poisoning. The tragedy shattered her heart, shocked her body and nervous system, leaving her numb, frozen and heart broken.
Her long time meditation and yoga path of 37 years became her life line, it caught her shattered pieces, and held her with the compassionate loving kindness of a dear old trusted friend.
With a loving kindness practice she has been able to experience some space around the deep pain of loss and grief, making space for the love of her son to grow stronger and brighter in her heart. She calls this process “making space for grace”.
Gaining strength overtime to pick up and hold her grief and broken bits as she moves forward, honoring life, for her son Lance, her other children and many others.
She is very grateful to share yoga and meditation as a healing modality for grief. She is humbled and in awe of the human heart’s potential to hold the Unbearable and the Immeasurable love, how both can coexist.
Prema also offers her love as a Grief Group Leader and a Yoga Teacher for Grief, for the nonprofit organization – Love In The Trenches.
Prema’s experience and belief is that holding space for grief requires deep compassionate and heart-centered attention. She practices and teaches yoga & meditation with the intention to hold all of our broken pieces with loving kindness. For her students to open to the possibility of love, wisdom, peace and inner guidance, in the midst of the pain in the storm of loss.
Prema keeps her classes basic and simple for students to feel safe, to experience connection to their hearts and to help calm the mind, not a workout class!
Choosing to live each day with gratitude, she is deeply grateful to her long time meditation teacher, for her loving guidance and wisdom on her life long journey through the heart. She is grateful for the support of her husband, adult children, and the unwavering support from the LITT Community and its compassionate and courageous leadership.
Kristin
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Kristin's Bio
Kristin’s career has been in the design field, where she has worked as a graphic designer, art director, creative director, global brand manager, and educator for over thirty years.
But in2020, a devasting and life-altering event occurred: she lost her twenty-year-old son, James, to accidental fentanyl poisoning. Her grief seemed unnavigable.
If you found Kristin in a bookstore, then you would find her mindlessly mulling, grasping at titles to see if there was anything on the dust jackets that could entice her to sit down for a few hours to concentrate, to find relief, to find grief compatriots, to comprehend what was happening.
She searched for whispers, smaller sensitive voices telling her that the absence ofsomeone in space and time was something sacred. And she found those voices with thewriters and poets. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck said that poetry (and all art) was her revenge against the circumstances of life. She took this as agency for her life onward.
Kristin turned to writing through journaling and epistolary writing, followed by essays, and then getting an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars in June 2023.
Her critical thesis explored the feral nature of grief and used three books for her analysis. Her creative thesis was a collection of essays titled “The Ghost of Oxytocin,” which explored where love goes when the physical body is no longer here.
Kristin’s influences are wide, from Julian Cameron to Herman Melville, essayists James Baldwin and Joan Didion, novelists Yi Yun Lee and Max Porter, and poets Denise Riley and Naja Marie Aidt. These writers and many others have taught her that while grief is highly personal, we are not alone. Grief and sorrow are universal; while a painful part of life, they also deliver
unexpected gifts.
The writer Cheryl Strayed, who lost her mother at a young age, wrote about
her anger in grief: “That rage has turned into something else that I struggle to describe. Perhaps it is this: a sturdy sense that my ability to endure her absence has been one of the most powerful gifts of my life.”
Kristin splits her time between Baltimore, Maryland, and Friesland, Netherlands, with stops in between to make sure she collects as many sunrises and sunsets as possible. When not writing, she takes photographs of things that bewitch her.
She is a trustee and a volunteer at two nonprofits in Baltimore, The Creative Alliance, and Love in the Trenches (LITT). At LITT, she leads a grief support group, where she met Prema. She is also a certified grief educator with
David Kessler and offers peer-to-peer grief counseling.
She is looking forward to leading the Writing through Grief portion of the retreat with an open heart, sharing wisdom from writers, journaling, providing writing prompts and meditations, and opening the pathways for us to pen our grief with prose or poetry.
Workshop Facilitators
Heidi
.
Heidi's Bio and Workshops
Eva
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Heidi's Bio and Workshops
My life with with Chanting Mantras.
I was born in Stockholm in 1963.
My grandmother, who was Sami, used to sing to me when I was very young. I loved her songs about nature and stories about the unexplainable.
When I was 9 years old, I applied to Adolf-Fredrik’s music school and got in. I was classically schooled there for 6 years. Much of the repertoire had spiritual messages. It was powerful to sing in Stockholm’s beautiful churches. I enjoyed it and found a security in it.
But felt like I was missing something
I came into contact with Mantrasång in Stockholm when I was 15 years old when I met Krishna Premi Devi. She sat and played the harmonium and sang Vedic mantras. I immediately felt something happen inside me when I sang. That I was home! A sense of freedom I had never felt before. An inner cleansing.
After our first meeting, she became my teacher and great role model. She taught me to play Harmonium, Mridanga and Kartalas. I could sit for hours and sing with her. Beautiful songs in Sanskrit from the Bhakti tradition, Love and Devotion. Above all from the Bhakti tradition, the path of love and devotion. ❤️
Since then I have actively lived with these mantras. Sung them. Meditate them. Live them. Now, I travel and lead kirtan and voice activation workshops and retreats.
In recent years, I have also cautiously begun to explore my Sami heritage. The joik is exciting and describes nature in a beautiful way that also touches my heart deeply.
It is so wonderful to sing together with others.
Experience borderless community.
Looking forward to singing with you!
In love
Eva/Radhakumari.