The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

by Francis Weller

Clearly I was not the only one who felt the pain of shame. It was felt by many, and I came to see how we live in a society that is drenched in shame.

Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul.

Gershon Kaufman, one of the most important writers on shame, has said that shame leaves us feeling “unspeakably and irreparably defective.”

It is unspeakable because we do not want anyone to know how we feel inside. We fear it is irreparable because we think it is not something we have done wrong—it is simply who we are.

We cannot remove the stain from our core. We search and search for the defect, hoping that that, once found, it can be exorcised like some grotesque demon. But it lingers, remaining there our entire lives, anxious that it will be seen an...

No one arrives on this earth encrusted with shame. Rather, shame settles in our bones over time, accumulating duri...

This is how it is with shame. We can endure a certain number of times when the connection is broken between us and the people we love and need. We can digest a certain volume of disappointments and criticism. But at some point, with enough repetition, the internal stories associated with those events reach their saturation point, and the fictions crystallize into things that feel like truths.

Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults. We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional.

We become convinced, on some basic level, that these pieces of who we are, are not good enough—that they are, in fact, shameful—and we banish them to the farther shore of our awareness in hopes of never hearing from them again. They become our outcast brothers and sisters. I remember going to therapy with the expressed interest in having my therapist help me rid myself of these unwanted pieces.

In order to loosen shame’s grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing.

Much of our grief comes from having to crouch and live hidden from the gaze of others, and in that posture we confirm our exile. I hear these outcast brothers and sisters every day in my practice. Their numbers are many, and their grief encompasses every aspect of human life.

For many, it is their needs that were ignored. These outcast portions of soul do not quietly languish at the edges of our awareness; they appear as addictions, depression, or anxiety, calling for our attention.

Many of us suffer from what I call premature death, in that we have turned away from whole portions of our life. We have adapted to a pattern of ambivalence, neither in nor out of life, but living in a state of suspended animation. This stance generates a strategy of caution and avoidance. I have worked with hundreds of men and women who have artfully dodged the call to engage in living with passion and conviction.

All of this, however, could not become possible until they stepped fully into their lives, into the river of their full existence, welcoming all those pieces of soul that had been banished through self-betrayal or the fear of rejection from others.

It is important to look into the shadows of our lives and to see who lives there, tattered, withered, hungry, and alone. Bringing these parts of soul back to the table is a central element of our work. Ending their exile means releasing the contempt we hold for these parts of who we are. It means welcoming the full range of our being and restoring our wholeness. Until then, we will continue to carry a feeling of worthlessness and brokenness.

the grief we experience at this gate is a form of soul loss, a condition that occurs when the desire for life—the feeling of being alive—becomes so blunted that death b...

For many of us, the diminishment in our soul life began in childhood. We experienced what is now referred to as developmental trauma, what I call slow trauma. This trauma occurs from an experience of absence rather than from something dramatic that happened to us.

He says that trauma is inherent in being human, but “when painful emotions and unpleasant feelings are not picked up and handled by the parents, the infant, or child, is left with overwhelming feelings he or she is not equipped to deal with, feelings that often get turned into self-hate.”

It lingers in our soul as a primitive agony, an idea that Epstein draws from the work of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Primitive agony remains in our psyches as a gravitational field, pulling us downward toward anxiety and dread.

Turning toward the suffering and into the marrow of our grief with the attention and attunement of a caring adult helps to dilute and transmute the trauma and shame into the kind of sensitivity that can inform our compassion for others.

finding a target to blame is effortless. Nothing is asked of us when we simply assign fault to someone else for the suffering we are experiencing. Psychology has colluded in the blame game, pointing an accusing finger at our parents. While many of us suffered mightily because of unconscious parenting, we must remember that our parents were participants in a society that failed to offer them what they needed in order to become solid individuals and good parents. They needed a village around them—and so did we.

To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly and disguised.

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks, how the discarded is woven into shelter, learn the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that inward symmetry to all outward appearances, apprentice yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back all you sent away, be a new annunciation, make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.35

He then offers a surprising revelation: every part of us longs to reveal its voice to the world. We must welcome back all we have sent away and, in so doing, become a new annunciation.

Regrets are another part of the second gate, those choices we made that hindered or harmed others or ourselves: the unlived life of abandoned dreams, friendships that withered and died, or the decision to withdraw our hearts from the world and neither receive nor offer love.

Instead, what is asked of us in the quiet terrain of our inner conversation is to hold these regrets with gentleness, acknowledging who we were at the time we made those choices. What part of us might have come to the foreground of our life in that particular moment? Kindness and mercy are soothing medicines in the room of regret.

Forgiveness cannot be willed. We can, however, create the conditions within which the grace of forgiveness can arise. When our regrets are polished by self-compassion, they soften and release the life trapped inside.

Some participants find the phrase “It is not all right with me . . .” to be liberating; others, “I will not shut up . . .” or “I will not live small.” Sometimes the simple “Enough!” does the work. Each of these offerings encourages the long-held grief around these rejected parts to rise and put an end to their exile.

It is important to remember that grief does not appear solely through tears; it is also expressed through our anger and outrage.

Grieving, by its very nature, confirms worth. I am worth crying over; my losses matter.

THE HEALING TIME Finally on my way to yes I bump into all the places where I said no to my life all the untended wounds the red and purple scars those hieroglyphs of pain carved into my skin and bones, those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again where I find them, the old wounds the old misdirections and I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say holy holy.36

The Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World

The third gate of grief opens when we register the losses of the world around us.

They feel what psychologist Chellis Glendinning calls Earthgrief. She writes, “To open our hearts to the sad history of humanity and the devastated state of the Earth is the next step in our reclamation of our bodies, the body of our human community, and the body of the Earth.”37

As Jung noted, we live in psyche; psyche does not live in us.

We are enveloped in a field of consciousness; everything possesses soul. This was known to every indigenous culture. What we feel from the surrounding world is not a projection of our own minds outward into the environment.

What if, however, the feelings we have when we pass through these zones of destruction are actually arising from the land itself? What if it is the grief of the forest registering in our bodies and psyches—the sorrow of the redwoods, voles, sorrel, ferns, owls, and deer, all those who lost their homes and lives as a result of this plunder of living beings? What if we are not separate from the world at all? It is our spiritual responsibility to acknowledge these losses.

We know and feel in our bones that something primal is amiss. Our extended home is being eroded, as is the experience of our wider self. It is essential that we stop and recognize these losses. It is good manners to respond with sorrow, outrage, and apology at these places touched by so much loss.

The cumulative grief of the world is overwhelming. The litany of losses could fill this book. Our ways of living have become corrosive to the earth, to prairie dogs and grizzly bears, to bluefin tuna and monarch butterflies and cultures. Every day, we see the dead lying by the side of the road—deer, raccoons, skunks, opossums, and foxes.

How can we possibly stay open to the endless assaults on the biosphere when the urge to avert our eyes and pretend that we don’t feel this pain takes over? It takes a heart of courage and conviction, one willing to look into the center of the suffering and remain present.

I have listened to many young men and women share their stories of grief and outrage over the destruction of the world. One young man came to a ritual after spending months on the road, fighting for ecological and economic justice as part of the Occupy movement. He wept the most heart wrenching tears as he expressed his pain for the suffering world. His heart, however, was willing to stay open and register all that is happening in our communities and culture.

Walking through the doors of grief brings us into the room of the great grief of the world. Naomi Shihab Nye says it so beautifully in her poem “Kindness.” Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.39

Human biologist Paul Shepard said, “The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.”41

What happens to our soul life in the absence of the others? Shepard says that what emerges is a grief-laden emptiness. How true. And he was wise to recognize our tendency to attribute the emptiness to a “failure in our personality.”

What was once a seamless embrace has now become a breach, a tear in our sense of belonging. Glendinning calls this our original trauma. This trauma carries with it all the recognizable symptoms associated with psychic injury: chronic anxiety, dissociation, distrust, hypervigilance, disconnection, and many others. We are left with a profound loneliness and isolation that we rarely acknowledge.

Our soul life flickers dimly, and rather than feeling a kinship with the entire, breathing world, we inhabit and defend a small shell of a world, occupying our daily life with what linguist David Hinton calls the “relentless industry of self.”43

This beautiful and strange otherness was also meant to be seen in one another’s eyes. We, too, are meant to embody a vivid and animated life, to live close to our wild souls, our wild bodies and minds. We were meant to dance and sing, play and laugh unselfconsciously, tell stories, make love, and take delight in this brief but privileged adventure of incarnation. The wild within and the wild without are kin, the one enlivening the other in a beautiful tango.

The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive

There is another gate to grief, one difficult to identify, yet it is very present in each of our lives. This threshold into sorrow calls forward the things that we may not even realize we have lost. I have written elsewhere about the expectations coded into our physical and psychic lives. When we are born, and as we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection. In short, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred. As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land “Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth.”

The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadn...