Keening
A Living Tradition
An 8-week experiential journey and educational course into the Keening traditions of Scotland & Ireland
Autumn 2026 Dates to be Announced
See below for details of the 2025 season
Join the Waitlist
Be the first to know when registration opens for the Autumn 2026 season opens.
May our time together draw us into the depths of our hearts, where love and grief intertwine, and where we touch the mystery of the unseen realms.
Teachers have been featured in
"Know dear one
The song of death
Dreams the birth of creation
As beloved life
Embraces your heart
She is planning on leaving
In the heart
Of the seed there
Hides the fullness of mystery
In the same seed
Hides the destroyer
Of all that is created
So live within
The heart of death
And die fully into birth."
~Phyllida Anam-Áire
One of our beloved teachers in this course.
What is Keening?
In this Weaving Remembrance offering, we return to ancient practices that once held grief with reverence, sacredness and song.
At the heart of this work is the Keen – a raw, embodied lament that lives in the bones of Irish and Scottish tradition.
The Keen is a vocal expression of grief, part cry and part song, offered at the thresholds of death. Traditionally heard at wakes, funeral processions, and gravesides, it arose from deep presence and embodied knowing. Women, often kin or hired keeners, would gather to call forth sorrow through wailing, chant, and improvised melody.
This was not performance, but invocation: a weaving of grief, memory, and love into sound. The Keen served as a bridge, carrying the soul onward, uniting the community in mourning, and giving voice to what words alone could not hold.
Though nearly silenced by cultural suppression, the spirit of keening endures and lives on.
This course is a heartfelt container for exploring the themes of keening and lamenting, grief and love, death and life.
Together, we will explore the sounds of grief, remembering how to be with sorrow, how to honor what has passed, and how to listen to what still wants to be heard.
Come As You Are
Bring your heart, your voice, your stories, your pain. We begin with the breath.
We begin in the place where grief and love meet.
Though severely diminished, the old ways have never died and are now being repaired and revived. We are reweaving the broken threads.
This course brings together some of our respected elders and tradition keepers from Ireland & Scotland, who are working deeply with the revival of these ancestral keening and grief-tending traditions.
It includes learning and receiving historical teachings, keening songs, stories, Celtic perspectives, and grief-tending rituals.
