Grief Companion Training
Grief Companion Training: Foundations
A Three-Day Immersive Training in Grief Companioning
January 8–10, 2027 | Virtual | Limited to 30 Participants
Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a sacred landscape — one that asks to be witnessed, held, and honored with skill, courage, and cultural integrity.
This training equips helping professionals with the knowledge, frameworks, and compassionate tools to accompany people through the full terrain of loss — not as fixers, but as skilled witnesses who know how to stay.
Participants
Who This Training Is For
This training is for you if you companion people through loss.
Licensed Counselors & Therapists
Expand your grief competencies with a thanatology-grounded, culturally responsive framework that honors the full depth of what your clients carry.
Social Workers
Build practical skills for accompanying clients through death, dying, anticipatory grief, and bereavement — across the lifespan and across communities.
Chaplains & Spiritual Care Providers
Deepen your capacity to companion grief across spiritual and cultural traditions without imposing your own.
Nurses & Healthcare Professionals
Understand grief as a whole-person experience and bring more of yourself — and more skill — to end-of-life care.
Community Leaders & Clergy
Develop the skills to hold collective grief in congregational and organizational settings, especially in the wake of violence, loss, and communal trauma.
Emerging Grief Companions & Practitioners
Ground your practice in the scholarship, ethics, and cultural frameworks that sustain it — and you — for the long haul.
Program
Three-Day Curriculum Overview
What You'll Learn
Day 1 — Thursday, January 8
Foundations: Grief, Identity & the Art of Companioning
- Grief's landscape: a bio-psychosocial-neuro-spiritual framework
- Personal connections to loss — your grief history as practitioner
- The grief companion: role, scope, and professional identity
- Foundations of thanatology: what the scholarship actually says
- Intersectionality, culture, and grief — whose story gets told?
Day 2 — Friday, January 9
The Clinical & Ethical Landscape of Dying and Death
- End-of-life realities: the medical landscape and the companion's role
- Death and the body: ritual, care, and creating sacred space
- Trauma-informed care in grief companioning
- The art of witnessing and the ethics of accompaniment
- Ethics, professional boundaries, and sustainable practice
Day 3 — Saturday, January 10
Practice, Community & the Companion as Practitioner
- Somatic grief practice: holding the body in loss
- Grief across the lifespan — children, adolescents, and aging
- Organizational and communal grief: when loss is collective
- Spiritual, cultural, and communal rituals in grief
- Community care and sustainable practice — not all giving is sacrifice
- Grief work as collective liberation: closing ritual and next steps
Logistics
The Details
Enrollment
Investment & Registration
Register for Grief Companion Training: Foundations
Space is limited to 30 participants. This training fills from a community of practitioners who take grief work seriously — register early to hold your place.
Early Bird Registration
Available through November 15, 2026
$997
Training only — 18 instructional hours
Regular Registration
$1,099
Training only — 18 instructional hours
Questions about registration? Contact [email protected]
Presenter
About Your Presenter
Jamie Eaddy, DMin, FT
Jamie Eaddy — known as the Grief Whisperer in the communities she serves — is a grief scholar, thanatologist, death and end-of-life specialist, ritualist, and mystic. She is the founder of Thoughtful Transitions, LLC, where she companions individuals, families, and communities through the sacred terrain of loss, dying, and grief.
Dr. Eaddy holds a Doctor of Ministry degree and is a Fellow in Thanatology (FT) — the highest credential conferred by the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC). Her approach to grief integrates bio-psychosocial-neuro-spiritual understanding with somatic healing, ritual, African spirituality, womanist theology, and liberationist pastoral care.
Dr. Eaddy serves as Director of Counseling and Wellness at the Anti-Violence Partnership of Philadelphia, Affiliate Professor of Pastoral Care at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, and Associate Pastor of Congregational Wellness at St. Paul's Baptist Church. She is the founder of The Ratchet Grief Project® and author of Re-Membering Ourselves (Wipf & Stock). She is currently pursuing doctoral study in psychology.