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

by Francis Weller

At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families.

“the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter.”45 We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings.

Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, “what was once man’s confident expectation for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, ‘I am all right,’ there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”

Imagine how profoundly that would impact us, if we knew that we were welcome in any home and could find sustenance at any fire.

These two things are extensions of one another: worth and welcome. There wasn’t any anxiety of whether someone was good enough to be let inside the circle; this was a given. And don’t hear this as some altruistic practice. The generation of healthy and contented people was a necessity for the sustainability of the village; everyone was needed; therefore, their well-being was essential.

A healthy village requires healthy individuals. And to become a healthy individual, you need a healthy village. They are mirrors of one another, the one supporting the other.

Without a village to reflect back to us that we are valued, these ruptures are interpreted in silence, in a vacuum, and the conclusion we often come to is “I must have deserved this treatment” or “I was somehow responsible for this.” I hear versions of this story often in my practice.

Another facet of loss at this gate concerns the expectation of purpose in our lives. Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need. To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity. In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment—simply being who we are confirms our place in the village. That is one of the fundamental understandings about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully. Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge.

In our modern culture of hyperactivity and stress, we are seldom asked what we have carried into the world as a gift for the community. The frequent question is: “What do you do for a living?” Or worse: “How you do earn a living?” I find that question obscene. We have gone from being seen as valuable to the community, a carrier of gifts, to having to earn a living. No one asks, “Wha...

Hidden within the losses at this gate lies our diminished experience of who we truly are. Our experience of identity has been radically reduced over the centuries, especially in Western technological cultures. What was once a seamless intermingling of body, family, community, clan, ecology, and cosmos has been reduced to a narrow realm where we live as an isolated cell occasionally colliding with other isolated cells.

Whenever I talk about this loss with groups of people, there is a feeling of surprise and then sadness. They quickly realize that their experience of who they are has been compromised. What was meant to be a far-ranging identity riddled with intimacies with wild iris, stellar clusters, earthworms, and humans has been whittled down to the narrowest hub. We exist in a state of isolation, cut off from an encompassing community of others. We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves. We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world with uniformity and mediocrity. This reduction in vitality and vividness induces a smoldering rage. Domestication mutes the poetry and music of the world, crushing the articulated and nuanced rhythms that accompany all living things, what poet Federico García Lorca called the canto hondo, the deep song of the world. And we are emptied.

The unconscious disappointment that lingers from the failure to receive these necessary elements in our life slowly evolves into a sense of emptiness. Nearly every day in my practice, someone speaks to this feeling of hollowness.

how good to name it, to bring it into the room and sit with it. How important it is to keep it in front of us, instead of having it trail behind us, out of sight, pulling us away from others and from life.

when I plunged into this place of emptiness, it was like a wall that had been blocking my view was shattered, and I could finally see how I was limiting my life in hopes of avoiding the emptiness.

I have never been so fragile, so out of control, so inundated by wave after wave of grief as I was when I finally faced the emptiness within, but I am grateful that I did so.

is as though the ocean floor of my psyche shifted, and an air pocket rose to the surface of my life. This pocket held precious pieces of my life from times when I could not process the grief, loss, betrayal, and disappointment that was moving through my world. These times had been too much for me emotionally, and so they broke free from consciousness, going subterranean, waiting till the time when I could face them once again.

Facing our emptiness is key to our freedom. Until we do, we are driven by lifelong patterns of avoidance. It is important to remember that this emptiness is not a reflection of personal failing, but a symptom of a wider loss.

To be empty, to feel empty, is to live in the wasteland near the gates of death. This is intolerable to the soul. We were not meant to live such shallow lives. Our heritage and our psychic makeup are designed for an elaborate richness of imagination and creativity that allows us to feel intimately connected to the ongoing creation. We were meant to drop below the surface of things and to experience the depths of life in the same ways that our deep-time ancestors did. Their lives were filled with story, ritual, and circles of sharing. Their lives were not shamefully hidden away but known—losses, defeats, grief, pains, joys, births, deaths, dreams, sorrows; the communal draw of life was open and acknowledged. This is what the soul expected, what it is we need today.

The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief

The fifth gate of grief is what I call “ancestral grief.” This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors.

We hold this ancestral grief in our beings, even after many generations in the new land. This sorrow becomes concentrated over time, gathering grief unto itself, and is carried in our psyches unconsciously as a diminished inheritance. The psychic inheritance from our ancestors was meant to be a blessing, but instead it is a layer of heaviness. The stoic façade and behaviors of these generations left behind a legacy of unattended pain. Mayan shaman Martín Prechtel says that we are surrounded by the ghosts of unwept ancestors.

Ancestral grief also speaks to the grief that remains in our collective soul for the abuses of millions of individuals. It carries the weight of our genocide of the indigenous cultures that were encountered when European settlers arrived in the New World. It speaks to the shameful legacy of slavery and to the killing fields of the Civil War. This grief carries the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It carries the suffering of many cultures across the planet whose paths collided with the march of progress. All this weighs on our psyches. This grief is so immense it is hard to reconcile. We have much work to do here as a culture, and it may take many grief rituals and rituals of reconciliation with the Native Americans of this land, with the descendants of the Africans who were enslaved, and at places of death and destruction to begin to heal this lingering sorrow. The long shadow of this violence persists in our psyches, and we need to address it and work with it until there is some genuine atonement for these wrongs. This is clearly part of the “sequestered pain” that Stephen Levine spoke of that generates the persistent hum of sorrow in the background of our lives.

One other facet of ancestral grief revolves around the loss of the ancestors. We no longer look to our ancestors as a source of connection with the invisible powers in the world. In a very real way, we have lost our connection to the land, language, imagination, rituals, songs, and stories of our ancestors and, because of this, we feel homeless.

There are other pathways of grief, other thresholds that could warrant their own gate. Trauma, as we have seen, is one territory that may need its own gate. When we are exposed to violence, whether in wartime, natural disasters, or the violations of our integrity in body and soul through rape, molestation, or assault, some part of us splits off in order to survive. While this move is necessary in order for us to keep on living, it also carries a loss of our essential wholeness.

Ultimately, these gates all lead to the same chamber, the communal hall of sorrows. It makes no difference which door we open, which threshold we cross.

All too often we deny our grief because it is not as severe as someone else’s. How can we possibly compare our sorrows to those who are suffering the horrors of war or the devastation brought about by tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, or intolerable poverty? It is easy to dismiss our grief when we compare it to circumstances we consider to be much worse than our own. But the grief is ours, and we must treat it as worthy of attention.

In fact, it is essential for us to welcome our grief, whatever form it takes. When we do, we open ourselves to our shared experiences in life. Grief is our common bond. Opening to our sorrow connects us with everyone, everywhere. There is no gesture of kindness that is wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless. We can be generous to every sorrow we see. It is sacred work.

Those who risk contacting the Num don’t do so on their own behalf, but for the sake of the community as a whole. Everyone is touched and soothed, held and comforted. It is an intimate and soulful time. In the morning, after the ritual is complete, everyone feels happy, and the village is renewed. Their regular visit to the healing ground keeps them healthy in body, soul, and community.

The Navajo have a similar process. To the Navajo, healing is seen in the context of their particular vision of the world and cosmos; it is a ritual of restoring balance, a return to beauty, or hozho. Beauty is the central organizing principle in their culture—not economics, technology, or politics. It is through beauty that all relations are maintained, and it is when beauty is lost or forgotten that someone gets ill.

Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another.

Ritual offers us the two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release. Containment offers the holding space for the ones in grief. It provides the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of both the known and unknown layers of sorrow.

This holding allows those deep in the throes of anguish to surrender completely to the requirements of grief. Nothing is held back; everything is thrown into the other world for the sake of the one who died.

In the absence of this depth of community, the safe container is difficult to find. By default, we become the container ourselves, and when this happens, we cannot drop into the well of grief in which we can fully let go of the sorrows we carry.

Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.

When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.52

Grief keeps the heart flexible, fluid, and open to others. As such, it becomes a potent support for any other form of activism we may intend to take.

Our activism is directly connected to our heart’s ability to respond to the world. A congested heart, one burdened with unexpressed sorrow, cannot stay open to the world and, consequently, cannot be fully available for the healing work so needed at this time.

In the end we will either participate in ritual deliberately, which binds us to soul, community, nature, and the sacred, or we will be reduced to repetitive patterns of addiction, compulsion, or routines lacking the artistry and renewal of genuine ritual.

ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation.

Ritual is the pitch through which the personal and collective voices of our longing and creativity are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond our conscious minds and into the realms of nature and spirit.

Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigen...

Z. Budapest says, “The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, the different eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. Those parts do not speak English. They do not care about television. But they do understand candlelight and colors. They do understand nature.”53 Ritual is the original art form, weaving

It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land.

There are many concerns that are addressed through ritual; these are universal themes: healing, gratitude, initiation, visionary or divinatory processes, grief, maintenance, renewing the earth, reconciliation, and peacemaking.

Most notably, it offers the necessary structure to hold the wild and eruptive moods of sorrow. It helps us shift the weight of the pain and emotions we are carrying, allowing us to set down portions of the burden. Ritual also evokes a feeling of reverence, a sense of the sacred. Not every loss requires a ritual, though every grief we carry is worthy of the sustained attention that is offered by ritual.

The first function of ritual is to enable us to become transparent to the transcendent, to use Joseph Campbell’s phrase.

Secondly, there is a reparative function to ritual.

We live in a culture that has forgotten the basic needs of the soul.

Ritual helps us remember and reestablish our inner rhythms and to place them once again in accord with the deeper cadence of our soul. It restores our psychic foundations.

Living as we do in the belly of a soul-eating culture, it is imperative that we have measures that can help us come back to soul, especially in times of crisis.