27 Prompts for Investigating Your Grief Experience

You are invited to spend the next 27 days exploring creative ways to investigate your grief experiences. Grief can be many things for each of us. Overwhelming. Confounding. Breaking our hearts open. And more. The creative prompts offered in this self-directed course are aimed at giving you an opportunity to enact a different approach to your relationship with grief experiences.

This on-demand course is brought to you via a partnership between The Creative Grief Studio and Kara LC Jones of GriefAndCreativity.com. Kara is the facilitator for this session, so if you have questions, feel free to be in touch with her at kara@griefandcreativity.com. Thanks!

Please note: This is not an art making techniques course. It is a creative grief prompts course offering you a variety of creative approaches to your grief experiences, including encouragement to explore via whatever art mediums you like.

In these prompts, we're personifying grief as if they were a character we are interacting with in life, and each prompt asks you to investigate different aspects of this character. You are welcome to respond in whatever medium you might like. As an example of how this works:

1. The prompt might be something like: "Grief shows up to an interview. What is Grief wearing? How do they present themselves?"
   
   
   1. You can respond in a journaling type, free-writing type of way.
      
      
   2. Or you can use it as the beginning of fleshing out a whole character development. You might go beyond just what Grief is wearing to also investigate what Grief is listening to on their iPod as they ride the bus to the interview.
      
      
   3. Or you can use it as the title of a poem and do a poetic response.
      
      
   4. Or you could do a drawing or painting of the scene might look like.
      
      
   5. Or you could even do a movement type response where you get up and move around (you are responsible for assessing and for any risk in your health for doing movement) in the ways Grief might present itself in the scene.
      
      
   6. You can take the response in any creative direction you like.
2. You then have private, comment section space at the bottom of each day's prompt page where you are free to share as much or as little as you like about how you did this investigation or exploration of your relationship to/with grief or recognition of grief; what you discovered; what was surprising; or whatever you like about your creative experiments exploring creativity and resiliency in the face of grief.

Features of this course include:

• The same day that you register for this course, you'll get the welcome + logistics information as well as the day 1 prompt immediately.
  
  
• Then each day, for 26 days after your registration day, you'll get a new creative prompt Lesson that opens up to you.
  
  
• This course offers participants comment space at the bottom of each prompt Lesson page.
  
  
• This online, private space is open only to participants and is available 24/7, so you can read prompts and post replies any time of day or night on your own schedule.
  
  
• Please note this is an on-demand, self-directed course, meaning there is no formal facilitation for the session, and this is definitely NOT crisis support.
  
  
• That said, I (Kara - creator of the course) will get notifications of your shares, questions, reflections. If your posts ask questions or specifically for feedback, I will do my best to check in within 48-72 hours of notifications where replies are needed. [Note: There are several times a year where I am away for a few weeks at a time. So if there is a delay in reply, please know your posts are not being ignored, and I will reply when I am back.]

Enrollment is open on an on-going, on-demand basis.

Please see the FAQ below for more details to questions others have asked.

Creator heARTist of this session is moi, Kara Jones of GriefAndCreativity.com, and I look forward to sharing these creative prompts with each of you!

Notes For Practitioners Taking This Course

If you are a grief support practitioner of any kind (therapist, hospice volunteer, pastor, etc.) participation in this course does not grant you permission to use these tools directly with your clients. This course was primarily designed for people experiencing grief themselves and does not offer facilitation instructions. Naturally, you are welcome to provide a link to anyone who you think could benefit from this experience so they can sign up for the course themselves and we appreciate that referral.

Grief support practitioners interested in creating tools, such as the ones contained here, might benefit from exploring the Creative Grief Studio Certification program. Through that curriculum, we offer many tools that can be used directly with your clients in addition to giving you the foundational skills you need to create your own tools to use with your clients. We hope you will check it out.

FAQ

I want to join, but life is busy. Will this session involve a great deal of time and effort?

As with any online session, the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. That said, no, this is not an intensive course necessarily. You'll be getting creative prompts once a week with space to share as much or as little in the private classroom as you like. Unlike in-person classes, you get private space that is open 24/7, so you can participate at your own pace. If you can't be here in this classroom during the initial drip feed of materials, that's okay. You'll still get the full content of the course. The comment sections do not close, so you can respond even after the drip feed is "finished," and I will still get notifications of your posts and do my best to answer.

If I decide I will be short on time during the 27 days of the session, can I get a refund on my registration fee?

No, I'm sorry, we are not offering refunds. This course drip feeds content for 27 days, but you can access it at any time, in your own pace, for as long as you like. The course space is not going anywhere even after the end of the 27 days. So once you register, you actually get the entire course in the end, even if your schedule ends up conflicted with the 27 days of the initial content feed. Let me know if you have questions around this *before* you register! Contact kara@griefandcreativity.com.

Is this a therapy group?

No. This is a self-directed session for exploring creative approaches to grief and life experiences; for exploring how you yourself make meaning and expression with whatever is happening for you. While there is a facilitator in our online classroom (moi), I am just one person. I am not available as crisis intervention, and this is not meant to be private session coaching for each and every person. That said, this type of session is a good companion to whatever therapy you are doing already to support yourself. Please practice responsibility (ability to respond) for whatever needs you have medically, mentally, physically.

My grief is non-death related. Can I still join this group?

Yes. All are welcome, whatever your grief experience circumstances are! Often death related grief experiences (death of child, spouse, other loved one, pet) are acknowledged, whereas non-death related grief (divorce, loss of job, chronic illness, major change like immigration) are not. In this course, we are aiming to offer creative grief space to anyone, whatever your circumstances might be. We will not be playing "grief olympics" nor placing experiences on a "hierarchy of grief." Whatever grief experience you bring to the table, is your grief experience. And we will aim to help you find creative approaches to whatever your experiences are.

I still have a question, how can I contact you?

Happy to answer any questions you might have. Send an email to kara@griefandcreativity.com.

Will I learn specific art making techniques in the course?

No. This course offers you creative approaches to grief experiences which you can then take into whatever artmaking you are already doing. You will be provided suggestions on how to take the seed ideas into writing, visual artmaking, and/or movement, but you are free to use any techniques, mediums, art processes you wish to use.