Ripened (S)aging: A Good Friday Invitation for Exploration of Grief, Loss & Mortality in Our Wisdom Years
with Melissa Layer
Friday, April 18, 2025
4-6pm Ireland
11am-1pm Eastern
8-10am Pacific
Program Description
Good Friday’s potent themes of death and resurrection are compelling portals holding symbolic metaphors that offer an expanded opportunity for wisdom in our eldering years. Join Melissa Layer, a psychospiritual therapist, interfaith spiritual companion and Abbey Wisdom Council member, for a mini-journey through themes of: life review, sacrifice, lamentation, suffering, loss and grief, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Additionally, choosing to face our mortality with courage and curiosity can reveal surprising gifts of grace and gratitude. Calling upon the gifts of poetry (including our own poem-making), journaling invitations, and visio divina reflections (using Melissa’s photographs), we will break open death and resurrection as invitations to personal meaning-making and transformation in our eldering journeys.
We will turn on closed captioning during the live Zoom session (which you are able to turn off in your settings if you find distracting) as well as provide a video recording with closed captioning available and a text transcript of the session.
The program will be recorded for those who pre-register but are unable to attend at the scheduled time or who want to view again. You will be sent a notification when this is ready to view.
You have lifetime access to all online programs.
Your Guide for the Journey
Melissa Layer
Melissa Layer, MA, LMHC honors the unfolding journeys of our wild and precious lives as compelling invitations for creative, integrative meaning-making in BodyMindSpirit. Her sacred calling and formal training as a psychospiritual therapist, hospice grief counselor, and spiritual director have taught her about the potency of thin places in thresholds and dark nights of the soul. Cultivating curiosity, Melissa offers expressive exploration of the Great Mystery through journaling, collaging, poem-making, dreamwork, visio and lectio divina, creation of rituals and altars, and engaged encounters with nature. Like the honeybee for which she is named, she claims her role as “a bee of the invisible…passionately plundering the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible” (Rilke). Melissa offers a compassionate, attuned presence and deep listening with the ear of her heart from the Pacific Northwest in Washington, where the Salish sea meets the evergreen forest. Visit Melissa’s website here>>
Registration
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$30
reduced fee
- Includes partial scholarship
- Select this only if you require financial assistance
If you are in need of additional financial assistance please fill out our Scholarship Request form.
Terms and Conditions
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