Experiences and Immersions
In-Person Yoga Nidra practice, Ypsilanti, 7/24/25 on the new moon. Tune in, slow down. Intimate practices for those desiring to rest together. jessicakilbourn73@gmail.com for more details or if you are ready to rest go ahead and register here.
image of Yoga Nidra circle, EarthWell Retreat Center, Manchester Mi for Welcoming our Wholeness fall retreat
Please enjoy this yoga nidra to tend the heart. This practice is beautiful to tend grief, sorrow, sadness. A suggested small energy exchange of $5-20. Donation can be made to @jess-kilbourn (venmo), jessicakilbourn73@gmail.com (paypal as friend). Thank you for your kindness. Enjoy your rest. Guidance begins 17 seconds in.
BEautiful Grievers 2025
embodied grief work to welcome and tend the grief that resides within
ENROLLMENT IS NOW CLOSED for 2025 Beautiful Grievers. Please reach out to be put on a waitlist or to share your interest in other grief tending offerings. I look forward to holding this space with and for you. Thank you!
-A 5-week practice and connection group for grievers.
Are you looking for a place to be present with and center your grief experience? You have come to the right place!
"Communal grieving offers something that we cannot get when we grieve by ourselves. Through validation, acknowledgement and witnessing, communal grieving allows us to experience a level of healing that is deeply and profoundly freeing. Each of us has a basic human right to that genuine love, happiness and freedom." Sobonfu Some'
Grief tending, 1:1 and group grief coaching and support, collective grief ritual and ceremony, embodied grief work through Beautiful Grievers offerings BALM: rest-grieve-receive (Beautiful Grievers and Yoga Nidra fusion). Reach out!
About Beautiful Grievers:
"Jess was an amazing guide for this journey. The embodiment work and meditations were carefully crafted and such a wonderful and fulfilling addition to this work. I also loved the care and time put into the weekly song playlists and listened to them a lot in between meetings. It felt as if I was staying connected the whole time. Jess created a beautiful community for us beautiful grievers and ushered us along our healing journeys. I have deep love for this program." BG alumni, summer 2022
Come receive support, create space to welcome your grief more deeply, share space with others who want to connect more fully and deeply on their grief journeys and live life more integrated and engaged with your grief. Grief is such an amazing teacher. May you be open to its teachings!
Beautiful Grievers work came forward more fully and loudly after the death of dear friend late fall 2021. It is clear that embodied grief work is necessary to our healing and movement forward in our day to day lives as grief makes a home in our body and impacts our inner and outerworlds so tremendoulsy. Grief can be so painful and can keep us stuck in living our authentic beautiful lives. Beautiful Grievers is medicine, it offers warmth and ease to the pain and hardness that grief sometimes shows up as, especially in our heart-space...In beautiful grievers work, we acknowledge, welcome, integrate, metabolize, and alchemize our grief using intentions and practices that come from our inner knowing, and from our relationship to the outer world, especially the natural world, all in relationship to our grief. Often these intentions and practices arise when we ground, breathe and are present in the moment, when we get curious about our emotions and where in the body they are and what they are telling us, and align our body-mind to make space for the tender and sacred that is grief in a safe, brave, and loving space. I hope you feel called to the invitation to do grief work. I am here for it. I am here to support you in this most powerful journey.
What do I mean by embodied grief work? First off to me, embodiment is our sense of who we are in the present moment in relation to our inner world/our True Nature and what is happening and how this connects to our outer world "and how the world is moving through us" (Philip Shepherd). So embodied grief work is about being present to our grief. Not avoiding it but welcoming it. Feeling it and getting curious and recognizing its impact in all areas of our life and how our grieving influences how we show up in the world. This work uses practices that welcome the body (yes, this includes our mind/brain) in relation to our interconnectedness with the all AND also an opportunity to get curious about what is happening within (because remember, grief lives in the body) through myriad practices including but not limited to: nervous system practices/literacy, self-massage & manual lymph drainage, Reiki, aromatherapy, connecting with the rhythms of the seasons and cycles of the natural world and elements, breathwork, yoga nidra guidance, writing, stretching, moving, receiving, asking, singing, working with thoughts, beliefs and karmic patterns that keep us stuck, being in silence, resting, reflecting, re-membering, discovering, moving out of our comfort zone, getting curious, growing, and healing our way forward.
I am a griever, death doula, grief guide, certified From Grief To Gratitude grief coach, a certified BodyMind Method Coach, Certified Yoga Nidra Teacher, Women's and Gender Studies Instructor, Bodyworker, Reiki Master Teacher, Ritual and Ceremonialist, Educator, Organizer, Retreat Leader, student, lover of the natural world, the cycles and seasons. I am a wisdom seeker and wisdom speaker. Trust, depth, community, connection, supporting others, anti-racism/social justice, care, rest, integrity and presence are my core values that I work and live from.
My lineage of grief work and experience extends throughout most of my life but starting in the first grade with the death of my paternal grandfather, family dogs, and in the 6th grade with the sudden and tragic death of a classmate and friend. Grief continues to guide the ways in which I make offerings of support to the world, anchored in decades of formal collective community grief ritual rooted in the ways of the Dagara Tribe of Burkina Faso and shared by Sobonfu Some' and Malidoma Some', certified as an End-of-Life Doula, a Grief Coach (From Grief To Gratitude Coach), Grief Work training and Loving, Dying, and Letting Go Instructor training with Amy Wright at The Institute for the Study of Birth, Breath, and Death, mentored and taught with Merilynne Rush at The Dying Year, direct work with Francis Weller and his offering: The Five Gates of Grief and currently apprenticing with Francis in his 5-month Grief Ritual Training Entering the Healing Ground to deepen capacity as a grief-tender, and has held space for numerous personal and collective experiences of grief tending.
May you feel welcomed into this space.
"I was led to take Jess’ course and the things I have learned in 4 weeks time have transformed me!" BG alum
