Unearthing Our Wisdom
How do we grieve what has been taken from us while honoring and uncovering what endures?
Registration is now open for Archeologies of Grief!
Series Overview
IDHA’s 2026 training series, Archeologies of Grief: Unearthing Our Wisdom, is for those interested in understanding what has been stolen or lost while being supported by intentional grief practices and wisdom reclamation. Whether you're working in clinical spaces, organizing communities, supporting loved ones, or navigating your own lived experience, this space offers frameworks, practices, and community centered around honoring the complexity of grief.
Grief is everywhere, especially now, and yet many of us are never taught how to hold it. Dominant western paradigms tend to rush, polish, and hide grieving practices, leaving little room to process the pain inflicted by those same forces. All of us have lost something at the hands of structures of domination, and for communities most harmed, grief, remembrance, and reclamation practices are transformative.
This series offers space to explore grief through disability justice, decolonial, relational, and embodied frameworks. Our faculty will draw on a range of practices to help you engage grief more fully – in yourself, in your clients, and in your communities. Across three participatory classes, we will examine topics including neurodivergent and disabled grief, epistemicide and the suppression of indigenous and lived wisdom, and alternatives to dominant Western grief paradigms rooted in collective care and embodied practice.
Together we will engage questions of survival, adaptation, and remembrance while developing more culturally responsive and justice-oriented approaches to supporting grief in ourselves, our communities, and our work.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
Disabled and neurodivergent ways of grieving, adapting, and surviving
The reclamation and remembering of indigenous and lived ways of knowing
What embodied, collective, and culturally grounded grief practices offer in contrast to dominant Western frameworks
SKILLS YOU’LL GAIN
Support disabled and neurodivergent communities in navigating grief
Develop a culturally responsive practice that values diverse ways of knowing
Support yourself, others and communities in transformative grief practices
Schedule
Recording: Please note that all main sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants, in case you aren’t able to show up live. However, if you want to receive CEs for the classes you must attend live.
Accessibility: ASL translation and automated closed captioning will be provided.
Date and Time |
Course Title and Faculty |
|
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, August 20, 2026 6-8:30 pm EST |
Resisting Epistemicide: Restoring Indigenous and Lived Wisdom for Grief Care
Elmina Bell and Evan Auguste, PhD | ENROLL |
| Thursday September 3, 2026 6-8:30 pm EST |
Disabled Grief Portals: Storytelling, ritual, art, and changing narratives of what disability is and can be
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Fayza Bundalli | ENROLL |
| TBD September 2026 12-2:30 pm EST |
Grief Literacy
Camille Barton and TBD | Enrollment Coming Soon |
“I appreciate the willingness to grow together in the space — the recognition that we all come with lives rich with experience, and we are capable of co-building the future as far away as possible from state and interpersonal violence, towards collective and community care.”
— PAST IDHA training participant
Resisting Epistemicide:
Restoring Indigenous and Lived Wisdom for Grief Care
THURSDAY AUGUST 20, 2026 • 6-8:30 pm EST
2.25 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more here.
This course explores epistemicide—the systemic suppression of indigenous, lived, and non-dominant ways of knowing through colonial, psychiatric, and institutional forces—and examines the impacts of this loss on grief, identity, and community well-being. Participants will consider how dominant Western mental health frameworks may overlook or devalue Indigenous, cultural, and experiential ways of knowing, and examine the implications for clinical and peer support practices. Through remembrance practices, collective grieving rituals, and Indigenous-informed approaches to healing, participants will explore cultural frameworks for supporting complex and intergenerational grief.
Learning objectives:
Identify Indigenous and culturally rooted ways of knowing that have been marginalized through processes of epistemicide and describe the potential impacts of this loss on grief, identity, and healing.
Describe and participate in experiential Indigenous-informed therapeutic interventions and discuss considerations for their ethical and culturally responsive application.
Recognize how grief may be expressed through anger, resistance, and other culturally meaningful responses, and identify approaches for holding space within clinical and peer support settings.
Apply principles of culturally responsive and trauma-informed care when supporting grief experiences shaped by historical, cultural, and intergenerational loss.
Elmina Bell is an Indigenous African Psycho-Spiritual Practitioner. Their work as a trained trauma-informed peer support facilitator, crisis/refuge worker, astrologer, sound healer and medium, is guided by knowledge systems of her ancestors and Disability Justice and Healing Justice principles.
Evan Auguste, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a major area of focus in forensic psychology at Fordham University in 2022. Auguste is a 2014 graduate of Middlebury College. His identities as a Haitian-African American man have informed his work on examining how the U.S.’s history of anti-Blackness has shaped psychological realities both in and outside of the country’s borders. He is the director of the A.S.I.L.I. Collective and recently edited the volume The Carceral State, Forensic Psychology, and Black Resistance: “Let Them Not Be Forgotten”, which outlines the theoretical and ethical commitments for forensic psychologists in the struggle for Black liberation and details areas of focus for practice and research.
Disabled Grief Portals:
Storytelling, ritual, art, and changing narratives of what disability is and can be
Thursday September 3, 2026 • 6-8:30 pm EST
2.25 CE credits will be available for this class.
This 2½-hour training explores grief through a disability- and neurodivergence-centered lens, integrating lived experience with trauma-informed, embodied, and transformative approaches.
As sick and disabled people, we have the job of processing so much grief:
our lives, our worth, our contributions, our brilliant body-minds are unsupported, unprotected, and devalued by the systems of our overculture,
what happens as our bodies deal with increasing and different impairment and challenges at times can create more grief
there is so much direct and tangible impact on our lives and deaths. We have lost so much and so many of our dear ones, and it’s all unnecessary.
If we do not grieve, we will not survive, and so the task is ours.
Participants will examine how grief can be shaped by medical trauma, loss of access and supports, loss of disabled kin, anticipatory grief, and the tangible impacts of impairment on relationships, identity, safety, and belonging. The workshop creates a structured space for participants to process grief while also learning practical clinical and facilitation perspectives for working with disabled and neurodivergent clients and communities.
Through storytelling, ritual, art, collective dreaming, and guided discussion, attendees will practice ways to help themselves and their clients name losses, reduce shame, honor the body’s responses to grief, and support the vision of a future we want to live into. We will pull from the inheritances of all we have been gifted by our sick and disabled ancestors, and also make space for the griefs and losses that will never be reconciled.
This training is designed for people with lived disability and/or mental health experience and for aligned practitioners (therapists, counselors, social workers, coaches, etc.) who want a deeper understanding of disability-related grief and how to integrate it into ethical, culturally responsive care.
By the end of the session, participants will leave with a clearer framework for recognizing grief presentations common in disability contexts and with concrete language and tools for supportive communication and trauma-informed care.
Learning objectives:
Define disability- and neurodivergence-centered grief and explain how grief may emerge from stigma, unmet access needs, loss of supports, medical trauma, and anticipatory/ongoing losses.
Identify grief presentations that may be shaped by disability (e.g., grief layered with chronic stress, embodiment shifts, complicated mourning, social isolation, and disenfranchised grief), and describe how these may differ from grief framed solely as event-based loss.
Use at least two structured approaches for meaning-making and coping in disability-related grief (e.g., ritualized reflection, narrative reframing, or creative practice) that participants can adapt for clinical or peer-support settings.
Communicate supportive, clinically attuned responses to grief.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a nonbinary femme disabled writer and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of eleven books, including The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Movements (co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani) and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building The Stacey Park MIlbern Liberation Arts Residency, a writers residency by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. Follow them at brownstargirl.org and llps.substack.com Raised in Worcester, MA, they live in Lenapehoking/ Philadelphia
Fayza Bundalli, MSW, RSW teaches embodiment courses in collaboration with fellow somatics teachers, supervises QT/BIPOC practitioners, and works 1:1 as a somatic therapist and bodyworker. These are her drop-in-the-ocean offerings toward collective healing, aliveness, and power. Fayza has lived with chronic illness for two and a half decades; her body has been her longest-term teacher in the art and practice of deep listening. She is a South Asian femme, and a parent to a young child, her most depthful place of somatic learning. She is grateful to live and offer her work on the traditional and unceded territories of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations
“Interesting contrast of facilitation in terms of a more academic vs. on-the-ground perspective that complemented each other really well. I liked the way facilitators shared space with one another. The topics were right up my alley and so relevant to my lived experience and current struggles in life and in community. I adored chatting with classmates too and sharing vulnerability."
— Past IDHA training participant
Pricing Tiers
What you get: |
Reduced/Member $35/ class |
General $65/ class |
Supporter $95/ class |
| 2.5-hour live class session | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Class recording and resource list | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Access to IDHA's virtual learning community on Mighty Networks | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Complementary CE credits (2.25 per class) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Subsidize another participant and sustain IDHA's ongoing training program | ✓ |
We love organizing these classes and we’re committed to keeping them as accessible as possible. At the same time, there’s a lot that goes into making them happen. As we navigate a shifting and uncertain funding landscape and move toward becoming more community-sustained, we’ve made a small increase to our live series registration fees this year. Your registration helps cover the cost of compensating our faculty, providing live ASL interpretation and accurate captioning, and maintaining the tech platforms that keep classes running smoothly.
Scholarships
If cost is a barrier, we don’t want that to be the reason you can’t join us. We are also offering full and partial scholarships to each class. Our Scholarship Program is for mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups will be given priority.
Deadline to apply: One Week before your class
Continuing Education Credits
IDHA is pleased to offer this series for Continuing Education (CE) credits. We offer these credits through our partner CE-Go. Please note that to receive CE Credits you must attend the class live. For full information about CE Credits offered, please visit the course’s registration page and navigate to the section on CE credits.
As a training institute that values lived experience as highly as professional training, IDHA recognizes the way that the credentialing system enforces a culture of professionalism and devalues lived experience. At the same time, we believe it is a radical act to offer our training content for CE credits, ensuring that mental health workers and other clinicians can apply transformative mental health knowledge in maintaining a credential.
FAQ
What’s unique about IDHA’s approach?
We value lived experience as highly as professional training, so each course will be led by both a mental health clinician as well as someone who identifies as a survivor, a mental health service user, and/or someone who has experienced a mental health crisis. This will ensure participants receive holistic and nuanced perspectives.
Who is this series for?
This series is for mental health professionals, including but not limited to: clinicians, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, peer specialists, recovery support specialists, housing specialists, nurse practitioners and medical professionals, students. and anyone who works or plans to work with and around people who experience mental health-related issues. This series is also for people with lived experience and those who love them.
Where are the classes held?
Classes will be held virtually via Zoom. Be sure to download the Zoom software onto your computer in advance of the training!
Are scholarships available?
IDHA will award a set of full and partial scholarship positions to mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups will be given priority. Learn more about our Scholarship Program here.
Are these classes accessible?
Live ASL translation and automated closed captioning will be provided for all sessions.
Do I have to show up right at the time advertised for the class?
Yes, this is a live training so please be sure you are available at that time. All sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants after, however, if you want to earn CEs for the class you must show up in person.
Will I have the opportunity to interact with faculty?
Yes, each live training will provide the opportunity to interact with the faculty.
What is your cancellation policy?
For any questions or concerns, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.
There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.