Laurence Cole (he/him)

Guiding Elder & Facilitator

Laurence Cole is a song elder, ritualist, and beloved facilitator from Port Townsend, Washington, whose work helps communities remember the healing power of grieving and singing together. He brings decades of devotion to group singing, grief ritual, and the restoration of belonging through shared voice. Laurence met Thérèse Charvet at a grief retreat held by Sobonfu Somé in 1997, and participated in many rituals with Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé through the 1990s and early 2000s. He joined the Sacred Groves grief retreat team in 2009 and has since traveled widely offering grief rituals, song circles, and communal singing at retreats, conferences, festivals, and community gatherings. Through his songs and facilitation, Laurence helps create spaces where people can soften into grief, reconnect with one another, and remember their natural human capacity for belonging.

Siena Tenisci (she/her)

Program Steward & Facilitator

Siena Tenisci, MA, LMHC, is a therapist, and founder of Northwest Grief Tending, a practice dedicated to grief ritual, community healing, and the restoration of communal grief tending. For more than a decade, Siena has facilitated grief rituals and supported others through retreats, consultation circles, individual mentorship, and grief ritual leadership training. Her work is rooted in relationship with her Abruzzese and Celtic ancestral lineages, including the revival of keening traditions, where women held important roles in helping communities metabolize grief through vocal ritual. Siena’s work is shaped by teachers including Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, Joanna Macy, Thérèse Charvet, Laurence Cole, Francis Weller, Mary Hart, and Vince Horan, and grounded in Internal Family Systems, body-based practice, and anti-oppression frameworks.

Thérèse Charvet (she/her)

Guiding Elder & Facilitator

Thérèse Charvet is the founder of Sacred Groves, a forest sanctuary on Bainbridge Island she has stewarded for 50 years, where she has offered earth-based ritual, grief work, women’s mysteries, rites of passage, and community gatherings. Her work is rooted in decades of ceremony, midwifery, Buddhist practice, land-based spirituality, and relationship with the more-than-human world. Thérèse attended many ceremonies with her mentor, the late Sobonfu Somé, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and began offering grief rituals with Sobonfu’s blessing in 2002. After six years as the director of the Grief Tender Mentorship Program, Thérèse is now stepping into the role of Guiding Elder, offering wisdom, ritual leadership, and spiritual grounding while supporting the program’s next stage of stewardship.

Alyx Somas

Program Assistant

Alyx Somas is a 2S Native North American of multiple tribal and detribalized peoples. Rooted in life-honoring ancestral teachings, they walk as a Culture Tender, Re-indigenization Practitioner, and Collective Liberationist, guiding communities to re-member our truest human natures and restore relationship with lineage, land, and kinship-based lifeways.

Raised by a family of 200+ kin, Alyx carries the gift of intergenerational belonging — a bone-deep knowing that we are not meant to navigate life alone, that we are wired for community, for ritual, for being witnessed and held. Training to be a Good Elder, their prayer is for worldwide pan-cultural revival and the reimagining of our village interdependence within the ecosystems of modernity.

Alyx is the founder of The Collectivity Project, an indigenous response to polycrisis, genocide, and ecocide — anchored in the truth that we all come from people who gathered around fires storytelling, dancing, and grieving together in medicinal ways.

They are a council member and cultural consultant for Cascadia Song Rise, Stellar Village, Conscious Growth Convergence, Revival Gatherings, Grieving Man, and Temple of Belonging. They offer ceremonies, workshops, consultation, and mentorship in ancestral healing, cross-cultural bridging, grief and initiation work, and belonging-based decolonial systems.

May this work nurture our sacred responsibility as living ancestors.

Learn more about ceremonies, workshops, consultation, and mentorship through the Collectivity Project’s Website and Instagram. Join the email list here.

If you believe this cultural work is important and would like to contribute to sustain it, you can support Alyx’s Ko-fi here.

Esteban Carazo Flores, aka Este (he/him)

Program Assistant

Este is a self-claimed “half-generation” US American. Born in Southern California to immigrant Costa Rican parents, he was raised in Central America since the age of 3. He then lived in Argentina before starting to hear the clear calling to reconnect with his birth lands on Turtle Island, landing in the Sierra Nevada Foothills in California for the past 3 years.

As a bridge between cultures , languages and territories, Este has been walking with native elders and ceremonies across the continent, weaving initiation, belonging, prayer and offering as technologies for these prophetic times.

Este is an alumni of the Grief Tending Mentorship program with elders Laurence Cole and Therese Chavert, a rite of passage and vision fast guide in the lineage of the School of Lost Borders and a land steward working in ecological restoration.

Corlé LaForce (she/her)

Program Assistant

Corlé LaForce (she/her) is a grief tender, somatic psychotherapist, and devotee of beauty. As a mixed-race, second-generation daughter of the Filipino Diaspora, Corlé brings embodied knowledge of the colonized and the colonizer.

She gives gratitude to her matrilineal line for her warmth and playfulness, gratitude to her paternal line for her capacity to tend heart-centered circles, and respect and honor to her spiritual teachers, Naomi Tsotsie, Belinda Eraicho, Darryl Slim, Laurence Cole, and Wayne Price for teaching her how to put Spirit first and to be of service to others.

Sheltered by the Tlingit Nation on Áakʼw Ḵwáan Aaní, Juneau, Alaska, Corlé is learning how to be a good daughter to the Áakʼw Kwáan Lʼeeneidí, The Raven Dog Salmon clan.

Jordan Lyon

Program Assistant

Jordan Lyon is a chef, grief tender, writer and facilitator. His passions and work guide him towards cultivating community through all the ways he creates, weaves, and lives. Primarily through food—a love language of his that nourishes community doing deep work together; through ritual—co-creating emergent ceremonies that reconnect us with the sacred, Mother Nature, and all the cycles of life; and lastly through story—weaving together mythic threads and tapestries that help us remember what we’ve forgotten and reimagine what is possible ahead. He resides on the land of Sacred Groves, a small intentional community on Bainbridge Island in the Salish Sea.

Sarah Jackson

Program Advisor

Sarah is a grief tender, somatic healer, organizational consultant. She has been participating in grief work for over a decade, and has mentored with Therese Charvet and Laurence Cole since 2020. Her work is grounded in connection with spirit, reverence for nature, and deep care. She is a Certified Hakomi Practitioner, offering individual and couples somatic healing work based on present moment awareness. Her consulting practice brings strategic program leadership, organizational development, and holistic leadership coaching to non-profits and mission-driven businesses.

Rain Webbert

Program Assistant

Rain serves as Retreat Coordinator and Program Administrator, supporting program logistics and participant communication. Rain is an alumni of the Grief Tender Mentorship Program (2024-2025), and an assistant to the program in 2025-2026. She serves those at thresholds, including wilderness rites of passage, birth work, and grief tending. Rain is honored to be a bridge between the griever and the ritual and to be in service to your apprenticeship with grief.