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It’s Time to Decolonize Your Grief
An Introduction to Liberating Our Hearts
A one-hour introduction on how colonization and oppressive systems have impacted our ability to grieve.
What you’ll learn
“This one hour got my brain moving in new directions - it opened new pathways to deal with and work through grief.”
Meet your instructor
Ayako Gallagher (she/her)
Meet Your Facilitator, Ayako
Ayako was born as an illegal settler on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Kwantlen, Tsawwassen, and other Coast Salish nations in Richmond, BC, Canada. Being of “mixed race”—Japanese mother and Scottish-Irish father—she never felt fully accepted by her ancestral cultures or even as a Canadian, facing daily racist micro-aggressions as a visible minority. Despite her imperialist and colonial heritage, she was raised with a strong moral compass, respecting Indigenous people through her mother’s love and admiration for Indigenous art and hearing bedtime stories of her father's activism in the British labour union movement.
A sense of global responsibility was evident in Ayako from an early age. In elementary school, she started a paper route to fund a sponsorship program for a family in Nepal. In high school, she volunteered on Vancouver’s East Side, supporting sex workers. While studying Sociology and Political Science at UBC, she mentored Indigenous teens through UNYA and organized impactful direct actions as a Canadian Board Member for Students for a Free Tibet. She spent her 20s backpacking and immersing herself in different cultures across Asia, Central and South America, spending a total of almost four years on the road. In her 30s, she founded a non-profit, Fundamentals for Change, which supported community projects in a garbage dump community of Kingston, Jamaica.
Her early stillbirth of her second child, Emiko, in 2020, shook her whole world. Without having any learned coping skills for grief from her parents or ancestral background, she was left depressed, isolated and alone. For the past four years, Ayako has been researching and finding ways to reclaim the sanctity of her grief and create new rituals and meanings in mourning, rooted in an anti-colonial mindset.
To address the lack of post-loss support, Ayako created the Loss to Love app, the world’s first app providing emotional support for bereaved parents through all seasons of their grief.
Ayako currently still lives in, “Richmond”, with her two living children and her husband, minutes away from her parents, her father of which, is suffering from dementia.
Testimonials
Still have Questions?
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The reason why we ask for some sort of monetary donation (whatever you can give is fine) to attend is because Loss to Love believes in compensating all their facilitators financially for the energy transfer it takes to hold space in these grief filled circles.
Commerce can be ethical and is different than buying into the capitalist ideals.
We appreciate and compensate our facilitators for the education, time, familial sacrifices and vicarious grief, that goes into every session.
We hope you can appreciate this too! :)
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Yes, please! Although the examples will be rooted in Ayako's lived experience of grieving her pregnancy loss, grief is universal and have, or will, touch us all. The topics discussed will be applicable to all of us.
Everyone is welcome.
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Of course, please! We will even be breaking down that social construct of "whiteness" and how that has hurt people's ability to connect with their ancestral lineages from European cultures.
This webinar is for anyone looking to deepen or begin their reclaiming of pre-colonial inner knowing.
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100% YES. This webinar is for anyone that is looking to deepen their cultural connections or begin to examine how colonialism severed those relationships and how we can begin to repair them.
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This recording is non-refundable.
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Please don’t hesitate to contact Ayako at: ayako@losstolove.app and she will happily answer any questions or concerns you have.