On Grief, Gratitude, and Meeting Shadow Places

March 2020

Dear reader,

Reflecting through these times, I feel close to the slowing down present in my life, in all of our lives, in the machine of the world. In that process, I experience much that is normally covered over - by busyness and the dominant narratives in the lives I and we lead - becoming visible.

In this uncovering, I feel in touch with the ways in which the realms of the ‘shadow places’ are becoming visible at this time, namely the ways in which we are all touched by death and loss.

Normally, the rapidity of our lives and the infinite opportunities to do more, be more, and engage more that we are bombarded with on a daily basis, anesthetize our losses. Loss is so very present for all of us, and yet it is disowned by the eternal spring-summer culture we live in.

In the slowing and rapid shifting of life as we have known it, we are all encountering death and loss in many forms. In my own life, and in the lives of those I touch, I am witnessing great discomfort - and great possibilities - in the realm of meeting these shadow places.

During this time, as I reckon with all the ways loss has and is touching my life, I turn to the gentle and wise guidance of teachers who have engaged deeply with these ‘shadow places.’ I turn there for solace, for guidance, and for maps. I turn there for openings to be with these places with the warmth of compassion, of wisdom, and to engage the possibilities of relating to these losses with the tender, safe holding of presence and grace.

Of these teachers, The Wild Edge of Sorrow author, psychotherapist, and self-described soul activist, Francis Weller, has been a profound companion as I navigate the inner and outer worlds of loss.

Below follows a summary I wrote recently of some key essences and maps Francis distinguishes around loss, and the ensuing grief that accompanies it. Weller’s descriptions of the five gates of grief opens new possibilities in relating to our experiences of loss. As we deepen and learn to to embrace these shadow places, we open up to an experience of rooted wholeness, of greater aliveness, in which all of the parts belong.

May they serve you in your own unique apprenticeship with loss, with the ‘shadow places' in your inner and outer worlds at this time…

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In Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis so poignantly makes visible the journey we all take in our own unique apprenticeship with loss. Grief, like love, is universal, and yet we live in a grief-denying and death-denying culture. As a result, so many manifestations of loss become confusing and overwhelming, cast into the shadows of our psyches and lives. 

Without recognition, names, inner and outer maps, and community forums surrounding the many visible and invisible losses we experience, so many of us navigate these losses in isolation. For many, these unmet and un-metabolized places within us become invisible, leaden weights in our bodies and minds. For others, denied losses become rabid with aliveness, baiting fears around basic survival due to the unbearable, isolating turmoil.

Francis gently guides us through the terrain of a universal human experience - of ‘being unmade by grief’ - offering naming, recognition, and maps, so essential in a culture that is bereft of these essential structures. What emerges are signposts of possibility, sacred teachings of the possibilities for renewed vitality and intimacy that emerge when we learn to welcome and embody the often shadowed, muddy waters of our grief.

Whether you are new to grief, or a time old student, cultivating a familiarity will aid you on your journey, for grief inevitably knocks at all of our doors. What follows is a map of the wild terrain of grief in what Francis describes at the five gates. His delineations invite a familiarity, or growing fluency, in grief that enables us to acknowledge and then tend to the places where grieving is alive within us. 

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As you read, I invite you to pause after each of the five gates. Pause and notice - 

What is happening in your body? In your emotions? Is there any word or phrase that stands out to you, and what emerges within you in response to this word or phrase?

I recommend that you have a journal on hand to take note of what arises within you as you read. How does grief live through you?

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The first gate: everything we love, we will lose

This first gate is one that we are most familiar with, impermanence. Everything - parents, spouses, children, jobs - we will lose, without exception. Whether we encounter this gate through simple awareness of this profound reality, or we are thrust into a reckoning with loss due to illness, a relationship ending, or a tragedy like suicide, attached to everything and everyone we love are the realities of loss. In honoring this grief, we honor the depth and breadth of our love, the profound and intimate ways in which love touched our hearts. Through an acknowledgement of these inevitable losses, especially the “rough initiations” of our lives, we allow grief to pay tribute to all that we love, and invite cast out places, and the aliveness that accompanies them, to come home.

The second gate: the places that have not known love

These neglected, deeply tender places are the parts of us that have lived without warmth, kindness, compassion, and welcome. These are the places for which we feel ashamed a fundamentally flawed, and as a result have banished them into isolation, committed out of fear not to display these parts of ourselves to others, or to ourselves. Francis describes how when any part of ourselves or our lives is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The challenge here is that we cannot grieve the parts of ourselves that have been banished by shame, that we feel are unworthy of grief. The remedy lies in looking to the parts of ourselves that have been cast into the shadows, bringing them back from exile with the warmth of recognition, of love and compassion. From this place, we welcome the fullness of our beings and grieve the parts of ourselves that we deemed worthless and broken, seeing them instead as wounded, vulnerable places needing forgiveness, love, and healing.

The third gate: the sorrows of the world

The daily losses of species, habitats, and cultures open the third gate of grief, a profound sorrow for the treatment of our home, the Earth. Francis describes the cumulative grief of massive, immeasurable losses that are resulting from the unsustainable, outrageous ways in which we commodify and take from the Earth, igniting deep collective loss. The possibility of embracing this loss is in welcoming our intricate connection with the earth, our deep kinship with each other, and our interconnectedness with all that makes up this planet. Another layer to this loss is in our loss of connection to nature, a loss that has deeply fragmented our fundamental sense of belonging. An absence of closeness with nature has provoked “a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered,” and a poverty of the rich, innate wildness of our souls, bodies, and minds. Weller invites us to turn to the Earth as remedy, inviting our grief for our absence, and receiving her sweet, generous, potent, and ever-forgiving medicine.

The fourth gate: what we expected and did not receive

This fourth gate is often difficult to identify, and consequently grieve, and is comprised of all that we may not have realized we have lost. Francis grounds this loss in sacred expectations with which we all enter the world, encoded in us by our ancestors, many of whom were born within the welcome, engagement, containment, and ornate rites of passage of the village structure. He explains how our age-old bodies expect to be held within a rich relationship with the Earth and in communal rituals honoring individual and communal celebrations and losses. In the absence of this context, so many of us experience a vague and haunting sense of loss, an absence of belonging, and an emptiness that cannot be named and quantified. This loss also lends itself to a kind of ‘spiritual unemployment,’ in which being who we are no longer feels like enough. We feel devoid of the sense of purpose that comes from the ‘village welcome’ of our innate gifts and opportunity to contribute these gifts to the community. He calls for us to grieve this emptiness, to cultivate new forms of life that resurrect essential elements of this healthy village, to meet ourselves at the slow - geologically slow - cadence of our ancestral lives, and to allow the grief of these unmet places of our souls to be honored and to move.

The fifth gate: ancestral grief

Ancestral grief is the grief, largely silent, that we carry in our bodies from the sorrows of our ancestors, many of whom left or were forced out of their homes into new lands and continents, where they hoped to endure. Over generations, the traditions of song, myth, and intricate ritual that held our ancestors were overlaid by strategies to survive within conquest cultures, often resulting in suffering that manifested in addiction, isolation, and restrictive silence. Francis describes the ways in which we hold generations of unwept, unacknowledged suffering and grief for lost homes, traditions, and lives. He describes a necessary grieving for the abuses suffered by our ancestors, be it silent losses of culture and heart or the mass subjugations of genocide. Weller points to metabolizing this grief as an opportunity to invite our senses of wholeness back into our lives, into the collective, and into ‘the other worlds.’ Another layer to this loss, especially prevalent in Western culture, is a loss of connection with ancestors altogether, leading to a sense of homelessness and soullessness that is often invisible, and therefore denied. He calls for a connection of each individual to the myth, songs, and rituals of their unique ancestral lineage as a powerful remedy and means of finding our indigenous souls and homes.

As a first step to learning to navigate grief, it is essential to become familiar with the terrain, so beautifully laid out in each of the five gates. While this knowing does not save any of us from our own unmakings, from the painful realities of our losses, it does open powerful possibilities for uncovering the depths of our souls and for encountering the breadths of our aliveness in ways we have never known. And, when brought to our knees, this familiarity enables us to reenter “the breathing and animate world.” 

Getting to know the terrain enables us to learn to navigate the landscape, namely the art of grieving, through which we can discover the intricate intimacies between our grief and our aliveness, and ultimately learn to live and love more fully in all facets of our lives.

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May these words aid us in coming home to a compassionate, gentle tenderness with our vulnerable human hearts, with the hearts of our loved ones, and the hearts of all whom we touch.

I learn, every day, that I can find reasons and endeavors to become subject to my push, my pull, my demands that life be shaped in certain ways. May we all practice yielding and surrendering in all the ways that we can. And in the space that emerges, put an ear to the literal or metaphorical ground and deeply listen.