Your grief support journey starts here
Lighthouse Circle
Your Grief Support
Grief is hard, really hard. Your grief is also sacred and deserves to be honored and tended to with compassion in your own way and in your own time. Grief can be isolating, so our mission is hold space for people to grieve openly and honestly within a supportive community. Together with Gretchen Miura, we offer the following programs including free content.
Next round 2025! 2024 sign up closed for live round. Evergreen options below.
If you are interested in sitting with, exploring and tending to your loss in a warm, dedicated space, then get in touch. Our LIghthouse Circle is a beautiful and special programme that has stewarded so many people through their grief.
Lighthouse Circle journey in currently in the fifth Live Round.
You can learn more about our journey, of how Lighthouse Program came about by listening to this Legends podcast episode.
WHAT ARE SOME WAYS TO TEND TO OUR GRIEF?
Journaling: Writing about our thoughts, feelings and experiences in an unfiltered way provides a release for emotions, allowing for reflection and insight.
Rituals: Rituals like setting up an alter or making our loved one’s favorite meal can be performed to honor loved ones, connect to the sacred and tap into a source of inner knowing.
Meditation: Mindfulness meditation helps ground us with kindness and build the capacity to feel our feelings without judgment.
Embodied Practice: Grief is held in our bodies. Simple movements, breathing exercises and self soothing techniques can be used to offer compassion and gratitude to ourselves.
Resources: There are more and more resources available including books, podcasts and support groups.
Connection: While you may be grieving your deeply personal loss by yourself, please know that you are not alone in your grief.
We engage with each of theses modalities in our Lighthouse Circle. Join us and many repeating members to tend to your loss and grief, in tender community.
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Lighthouse Circle
Lighthouse Circle is a support group that runs for six months and starts twice a year. The next group begins in 2025.
Evergreen
Lighthouse EVERGREEN is a self paced online program that you can join anytime. You receive instant access to 6 sessions of content that you can access anytime. It is a self-directed programme with no calls.
Free Content
The free content is a resource to help bring compassionate care to your grief. This is available to anyone for free. Simply add your email for instant access.
Meet your Guides
Sarah Furuya
Hi, I am Sarah and I live in the hills by the sea South of Tokyo, near the sacred shores of Kamakura, on the Miura Peninsula. From there I run my coaching business and Legends Podcast. The heart of my practice is the many ways to lead a life, and working with and telling people’s stories. I honor the influence of those passed and create space and ritual for them and their presence in my coaching spaces. I am passionate about looking at the taboos and lost traditions around death, mourning and grief.
I am also an executive and life coach, run retreats, creative writing programmes and clothing swaps, all in service of the communities that have emerged around me.
Gretchen Miura
Hi, I'm Gretchen. I live in Japan with my family where we run DAIRYUJI Zen temple. Making grief support and mindfulness accessible for everyone to nurture well-being and a sense of belonging is my life's work. I studied with David Kessler to become a grief educator and under Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield to gain my mindfulness meditation teachers certificate. I love leading workshops, classes and retreats. My brother Chris died when I was five years old which deeply influenced my views on death and grief, ultimately guiding me to this calling. Drawing on many years of exploration, learning and unlearning, I am passionate about bringing elements of ritual, spirituality, creativity and mindfulness to create a supportive atmosphere at Lighthouse Circle.
“ Lighthouse is where I take these grieving parts of me. It’s a shadow;
but it’s not.”
LHC Member
Legends Podcast December 2023 with Gretchen and Sarah,
Your Lighthouse Circle Guides
Listen to Sarah and Gretchen talk about Gretchen’s life story and how following Dragons became a golden thread in her story. We touch on grief and how it weaves into full life story. It is part of the fullness of a life lived and expressed. Below is the original podcast that prompted the whole Lighthouse Circle as we spent the entire conversation talking about Gretchen’s loss, when she was 5 and her big brother, Chris was 17.
Gretchen is outstandingly generous in her storytelling and we unciver a string of coincidences that led to this being called the ‘Legend of Dragons’.
Legends Podcast February 2021 with Gretchen and Sarah,
In this our first conversation together we talk extensively about the elements of Catholicism that we loved and miss, yet how Catholicism was not the right place for our spirits.
We take a deep dive into the loss of her brother Chris, and her grief and how, in the three to four years prior to recording she began to acknowledge and explore the grief around the loss of her brother. Gretchen goes into great detail about the process of being five and observing the adult world mourning around her in her.
Gretchen took care of her grief some 40 years later, tending to the little five year old, sitting on the stairs, willing her beloved brother to come home.
It is the privilege of a lifetime to bear witness to these stories and I am eternally grateful to Gretchen for sharing her story, and for creating this Lighthouse Circle. Without her willingness to offer her story, we would never have conjured this space.
Sarah and Gretchen appear on Jayne Nakata’s ‘Transformations With Jayne’s Podcast.
Together we ‘geek out’ about grief and answer Jayne’s questions about grief.
This depth of work is not for everyone and Jayne’s questions can help you decide if you want to take on this sacred and transformational journey.
“Dissolve Resentment”
Sometimes the best we can do is laugh (or cry!) when someone says something stupid to us when we are grieving. Our society is largely grief illiterate, so often people say hurtful or insensitive things simply due to their own discomfort or lack of understanding.
And how can we navigate such awkward social interactions?
How do we learn to protect ourselves? How can we care for ourselves compassionately in those situations?
This is our flagship workshop that unpacks the "stupid" (i.e. hurtful, ignorant or tactless) things that people sometimes say to someone who is grieving. We will find ways to navigate these comments and care for our needs restoratively. We allow room for levity and joy to co-exist with the deep sorrow of grief.
“We belong to each other.”
Gretchen Miura
This 90 minute workshop includes:
Deep intention setting
Venting the the stupid things that people say
Why might people say these things?
What would we have LOVE to have said in response?
The excellent things that people have said
What we would have liked people to have said to us.
Give those things to each other
Grief theory
“Thank you for sharing your precious grief work.”
LHC Member
“We don’t heal in isolation but in community.”
- S Kelley Harrell