You're Going to Die Presents:
JEWISH GRIEF IN COMMUNITY
facilitated by Noa Yammer & Miriam Bolender

Many Jewish people are grieving right now.

Grief for the lives lost. 

Grief for the violence committed in our name. 

Grief for our ruptured communities and relationships.

Grief for silence, shame, and all that’s been too tender to name.

This 5-week online group is a space for Jewish-identifying folks to gather and grieve—

through words, stillness, sound, and voice.

To tend to our hearts and our humanness.

To be witnessed.

To speak what’s been unspoken.

To feel what’s been pushed down.

& to find new ground together. 

WHEN: Tuesdays, August 16th - Sept 9th, Plus Monday September 15th

 from 5:30-7:00PM PACIFIC TIME
LOCATION: ZOOM
PRICE: Sliding Scale $350-650 (Scholarships available!)

We offer the workshop on a sliding scale, but ask about further financial support if you need it to attend!

FOR MORE DETAILS and TO REGISTER E-MAIL: connect@yg2d.com

In order to preserve the uniquely intimate & personalized nature of this offering, space for this event will be limited, & registration is required to attend. We have space for up to 15 Jewish-identifying participants.

This series is a space for Jewish grief. It is not a space for debate or dogma, but for presence, feeling, and witnessing. 

We come together as Jews, across lines of belief and experience, to be with the grief in our bodies: grief for what’s happening now, for what has been, and for what’s being lost—individually and collectively.

This is not a course in ideology or politics. It’s a space to be with the grief that so many of us are carrying as Jewish people right now.

Your facilitators are available to discuss this offering in more depth so that you can get a better understanding of what to expect from this offering.

About your facilitators: 

Noa Yammer (she/her) is a facilitator, musician, and solidarity activist who holds spaces for deep listening, truth-telling, and collective healing. Originally from a Modern Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey, she spent two decades in Jerusalem, working at the intersections of justice activism, storytelling, and Jewish-Palestinian solidarity. 

A Harvard-trained educator and leadership coach, Noa specializes in using storytelling and nonviolent communication as a tool for connection, transformation, and social change. Whether working with individuals, teams, or communities, Noa fosters environments where silenced voices can speak, and where grief, complexity, and humanity are held with care.

Her personal journey—from silence to voice—shapes her belief that grief can be both a portal and a practice: one that softens us toward one another and reconnects us with what matters most. This softening not only nurtures our connection to ourselves and our truths, but also opens pathways for us to take courageous steps towards collective liberation and justice.

Miriam Bolender (she/her) is a musician, vocal liberation guide, and grief-holder who facilitates transformative spaces. For the better part of the last decade, she’s been an integral part of You’re Going To Die—directing and participating in the Songs For Life hospice music program, offering her presence and music in Alive Inside, YG2D’s prison program, and performing at live events.

A third-generation Holocaust survivor, Miriam carries the complex imprints of that lineage. She’s committed to cultivating and maintaining an ever-expanding lens—one where the nuance and complexity of life are honored in all their dynamic, layered, and often contradictory truths. This inner work continues to shape her devotion to creating spaces where grief, rage, fear, and confusion can be held, explored, and metabolized with courage and care.

Miriam’s own journey—from someone who spent most of her life afraid to sing, to a performer who has sung for thousands—gives her a deep understanding of what it means to reclaim the voice. As a seasoned mentor, she blends somatic practice, foundational technique, and playful exploration to support people in untethering their voices from shame and limitation. Her work—whether at a hospice bedside, inside a prison, or in a circle of people reclaiming their voices—is rooted in the prayer that feeling our hearts, remembering our interconnection, and tending to our shared humanity are essential parts of building a more loving, just, and peaceful world.

TO REGISTER, you can make your payment via Paypal and we will email you to confirm.

Feel free to email us for more details, to pay by a different method [venmo or zelle] or if you have any questions: connect@yg2d.com

Brought to you by www.YG2D.com

You're Going to Die Presents:
Writing about Grief with Literary Craft

Focusing on turning tragedy into beauty

A Five-Week Writing Workshop

With Nick Jaina and Chelsea Coleman

Mondays August 18th through Sept 22nd

(with a break for Labor Day)

7:00 - 8:45 pm PT on Zoom

PRICE: Sliding Scale $250-$400 (scholarships available)

FOR MORE DETAILS and TO REGISTER HERE!

Join us as we write about grief with an eye towards the experience of the reader. You’re Going to Die has for years led supportive workshops with a unique space for people to express grief in writing. 

There are two main goals in writing: to express yourself and to tell a compelling story. Those aren’t mutually exclusive things. There is a way that both of those qualities can be at their highest at the same time.

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YG2D member and Oregon Book Award finalist Nick Jaina has published three books. For almost a decade he has taught memoir writing workshops online and in person, exploring dozens of different tools and techniques to open up and create the best story possible from our own lives. He is excited to bring those ideas to the emotionally supportive environment of the YG2D workshop.

Chelsea Coleman is an SF Bay Area singer-songwriter and the Creative Director & Cofounder of YG2D, where she has been helping create and hold space for others to creatively express themselves through the touchpoint of our shared impermanence since 2012. As a singer-songwriter and storyteller she leads by example, by alchemizing her experiences of loss and complex grief into lyrics and melodies that resonate with others and meet them in their vulnerability with a sense of belonging and inspiration. 

FOR MORE DETAILS and TO REGISTER HERE!

Brought to you by www.YG2D.com

You're Going to Die Presents:
Grieving in Community Writing w/Music Workshop - FAMILY ESTRANGEMENT EDITION
facilitated by Ned Buskirk
w/music from Chelsea Coleman

This 5-session communal workshop is for community who want to make room for, & meaning out of, family estrangement grief & loss, offering a chance to creatively express ourselves & engage with our own [& collective] grief through writing, with music peppered throughout our sessions to inspire & hold us. It's a chance to connect to community, remember we’re not alone, and tap into our innate wisdom to creatively face our unique experiences of being mortal.

WHEN: Wednesdays, November 20th-December 18th
from 7-8:45p PACIFIC TIME
LOCATION: ZOOM
PRICE: Sliding Scale $100-275

We offer the workshop on a sliding scale, but ask about further financial support if you need it to attend! ***Full scholarships available for our BIPOC community***

FOR MORE DETAILS E-MAIL: connect@yg2d.com

In order to preserve the uniquely intimate & personalized nature of this offering, space for this event will be limited, & registration is required to attend.

Brought to you by www.YG2D.com

Join us for an online writing workshop with Becoming Monster - A Convening at the End of the Human…

As a part of ten’s (The Emergence Network) Becoming Monster Festival [FIND OUT MORE HERE], YG2D is offering Writing w/Monsters - an Online YG2D Writing Workshop [DETAILS HERE] with music throughout to inspire / soften / open / hold, with prompts focusing on creatively exploring our monsters of mortality [death, decay, grief and loss]. Participants might also explore the “monsters” of self and society – our own death and decay, so often in modern times considered to be “monstrously wrong,” as things that “shouldn’t happen,” or the monsters that desperately need confronting and reckoning, perhaps in the context of social justice or selfcare – cancer, pathogens, violence, war, chronic illness, mental illness, racism, etc. There is always room in You’re Going to Die spaces, and so then too with our Becoming Monster offering, for each community member to creatively explore what’s needed individually, resulting in a singularly unique communal conversation we all share – an experience never again replicated, simply ours and ours alone. Registration required. Maximum 20 participants.

FACILITATED BY: YG2D | Ned Buskirk & Chelsea Coleman
SESSION DATE: Wednesday, October 30th
SESSION TIME: 14:00 - 16:00 PDT | 21:00 - 23:00 UTC
LOCATION: Online everywhere

Becoming Monster is a five-day festival with virtual, hybrid and in-person components hosted by ten (The Emergence Network) and a strange ecology of friends and partners (non-human and human alike) from around the planet. This event is a space held for grieving the losses that come with living into the end-times AND playing with ideas of fabulation, imagination and questioning: what else might the human be in our crumbling, entangled, pulsating, animist world(s). It will take place October 30th – November 3rd, 2024 in a season associated with a porosity between realms, celebrations of reunion between the living and the dead, congress with the underworld and the ancestors. There will be a schedule of online offerings, as well as self-organized in-person gatherings and events in different places around the world. Some of these in situ events will welcome in virtual participation as well. Please check back to learn more about the sessions, celebrations and artistic offerings and the contributors that will bring Becoming Monster to life. This will be a highly participatory experience shaped and in-bodied by those who make offerings during our time together. Modes of inquiry and praxis may include making art together, engaging in ritual and ceremony, and opening space for heart / body / instinct-centered practices.

REGISTER for Becoming Monster Festival HERE: https://s5dvraeeilr.typeform.com/to/jsLOQyy9?typeform-source=becoming-monster.emergencenetwork.org

You're Going to Die Presents:
Grief & Healing
w/Writing & Music
a YG2D Workshop

REGISTER NOW: https://bit.ly/47u3kdp

This 3 hour in-person communal workshop offers a chance to creatively express ourselves and engage with our own and our collective grief & healing through writing and music. It’s a chance to connect to community, remember we are not alone, and tap into our innate wisdom to creatively face our unique experiences of being mortal.

In this workshop, we’ll write in response to several prompts, in intimate community, co-creating a space of deep sharing and listening. There will be readings and rituals offered, with time to write quietly together and to share if you want to, including live music to inspire our writing, for grounding, deepening, integration, and to hold us like musical medicine when we need it. The workshop will close with a sound bath from Emma Peck (https://www.soundandsoulsf.com/) to support integration through the healing vibrations of crystal alchemy bowls and vocals.

Our goal is to facilitate a safe space for vulnerable creative communal engagement with our grief, with those who are willing to face what's hard and hold it together.

WHEN: Thursday, November 30th from 7-10pm PST
LOCATION: The Center SF’s Red Room - 548 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, CA 94117
PRICE: Sliding Scale $40-120

We offer the workshop on a sliding scale, but ask about further financial support if you need it to attend!
***Full scholarships available for our BIPOC community***

In order to preserve the uniquely intimate & personalized nature of this offering, space for this event will be limited, & registration is required to attend.

REGISTER NOW: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/youre-going-to-die-presents-grief-healing-wwriting-music-workshop-tickets-747800480367?aff=oddtdtcreator

EVENT ON FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/events/709499234052931

FOR MORE DETAILS EMAIL: connect@yg2d.com

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COVID SAFETY INFORMATION (YG2D POLICIES)

As an organization that congregates around our shared mortality, it is important for us to acknowledge the real threat of Covid-19, especially for folks who are immune-compromised. For our shared safety, we are offering the following risk-mitigation measures and venue information to create a safer, more inclusive gathering space:

• Capacity of the Red Room is 40 seated, but we will have a workshop capacity of 17 to allow for spaciousness and distancing as needed.

• The space will have air filters and there will be windows to open to maximize air flow.

• We request that each participant take a rapid antigen test on the same day of the workshop. We can provide a test for you if needed. Here is an updated guide for self-administering a rapid-test for the most accurate results: https://www.ontariohealth.ca/sites/ontariohealth/files/2022-02/COVID-19RapidAntigenTests-HowtoCollectaSample.pdf

• We request that participants be as up to date as possible with available COVID vaccines and boosters.

• We ask that if you feel any illness symptoms to please stay home. We are happy to provide a refund as needed.

• We encourage masks while in the space. Please be aware that The Center has multiple shared spaces with varying degrees of risk and that people/participants may not be wearing masks.

We understand that no in-person gathering is without risk and we are grateful for your help in keeping our community alive and safe.