The Wild Edge of Sorrow: The Wild Edge of Sorrow Official Workbook Reflections, rituals, and meditations for grief and renewal

by Francis Weller

Grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by the experience of sorrow; as it adds substance and weight to our world.

Beyond the crazed hunger in our culture to be exceptional, loss and sorrow wear away whatever masks we attempt to present to the world.

It is the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love.

Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving.

While it is difficult to embrace grief and be moved by its muscular demands, without it we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breadth of love, the surprise of joy, we could not celebrate the sheer beauty of the world.

I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive.

Grief is subversive, undermining our society’s quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small.

What has become clear to me is the powerful role grief plays in enabling us to face what is taking place in our lives, our communities, our ecologies, families, and culture. Through our ability to acknowledge the layers of loss, we can truly discover our capacity to respond, to protect, and to restore what has been damaged.

There are few things as genuine as a person grieving. There are no questions to ask, no wondering what someone is feeling. It is self-evident. We are revealing the heartache we carry, the sorrows we have shouldered for decades. We are in the tumult of releasing our tears. This is a holy night, and we go on for hours.

This form of soul maintenance is hard work, but it is necessary to keep us available to life.

For the time being, we are released from the weight of grief, but we know full well that tomorrow, when we return to our daily lives, we will begin to gather more. That is the way of things.

When we gather on weekends to work with grief, we often begin by saying that we are entering into a sudden village.14 These rituals frequently bring together people from great distances, and yet slowly, over the time we share, the feeling of being in a village takes on a shape that is more than a longing; it becomes something tangible. These gatherings offer some of the constituent elements of a living community. The space is created for deep listening, respectful attention, and a container strong enough to receive our most painful and sorrowful revelations. In a very real way, we are able to generate a vessel capable of holding our joined hearts suffering. This space enables all of us to risk sharing the wild edge of sorrow.

In Bouncing Back, psychotherapist and neuroscience expert Linda Graham reveals how “bonding and belonging nourish resilience.” She relates how our sense of connection affects our ability to regulate our internal states during crisis and stress. She writes, “The process of being seen, understood, and accepted by an attuned, empathic other engenders a sense of genuine self-acceptance, a feeling that we are profoundly okay. We feel safe enough, strong enough, sure enough to venture courageously into the world and develop the competencies we need to deal with life’s challenges.”

belonging protects the heart from much of life’s unavoidable challenges.

The only thing that originally protected these people from heart disease was belonging. Now referred to as the “Roseto Effect,” we begin to understand the phrase brokenhearted more thoroughly. Linda Graham relates how the hormone oxytocin, often called the “love hormone,” is released when we are touched and held or when we engage with someone who cares. Genuine community heals body and soul.

Modern psychological theory utilizes the terms attunement and attachment. The language has become somewhat abstract and clinical, but what it means is that we require touch in body and soul to help us respond to difficult times with kindness and compassion and also to celebrate the sheer joy of being alive. We need these experiences to feel that we matter—quite literally—that we have matter and substance, that we take up space in the world. When we sense this, we feel that we are worthy of deep and lingering attention and that we can, in turn, offer our caring hearts to others in times of sorrow and pain. No matter who we are, we need the heartening touch of another. Even those of us who are introverted will, at times, require the devoted attention of a friend or a partner who can offer a sensitive ear to our tender woes.

It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul.

“Ash is the ultimate reduction, the bare soul, the last truth, all else dissolved.”

“Closure is important in all transitions, but after a death, there are rites of passage for the survivors as well as for the deceased. Completion of their ritual responsibilities . . . moves the living into a new phase of life. When survivors aren’t allowed sufficient time to grieve, however, the wounds close too soon, remain infected and never heal.” (Italics mine)

We require a sufficient season of mourning to tend to the dead and the living, thereby restoring our place in the daylight world. Without an adequate time in the ashes tending the loss, sorrow mutates into symptoms of depression, anxiety, dullness, and despair. We must honor the needs of the soul during times of grief.

“In one ancient language, the word memory derives from a word meaning mindful, in another from a word to describe a witness, in yet another it means, at root, to grieve. To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost.”19 That is the intent and purpose of grief.

Some grief is not meant to be resolved and set aside. Sometimes grief helps us hold what must be carried by a people so that they never have to endure such pain again.

Psychologists Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman explore the idea of non-redemptive mourning in their work with social injustice and violence. Non-redemptive mourning acknowledges that some losses should never be allowed to settle, like silt, to the bottom of our memory. Some losses, such as cultures that have been forever silenced, species that have disappeared, and traumatic events that affect whole communities and cultures, should be kept present in our communal memory. The experience of grieving in these situations is “not intended to finish with the past and return to ‘normal life,’ but rather to keep the past from slipping away in a present that continues to deny it.”

There is a direct relationship between mourning and memory. To counter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby.

Grief helps us acknowledge the losses and to hold these painful memories communally.

No one escapes suffering in this life. None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness, and death. How is it that we have so little understanding of these essential experiences? How is it that we have attempted to keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly acknowledge its presence at the most obvious of times, such as a funeral? “If sequestered pain made a sound,” Stephen Levine says, “the atmosphere would be humming all the time.”22 It is the accumulated losses of a lifetime that slowly weigh us down—the times of rejection, the moments of isolation when we felt cut off from the sustaining touch of comfort and love. It is an ache that resides in the heart, the faint echo calling us back to the times of loss.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in so doing, deepen our capacity for compassion.

When grief remains unexpressed, however, it hardens, becomes ...

When we are in touch with all of our emotions, on the other hand, we are more verb than noun, m...

As we begin to pay attention, we notice that grief is never far from our awareness. We become aware of the many ways it arrives in our daily lives. It is the blue mood that greets us upon waking. It is the melancholy that shades the day in muted tones. It is the recognition of time’s passing, the slow emptying of our days. It is the searing pain that erupts when someone close to us dies—a parent, a partner, a child, a beloved pet.

As poet and author Robert Bly wryly noted, “How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means ‘no ashes.’ ”

Without some measure of intimacy with grief, our capacity to be with any other emotion or experience in our life is greatly compromised.

the Five Gates of Grief. Each of these doorways leads to the communal hall of grief, and each helps us to understand the many ways that loss touches our hearts and souls in this life.

We are all familiar with the first gate of grief, which is the sorrow we experience with the loss of someone or something we love.

The other four gates receive virtually no attention in modern society. Consequently, the grief that accumulates at these thresholds remains untouched, and we feel the growing weight of unattend...

Far too many of us suffer from broken hearts that remain unattended. By understanding the grief that is held at these other gates, we may be able to compassionately meet it and, in the right settings, allow the full expression of grief to be felt and honored.

The First Gate: Everything We Love, We Will Lose

I have come to have a deep faith in grief, have come to see the way its moods call us back to soul. It is, in fact, one of the voices of the soul, asking us to face life’s most difficult but essential teaching: everything is a gift, and nothing lasts. This is a painful truth. To accept this fa...

For Those Who Have Died Eleh Ezkerah—These We Remember ‘Tis a fearful thing To love What death can touch. To love, to hope, to dream, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, Love, But a holy thing, To love what death can touch. For your life has lived in me; Your laugh once lifted me; Your word was a gift to me. To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, A holy thing, To love What death can touch. —JUDAH HALEVI OR EMANUEL OF ROME24

My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart.

is the bittersweet embrace of love and loss that sharpens our appreciation for those we love.

When we are in the grips of illness, a major focus in our mind is the hope of getting back to where we were before this sickness began. But we are not meant to go back.

are ushered into a darker night that sheds an astonishing light on our deeper and more genuine shape. The old stories, crafted in a mixture of childhood wounds and societal fictions, slowly yield to something more generous, elastic, and responsive to the life of the soul.

We begin to experience a more vivid complexity that takes us out of the either/or world of adolescence and into the alchemy of our adult selves. Here, in this more ripened place, we can see how much more we can hold, tasting both the sweet and the bitter, the beautiful and the painful, all in the same moment.

Everything we avoided for the sake of living in safety yields to a desire to encounter it all. We slowly recognize that no emotion is foreign to the soul, and every one of them can be welcomed as they arrive at the door. We ...

What she found at the bottom of her illness was a grief that, when she could fully express it, bound her to her life and the rest of the world.

As Susan Griffin noted, “At the center of / all my sorrows / I have felt a presence / that was not mine alone.”

The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love

These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community.

These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament—we chronically sense the presence of sorrow, but we are unable to truly grieve, because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief.