Stories from people who travelled with their grief
Journal entries, honest reviews and photo diaries from grief retreats around the world, written by the people who came, and the founder who walks every trip with them.
Portugal Grief Trip: August 2026
Core memories from our Portugal Grief Trip in August 2026: Porto mornings, the Douro Valley, grief workshops, and a small group who left as something closer to family.
What a Portuguese Tile Painting Workshop Taught Us About Grief
This time we painted tiles at Gazete Azulejos, a studio that grew out of a project to catalogue and protect Porto's disappearing tile heritage. What that project is, and why it mattered to us.
What Port Wine Taught Us About Grief
In the Douro Valley on the 2026 Portugal Grief Trip, a port tasting turns into an analogy about grapes, raisins, and what it actually takes to become something new after a loss.
What Our Chef in Porto Taught Us About the Years in Between
We hear the second half of stories like his all the time: someone lost someone, and later found purpose. What we don't hear enough about is everything that happened in between.
Google Review: Cassandra on Maldives Grief Trip
Cassandra, after the unexpected death of her mom, on the Maldives Grief Trip: a beautifully intentional space that made her feel less alone, seen, and alive.
Google Review: Sarah on Bali Grief Trip
Sarah, in her 30s and carrying multiple losses, on the Bali Grief Trip: a place to meet others at a similar age and stage, judgment free.
Google Review: Blair Kaplan Venables on Grief Trips
Blair Kaplan Venables, who has joined as both participant and co-facilitator across Bali, Australia and the Maldives, on what keeps bringing her back: grief and joy learning to coexist.
Google Review: Nicole on Portugal Grief Trip
Nicole, grieving both her parents, on the Portugal Grief Trip: a roller coaster of emotions safely explored with a community of women, and friends for life.
Google Review: Kim on a Grief Trip
Kim on her grief retreat: the best trip of her life, feeling seen and heard by Rachel and the group, with room for real fun alongside the grief.
Google Review: Maitreyi on Maldives Grief Trip
Maitreyi on the Maldives Grief Trip: grief workshops that felt supportive without overwhelm, and room to verbalise her grief, co-facilitated by Rachel and Blair Kaplan Venables.
Google Review: Hebe on Grief Trips
Hebe on two of Rachel's grief trips, to Portugal and Bali: a unique space where joy and grief can coexist, and friendships now part of her network for the hard days.
Google Review: Remee on Bali Grief Trip
100% - if you feel called to do this trip, you absolutely need to do it. Remee on the quality of care and connection she found on the Bali Grief Trip.
Grief Support After Suicide Loss: Can a Retreat Help?
Can a grief retreat help after a suicide loss? It can be one part of support, but this grief often carries stigma, unanswered questions, and complicated emotions that specialized postvention resources are built to address more directly than a general retreat.
Grief Retreats After Losing a Child
Can a grief retreat help after losing a child? It can be one part of support, though no retreat resolves a loss this size. What it can offer is a few days where that loss doesn't need to be minimized, alongside specialized child-loss support that belongs at the center of ongoing care.
When Is the Best Time of Year for a Grief Retreat?
When is the best time of year for a grief retreat? It depends on the destination's climate and on your own relationship to the calendar — some people time a trip around a hard anniversary, others deliberately choose distance from one, and both are valid.
Visiting the Maldives While Grieving: What to Expect
What arriving on a real, lived-in Maldivian island actually involves while grieving, from the speedboat transfer to Goidhoo's village life, and why a local island is a different experience from a resort.
Visiting Marrakech and the Agafay Desert While Grieving: What to Expect
A practical guide to what visiting Marrakech and the Agafay Desert while grieving actually involves: the medina's noise, the riad's quiet, the hammam, and the cold, silent desert nights that follow the heat.
Visiting Porto and the Douro Valley While Grieving: What to Expect
A practical look at what a week between Porto and the Douro Valley actually involves for someone grieving: the hills, the markets, the wine terraces, and how much or little you're expected to feel any of it.
What Happens After a Grief Retreat Ends? Integration and Aftercare
What happens after a grief retreat ends? Often a real comedown, as an intense week where grief was understood gives way to ordinary routine — which is exactly why aftercare and staying connected to the group matter as much as the week itself.
Is It Safe to Travel Alone to a Grief Retreat?
Is it safe to travel alone to a grief retreat? Yes for most people, largely because the trip isn't solo travel in the way that phrase implies — you're met, housed, and grouped from the start, with the usual sensible precautions still worth taking.
Can You Gift a Grief Retreat to Someone Who's Grieving?
Can you gift a grief retreat to someone who's grieving? Yes, carefully. The best approach is usually to offer information or funding rather than book it outright, so attending stays entirely their own choice, not an obligation to you.
Will I Be a Burden to the Group If I Cry a Lot?
Will you be a burden to the group if you cry a lot? No. A room of people who are also grieving tends to be unusually tolerant of tears, because everyone there already knows that crying isn't a demand on anyone else's emotional resources.
Can You Have Fun on a Grief Retreat?
Can you have fun on a grief retreat? Yes, and it's not a contradiction. Grief and joy tend to coexist rather than cancel each other out, and a room of people who understand loss makes it easier to let both happen without guilt.
Is Joining a Grief Retreat "Giving Up"?
Is joining a grief retreat "giving up"? No. Seeking structured support for grief is an active, deliberate choice, not surrender, and it's often the people already doing the hardest work of grieving who choose it.
Grief Yoga, Sharing Circles, and Other Grief Workshops Explained
What happens in a grief workshop? Usually gentle movement, an optional sharing circle, a letter-writing exercise, and a ritual moment, all designed so nobody ever has to perform emotion in front of strangers.
Grief Rituals Around the World: Fire Ceremonies, Hammams, and the Power of Ritual
Why do grief rituals help? Research shows that deliberately marking a loss restores a sense of control that grief takes away, which is likely why fire ceremonies, cleansing rites, and structured mourning periods appear across nearly every culture.
Grief Statistics: How Common Is Complicated Grief?
How common is complicated grief? Research suggests roughly one in ten bereaved adults develops prolonged grief disorder after a natural death, and nearly half do after a sudden or violent loss.
Why Rachel Started Grief Trips: The Founder's Story
Rachel started Grief Trips after losing her father in her twenties left her searching for grief support that didn't exist. This is the story of how that gap became a small-group, no-script travel model.
The Science of Grief and Travel: What Research Says
Does travel help grief? Research doesn't promise a cure, but studies on continuing bonds, oscillating coping, social support, and restorative environments point to why a small-group grief retreat can genuinely help.
Can You Bring a Friend or Family Member on a Grief Trip?
Most people come to a grief trip alone, and that's the norm, not a shortcoming. Bringing someone is possible too, but it changes the group dynamic in ways worth thinking through before you apply.
How to Choose the Right Grief Retreat for You
How do you choose the right grief retreat? Weigh group size, destination and pace, how much structure versus free time you want, whether the location holds personal meaning, and what's included in the cost, and trust that there's no single correct moment to go.
Grief Retreat vs. Grief Therapy: How They Work Together
A grief retreat isn't a substitute for therapy. Therapy offers ongoing, private, clinically trained support over time, while a retreat offers a short, intensive experience among people who understand loss. Done together, they tend to cover more ground than either does alone.
What Does a Day on a Grief Trip Actually Look Like?
What does a day on a grief retreat look like? A shared breakfast, an optional morning workshop or sharing circle, free time or an activity tied to the destination, a shared dinner, and on some evenings a ritual, though the exact shape shifts by trip and by group.
What to Pack for a Grief Retreat
Pack comfortable layers for workshops and outdoor time, practical travel basics, and anything for emotional comfort — a journal, a favorite book. Bringing something connected to the person who died is optional, not required.
How Much Does a Grief Retreat Cost? A Transparent Breakdown
Grief retreat prices vary by destination and length, but the number usually covers accommodation, workshops, meals, and support — flights and insurance sit outside it. Financial access options exist for people who need them.
Grief Retreats After a Sudden or Traumatic Loss
Can a grief retreat help after a sudden or traumatic loss? Often yes, though what it offers differs from grief after a long illness — there's no anticipatory grieving to draw on, only shock layered over loss, and a structure that asks nothing of you until you're ready.
Coping With Pet Loss Grief: Can a Grief Retreat Help?
Yes, a grief retreat can help with pet loss, because grief doesn't require a hierarchy of what counts. For many people a pet is genuine family, and the structure that helps with any loss, a small group and no need to justify it, works here too.
Grief Travel After Losing a Sibling
Sibling loss is often called the forgotten grief, because attention tends to go to parents while siblings are expected to hold things together. Travelling with people who center your grief, rather than asking you to manage everyone else's, can matter enormously.
Grief Retreats for Miscarriage and Baby Loss
Miscarriage and baby loss grief is real grief, not a lesser version of it, and it deserves real space. A small-group retreat with people who won't rush you past it can offer something most of daily life doesn't.
Grief Travel After Losing a Parent
Grief travel after losing a parent helps because this loss is so often minimized by others, regardless of the parent's age or how the death occurred, and a retreat gives it room to be taken seriously.
Grief Travel After Losing a Spouse or Partner
Grief travel after losing a spouse or partner can help by offering company that understands the loss of a shared future and an empty house without needing it explained, in a setting free of the daily reminders left behind at home.
What Is a Grief Retreat? The Complete Guide
A grief retreat is a small-group trip, usually four to seven days, built around shared meals, free time in a meaningful destination, and optional facilitated conversation with others who understand loss firsthand — no fixed script for how anyone grieves.
What If
When grief gives you nowhere to put your anger, sometimes you turn it around and point it at yourself. Rachel on the guilt of 'what if,' and the stranger in Corfu who helped her put it down.
Attending a Grief Trip With Your Sibling
When a family member dies, siblings are often expected to support one another. But grief rarely moves through siblings the same way, and that gap can quietly become its own source of pain. A grief trip creates space for a different kind of conversation.
Is It Okay to Travel After the Death of a Loved One?
Both joy and sadness can exist at the same time during travel after loss. This is not a contradiction, it is the reality of carrying grief while still being present in a life that continues.
Healing Travel After Loss: What It Actually Means
Healing travel after loss is not travel that leads to emotional resolution. It is travel that creates different conditions: distance from the routines of grief, proximity to people who understand, and space to exist in the loss rather than around it.
Why Grief Feels So Lonely Even When You’re Not Alone
Grief can be profoundly lonely even when you are surrounded by people who care. Not because they are absent, but because the internal shift loss creates rarely translates into words. Being with others who understand, without needing to explain, changes that.
How Do Grief Retreats Work?
How do grief retreats work? Most run several days in a small group, mixing shared meals, free time in a meaningful destination, and optional facilitated conversation, with no fixed script for how much anyone shares.
The Permission People Are Waiting For After Loss
After loss, many people wait for permission to re-engage with life, for a sign that they're ready. That permission rarely arrives from outside. It's practised, in small steps, while still carrying the grief.
When Is It Too Soon to Travel After a Loss?
There's no universal answer to when it's too soon to travel after a loss. A more useful question: do you have the capacity to be present on a grief trip, imperfectly? You don't need to be ready, just willing to try.
Life After Loss: What No One Tells You
Life after loss doesn't follow a clean arc, and there's no return to who you were before. What no one tells you: the goal isn't to stop feeling grief, it's to reach a point where you can carry it alongside everything else.
Can Bereaved Parents Join Grief Trips Together?
Yes, bereaved parents can join a grief trip together, and many do. It won't make you grieve identically, but it can create the space many couples are struggling to find at home: room to understand each other again.
Is Travelling While Grieving Helpful?
Is travelling while grieving helpful? For many people, yes, though not because it offers escape. What changes is the environment grief is carried in, and with the right company, the pressure to perform wellness disappears entirely.
Why Travel Feels Different After Loss
Travel after loss feels different because you have changed. Grief travels with you, it doesn't stay at home. But being somewhere new can change the texture of how that grief is experienced. Not escape. Something more honest than that.
What Actually Happens on a Grief Trip?
So what actually happens on a grief trip? Not scripted healing exercises, not group therapy: shared meals, quiet walks, optional conversation, and the relief of being somewhere grief doesn't need to be hidden or explained.
What Does Diversity Add to Grief Trips?
People often join a grief trip expecting connection with others who share their exact loss. What they find is something wider: perspective from grief that looks nothing like their own, and the quiet relief of no longer carrying it entirely alone.
Review: Lindsey on Bali Grief Trip
Best experience I've had since losing my dad. The Bali Grief Trip was truly so magical, a blessing shared with women who could hold space for each other.
Portuguese Tile Painting Workshop: Honoring Memories Through Art in Porto
On the first Grief Trip to Porto in 2024, Daniela at Boiler Studio taught us what it costs to keep a tradition alive. Then we painted tiles, dedicating a colour to each memory of our person. I ended up somewhere else entirely.
Review: Kayli on Bali Grief Trip
This week on the Bali Grief Trip gave us an opportunity to connect in a way I don't think we have anywhere else in our lives, and to share my sister's story with people who truly understood.
Review: Sonia on Bali Grief Trip
In this short video, Sonia shares her experience of grief and connection on the Bali Grief Trip after the loss of her sibling.
Review: Maria on Portugal Grief Trip
Going on the Portugal Grief Trip is one of the best things that I did for myself.
What Does It Mean for Grief to Transform: Lessons from the Balinese Fire Ceremony
During the Agni Hotra fire ceremony on our Bali Grief Trip, something shifted. Grief, like fire, does not disappear, it changes form. Moving forward was never about forgetting.
Grief Yoga and the Power of “I Wish I Told You”
During a grief yoga session on the Portugal Grief Trip, Rachel wrote the words she never got to say, and heard them read back in a room full of people who understood.
Review: Dr Julia Went on Bali Grief Trip
Whether you're in the early days of your grief journey or years into it, the Bali Grief Trip felt non-judgmental and safe from the start.
How a Spontaneous Day Trip in Mostar Turned Into a Profound Grief Connection
A spontaneous day trip in Mostar turned into an unplanned, profound grief connection between two strangers, both traveling solo, both grieving a father.
Grief Workshops: Letter Writing
Rachel shares a vulnerable look at the Letter Writing workshop from a Bali Grief Trip, one of the grief workshops where participants write to the person they've lost, or to their current selves.
Do you remember when you "felt alive again" for a moment after the loss?
Rachel remembers the first flicker of feeling alive again after her dad died: a cafe in Italy, a latte, and unexpected tears. If it hasn't happened for you yet, it will.
Bali Grief Trip: April 2025
These photos bring back all the memories from our April Bali Grief Trip: grief workshops, sharing circles, the fire ceremony, and a small group who felt like family by the end.
Bali Grief Trip: June 2025
Photo credits: @danielleandhercamera. A visual recap of our Bali Grief Trip: sharing circles, the letter writing workshop, and the fire ceremony none of us will forget.
A Gelato Store in Bali Taught Me That I'm Good Enough
A closed gelato shop in Ubud taught Rachel something she needed to hear before hosting a Bali Grief Trip: rest is not a failure, and you don't need to be perfect to hold space for others.
Discovering the kind of deep, authentic connection that makes you feel truly seen as a griever
What makes you feel truly seen after loss? Usually it is not advice, it is someone who understands without needing anything explained. Here is what that kind of connection tends to look like on a grief trip.
Review: Maddie on Australia Grief Trip
In this short video, Maddie talks about her experience on the Australia Grief Trip, and the quiet light she found while grieving alongside others who understood.
Portugal Grief Trip: August 2024
Core memories from our Portugal Grief Trip: Porto mornings, a Douro River cruise, tile painting, grief yoga, and a closing ceremony none of us wanted to end.
Review: Maya on Australia Grief Trip
In this short video, Maya shares what it was like to join the Australia Grief Trip and find a small group of people who understood her grief.
Review: Hebe on Joining Grief Trips Again
I've been on two grief trips, to Portugal and Bali. Rachel has turned her own deep loss into magical experiences where joy and grief can coexist.
The Art of Letting Go of Resistance: Grief Workshop in Porto
During a grief workshop in Porto, Rachel discovered that fighting her emotions was exhausting her more than the emotions themselves. Letting go of resistance, and picking up a paintbrush, changed everything.
Review: Remee on Bali Grief Trip
If you feel called to do this trip, you absolutely need to do it. Remee on why the Bali Grief Trip gave her the quality of care and connection she needed.
The Joy of Being Fully Yourself on a Grief Retreat
Rachel on the surprising joy of grief retreats: the relief of not performing okay-ness, and the freedom of being fully yourself among people who understand.
Why a Grief Trip Might Be the Most Powerful Thing You Do for Your Grief
A grief trip will not fix your grief, but it can do something everyday life rarely does: give you a small group retreat where you are met exactly as you are, dedicated space to feel, and unexpected laughter alongside the sorrow.
Boat Cruise on the Douro River: Where Grief Flows Naturally
There is something about moving slowly across water that lets grief surface without force. Here is why the Douro River cruise has become one of the most quietly powerful parts of the Portugal Grief Trip.
Review: Cassandra on Maldives Grief Trip
After my mom's unexpected death, my whole world split apart. The Maldives Grief Trip gave me a space to feel alive again, less alone, and truly seen.
Finding My Grief Soul Sisters on Grief Trips
On a Portugal Grief Trip, Rachel found seven soul sisters, women who understood her grief without needing an explanation. A small group, an ocean of shared loss, and a bond that changed her.