On grieving

There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.

It is in the inferior parts of our life that we will find redemption.

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

Over the last eight months I’ve grieved so much that at several points I thought, “time to write an essay on grief, I get it” and then another sorrow would transpire, and I’d think “wow, I really didn’t get it before”, and my relationship to grief would deepen. Well enough time has passed that I think I finally have enough perspective to write this. My goal is to describe my experience and what I’ve gained in my losses, to provide some benefit for people at an earlier stage of grief.

Why grieve?

My assumption is if you’re reading this, you may have something to grieve. Below I listed all the different things I’ve grieved; maybe you are grieving one of these too. But more broadly I think that stuck grief is a huge source of psychological distress and it manifests as a variety of symptoms. A loss of vitality, depression, a sense of nihilism or meaninglessness, anger and/or blame directed inward or outward, a feeling of stuckness, rumination, guilt, and emotional deadness can all result from unfelt grief. If you are experiencing these issues, unprocessed grief might be a reason why.

Given that you have some grief to feel, you should allow yourself to feel it. Sometimes people argue against “wallowing” in grief, but I think wallowing is just a special case of trying to make more of a feeling, a kind of grasping or attachment. I’m not suggesting trying to create grief; I’m instead advocating that you should fully feel the grief that is already present.

The above quotes from Francis Weller’s indispensable book on grief speaks to why it’s so important. So does this moving and funny talk by Martin Prechtel (you should listen to it). I’ve also alluded to this idea in the past, that grief and love are mirrors of one another. The bigger the love, the bigger the grief. As Weller puts it:

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.

What I’ve been grieving

When we were able to see times of loss as inevitable and, in a very real way, necessary, we are able to engage these moments and cultivate the art of living well, of metabolizing suffering into something beautiful and ultimately sacred. It may be strange to imagine grief leading to beauty, but imagine, for a moment, the shining face of someone who has just released his or her cup of tears standing before us naked and cleansed. We are seeing someone as beautiful as Botticelli’s Venus or Michelangelo’s David.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (pp. 21-22).

Each of these acts of grieving have provided numerous gifts in return:

• The pain I’ve caused others

This yielded self compassion, and ultimately the ability to rest in the full knowledge of my mistakes, to be accountable and make amends, and to understand what I need to do better going forward.

• The pain others have caused me

This turned into forgiveness, love and compassion for them. It also turned into an understanding of healthy boundaries that I need to maintain in relationships going forward.

• The pain I’ve caused myself

This became self compassion as well as self acceptance, and an appreciation for how my “good parts” and my “bad parts” are the aspects of the same qualities. It helped me see that this pain couldn’t have been otherwise and was a gateway into insight into my own conditioning.

• The loss of loved ones, relationships

The deep experience of loss turned into a wave of gratitude and love for those that I’ve lost. Also there’s a feeling of softness, a raw open feeling, a sense of profound peace and equanimity and joy.

• The loss of who I thought I was

This both stemmed from and led to seeing the emptiness of self and the way that my behaviors and thoughts were not arising from a stable self but rather from causes and conditions (i.e. “dependent origination”). I felt a deeper attunement (not quite identification with) to the empty awareness space from which everything arises an everyting dissolves into. You know, that loving fecund voidness no-thing?

• The loss of imagined futures

A sense of the sacredness of the present moment shines through as the grief around this loss arises and passes.

How I’ve grieved

Crying a lot, obviously. But there’s more:

1. Grief is a practice.

2. Grief should be witnessed by someone attuned to us

3. Grief needs a temporal, communal and ritual container

Weller describes the practice of grief eloquently:

Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time. Any form will do—writing, drawing, meditation, prayer, dance, or something else—as long as we continue to show up and maintain our effort. A practice offers ballast, something to help us hold steady in difficult times. This deepens our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them. Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 5).

It can also help to engage in these practices with someone attuned to us, of possible:

Attunement is a particular quality of attention, wedded with affection, offered by someone we love and trust. This deep attention is what enables us to make painful experiences tolerable. We feel held and comforted, reassured and safe. The failure to provide a safe and nurturing space in times of loss and grief can precipitate the formation of a complex.

Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 6).

One thing that we Jews do well is grieve in community. In Jewish tradition grief has a cadence, a structure, and it recognizes the temporal flow of the process. When someone dies, you have a period of intense mourning for the week after the funeral (called sitting shiva). Then you say a mourning prayer (the Kaddish) every day for a year. And finally, after a year you have a yearly remembrance and say the Kaddish prayer on the anniversary of the person’s death. This recognizes that there’s an immediate acute phase to grief when it occupies the entirety of one’s focus. Then it becomes a daily practice, and then finally yearly. This tends to line up with how the grieving process generally unfolds. Moreover, the grieving process isn’t private — it takes place in a collective container.

Another source of grief in our lives is when that collective container is missing:

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.” This is our inheritance, our birthright, which has been lost and abandoned. 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 sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 54).

I’ve been lucky enough to have the support and love of dear friends, and a great therapist to create some kind of communal container for my sorrow. I’ve been able to have my grief witnessed. That isn’t to say that there hasn’t been lots of private grieving as well; there has. But part of the process for me has been having supportive loved ones around me as I’ve gone through this process.

Finally, a ritual structure around grief can be extremely helpful. I’ve written about how to engage in ritual practice before, here. Weller suggests that there are three functions to ritual: ritual connects us to the transcendent, repairs, and invites the denied aspects of the psyche to show up.

Ritual touches us in many ways. One of its most powerful impacts is that it breaks us open to a vast and more enchanted world. The first function of ritual is to enable us to become transparent to the transcendent, to use Joseph Campbell’s phrase. It fosters our link to the great mystery. Ritual elicits a certain vibration, a pitch, that enables us to individually or communally connect with the sacred. This pitch activates the psyche. In ritual space, movement, rhythm, expression of emotion, and direction of attention all open gateways to the sacred.

Secondly, there is a reparative function to ritual. It sutures the tears in the soul that occur in the daily rounds of living. We live in a culture that has forgotten the basic needs of the soul. This is especially important today, as our world is increasingly dominated by the rhythm of the machine. As we succumb to the pressure to adapt to this rapid-fire world, we feel ripped out of our own natural human rhythms. Many of us feel exhausted, flattened by the energy expended to keep up with the pace of culture. These ruptures in our emotional lives are frequent, and yet we lack the basic requirements for restoration and healing. African healer and elder Malidoma Somé calls ritual the anti-machine.

The third function of ritual is that it invites the denied and forgotten aspects of psyche to show up, those abandoned parts of who we are. Ritual provides a space potent enough to bring in the undeveloped aspects of our lives in order to help them mature. This is possible because the container, the safe space generated within the ritual field, is capable of holding the intensity of emotions associated with these aspects of soul. This is a pivotal function of ritual. However, inviting in the wounded, neglected, and rejected parts of our psychic life is risky. Without an adequate holding space to contain the emotional release that accompanies the return of these parts, we cannot commit to allowing them to return home.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 78-80).

The rituals I’ve engaged in around my losses have been smaller ones in the context of a few trusted friends. Nonetheless they’ve been very powerful. One small example — earlier this month I hiked the Kumano Kodo with two good friends. Along the thousand year old Buddhist pilgrimage trail, numerous shrines mark the path. At each shrine we made made an offering and I said a prayer. Adding my coin and my prayer at the places where so many have gone before me connected my own grief to collective human history. As the grief process reaches certain milestones, I plan to demarcate it with more ritual.

Once more, on the interplay of opposites

I want to come back to this theme of love and grief, light and dark, death and life, emptiness and fullness, expansion and contraction being intimately interlinked. Because this this seems to be the essential character of grief and of feeling “bad” emotions more generally. Once I recognized this through my grieving process, the whole thing became deeply okay; I found myself welcoming the grief like an old friend.

There is a proverb from Africa that says, “When death finds you, make sure it finds you alive.”

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 124).

When it comes, death will find me alive.

Over seven hundred years ago, the mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “What is this darkness? What is its name? Call it an aptitude for sensitivity which will make you whole. Call it your potential for Vulnerability.” Rilke adds, “Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself / my God is dark, and like a webbing made / of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.”

The darkness we enter when we are overwhelmed by the swell of grief is a place of belonging. It is the fecund and gravid darkness of the womb, the dynamic vitality of duende that pulses through our bodies when we are singing from the dark earth; it is the quiet thrum of nature moving through our senses and the body of the earth.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 127).

Bob Ross also put it well, recording this show right after his wife died:

There is a stage in spiritual maturation beyond the preference for specific states of consciousness. In that vital space is where I hope to meet you.