About rituals for Being
Working with you we will explore ways to remember the person you have lost or restore the parts of yourself that you have lost touch with. We will be with you in your pain as you nurture your needs and integrate grief into your life.
In a grief illiterate society, it is so challenging for us to simply be with each other’s pain.
Rituals for Being was founded by Kay King, Birth and Loss doula, coach, facilitator and Non-Violent Communication Specialist and Katie Chalcraft, coach, therapist and facilitator.
We are the founders of Rituals for Being–Grief Education and Coaching.
Our Story
In September 2020, Katie’s parents were diagnosed with serious illnesses – her mother with Motor Neurone Disease and her father with dementia.
For Katie, this was a profound turning point. Despite over a decade of experience in personal development, specifically focused on helping others create lives they love, and her training and work as a mindfulness-based psychotherapist, she found herself watching her life and her mental wellbeing unravel.
During this time, Kay offered something precious: the simple gift of presence. She was able to simply be with Katie’s pain. She also shared a book that would later become foundational to our work: “The Wild Edge of Sorrow” by Francis Weller.
The experience of Katie caring for her Mum until she died transformed Katie from someone who actively avoided anything to do with death into someone deeply called to understand and work with grief.
Kay has experienced a wide range of loss over the years, including loss of several friends to suicide, her own pregnancy loss and early years loss of her bodily autonomy. Through these experiences, she found herself drawn to supporting others through loss as a doula, specialising in pregnancy, fertility, and birth affected by loss.
As the author of “Why Baby Loss Matters”(published by Pinter and Martin) Kay developed a deep understanding of grief’s many forms and the unique ways it shapes our lives.
Both of us have, for more years than we can remember, had a framed copy of the poem ‘The Invitation’ by Oriah Mountain Dreamer in our homes. Neither one of us introduced this poem to each other, it just found us and spoke to us deeply. One of the lines that stands out most to us is this: “I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it”.
It is this that has become the premise of Rituals for Being.
Our twenty year friendship further deepened when we worked together for over a year on a self-advocacy programme supporting women who had experienced domestic violence, birth trauma, sexual trauma and/or obstetric violence. This collaboration revealed our shared calling: to create a space where grief could be fully witnessed and held.
In our journey to deepen our understanding, we immersed ourselves in learning from these renowned grief experts, building upon our existing foundations.
Katie had already trained as a therapist, while Kay was trained in the Grief Recovery Method and Non Violent Communication coaching.
Together, we studied with psychotherapist Francis Weller, exploring grief and rituals at a deeper level, and completed our formal Grief Educators training with grief expert and author David Kessler.
Drawing from this rich foundation of knowledge, our professional expertise, and our personal experiences, we created our 12-session programme focusing on being with pain, remembering, nurturing, and integrating grief.