Speaker 1 · 0:04Grief is something that a lot of you have been bringing up over the years. You know, how can we bring mindfulness to grief? And it's such a big topic. All of us go through it, and yet a lot of us don't know how to deal with it or process it or open to it. And a lot of us are afraid to open up to grief in ourselves, in others, in our communities, for our planet, for other species. And it's common during a meditation for there to be tears of sadness, of sorrow. So how do we hold that? How can we increase our capacity to understand grief, relate to it, feel it? So I'm super excited to welcome Francis Weller here. He's a psychotherapist, an author, and a soul activist. He has an MFT, he's a writer, he's a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures, and poetic traditions. He's the author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, and also In the Absence of the Ordinary Essays in a Time of Uncertainty. And he's currently completing his fourth book, The Alchemy of Initiation, Soul Work and the Art of Ripening.
Speaker 2 · 1:53So I thought in this brief time we had together, what we would focus on is this idea of how do you take up an apprenticeship with sorrow? The suggestion in that idea is that the walk with sorrow is lifelong. It's not something you have an episode of grief and then you go back to normal living. Grief is around us all the time, constantly swirling around us on filaments of sorrow. So, how does one stay open to the world and stay open to your own life if that energy is moving around us and we don't know how to metabolize it? So that's what I'd like to talk to you about today. I've been doing psychotherapy for 40 years, and um the most persistent issue is loss. No matter what comes in the door, what's underlying it all is a quality of loss. For most people, it's a loss of some kind of um innocence in childhood through alcoholism, through violence, through abuse, through uh molestation, through abandonment, through betrayals. There's losses of marriages, losses of homes, of friendships. There's losses of safety currently, losses of senses of continuity. There's even a loss of faith in futures that's beginning to become more and more evident in what shows up in my room. And people arrive in my office and they often complain of depression. But as I listen to them, what I'm hearing more is oppression. It's the oppressive weight of undigested grief that's been settling on them like sediment, sometimes for generations. Much of the grief that we carry is not ours, much of it is inherited, much of it's been absorbed from culture. So much of what we're dealing with, the weight of what we're holding and what we're carrying, has come from places beyond our own experiences of loss and suffering. So our apprenticeship is based on an idea that you would take undertake a study of some craft that might last five, ten, sometimes up to 20 years long, you would be under this prolonged devotional practice of learning the skill and craft of that art. So it would take that long to learn how to become a master painter or a master weaver or carpenter or a stonemason or whatever it was. So in the language of that old apprenticeship, the culmination was to become a master craftsperson. The language of soul, this long apprenticeship doesn't lead to mastery, it leads to elderhood. And again, this is what we're deeply missing in the collective is someone who has undertaken this long, faithful uh journey with grief and has allowed it to work them in ways that opens them to the capacity to become a ripened human being, capable of showing up for the world. Imagine some of you are familiar with John O'Donnehill. He said that uh life is a growth in the art of loss. Life is a growth in the art of loss. There's so much in that little sentence. First one is that uh the art, it's an art, it's a craft, it's a skill, it's a capacity. So one of the core premises of this work is that grief isn't not just an emotion, but it's a core human faculty. It's a core skill that we must cultivate and develop. The other part of what I love about this sentence is that it's a growth in the art of loss. Our psychological frameworks, I think our spiritual frameworks to some degree as well, focus more on gathering, addition, growth, increase. We somehow predicate the things based on more of what we've gathered together, what we've what we've been able to accomplish. But here's Odani, who's saying, no, it's it's about growth in the art of loss. And I feel that more and more as I age, that um it's more about thinning and letting go. Then what about, you know, my 30s and 40s was more about gathering and accumulating.
Speaker 3 · 6:30But now it's more about letting it go. So the apprenticeship recognizes that grief is perennial and that it's persistence and it's pervasive, it's always there, it is always around us, much of it not personal, it is ever present, and it's especially heightened in times of of communal circumstances like the pandemic.
Speaker 2 · 7:00So, again, the idea of apprenticeship is helpful because it conveys a long period of study, of immersion, and it also begins with an idea of humility. When you begin an apprenticeship in the old style, you didn't start with a paintbrush in your hand. You began by mixing paint, you began by cleaning the paintbrushes. Or if you're working with wood, you began by sweeping up the shavings, you didn't touch the plane or the wood sometimes for years, until you demonstrated your commitment to the substance. So we begin the same way here by picking up the leaden weight of grief and holding it in our hands, bringing it close to our heart, letting the intense emotions come nearby, the difficult cargo of sorrow, as I call it. Even the language of grief can give us some sense. Grief comes from the Latin word gravis, which means heavy. That's where we get the word grave and gravity. An elder would be somebody who carries gravitas. In French, when a woman is pregnant, they talk about her being gravide. She's heavy with child. So this word tells us that we're being taken downward, close to the ground. Sometimes, I imagine some of you have had grief intense enough to actually take you to your knees. We have been on the ground. So we begin humbly and simply, not having much knowledge yet in grief, just coming into the territory. Sorrow is the teacher, learning to respect the materials. Grief is a core faculty of being human. So to be skillful in this terrain is to process and to possess the capacity to turn towards the grief, okay, to turn towards it. And that's when in the vessel, whatever we're holding in terms of what's present to us in the grief, it has the potential to transmute into something medicinal for the village, for the community. That's pure alchemy. It isn't to somehow get by it or get through it, but to tend to the sorrow long enough in that in that apprenticeship, warm enough so that it transmutes into something medicinal, something uh for the village, not so much for yourself. It takes tremendous psychic strength to stay present with grief or with any difficult emotional state, to stay close to the heat of loss, all the chaotic emotions that come with it, some of the memories that are so soaked with pain and grief and loss. So that gives again how much we have to keep the apprenticeship in place. The apprenticeship lasts a long time. The second premise is that grief works us in profound ways, reshaping us day in and day out, like water on sandstone. But it also requires that we work the grief. So grief is not only working us, but we're asked to engage the grief. It's not a passive state. Frequently, what we think about when grief comes is how do I get to the other side of this as fast as I can? Remember, someone once asked Jack Cornfield that question. It's like, when will this end? And Jack will often say, Well, how long have you been working with this grief? Oh, a year or two years. Well, you're about halfway there. So it's a long process. So it isn't just about trying to endure to get to this side, it's also about depth. So when we work the grief, it is carving out riverbeds in our soul. It's carving and deepening us as we work the grief. We want to be deepened by sorrow over time, not just get through it, but be ripened and deepened as human beings. The third premise of the apprenticeship is that what we're being taught is the art of vesseling, the art of vesseling, which is which is teaching us how to hold, contain, and warm the materials of loss and sorrow. The idea is again keeping the material warm. That's again such an essential idea from alchemy. And that warmth is done through our attention, affection, noticing, our interest. When we do our grief ritual weekends, much of our time is spent singing, writing, dancing, you know, movement, and then in deep ritual together. So we're we're giving all of that energetic movement to keep it warm. And we typically do our grief ritual towards the end of the second day, sometimes in the third day, because, like for me, it was the third grief ritual before I shed a single tear. We're pretty hard-packed around our grief. And sometimes it takes a lot of work to loosen it and soften it, and all of those processes were designed to bring warmth and looseness to the grief so it can move when we get into the ritual space. When we can do this, when we can keep the material warm, and the grief can stay fluid and it can continue to flow through us, we discover something quite amazing: that we are more verb than noun. We're designed to be more a jumpy rhythm, a poem. There's a wonderful line from the Spanish poet Jaime Gildebiadma. He said, I thought I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem. So we want to be poems, we want to be dances, we want to be, you know, rhythms and songs. But when again, when the things congeal because of lack of warmth, what's the number one cause of death in this culture? Congestive heart failure. And I could tell you some studies about this that it isn't just about smoking, it isn't about just you know too much animal fat, it's about loneliness, it's about the lack of community around our hearts to share our grief and our joy and our gratitude and our celebrations, but we're too alone. So I love that idea of that when we can work with the grief, I like to say that what it allows us to do is to get current with our life. How many of you, I know myself included, feel like we've been dealing with our histories our whole life? So we rarely ever feel like we get to the current moment, to get current, to be here, and then to be in the current of life, the electricity of life, to feel it really just moving through us to feel alive again, because our strategies of anesthesia, to try to numb out the pain through whatever means, busyness, shopping, you know, alcohol, whatever it is, to actually be in the current of life, and then to be in the current, the flow of life. Those are good things to do, and that's what I've seen happen as we've become more skillful at being able to bring community together around grief. So the approach to our grief is critically important. How we come to our grief is critically important. Our approach to grief is rarely reverent, it's usually suspicious, uncertain, anxious, fearful.
Speaker 3 · 15:02What if we recognized it as approaching something sacred, something holy? So I want to just briefly share with you the six elements of the apprenticeship with sorrow.
Speaker 2 · 15:16The first characteristic of the apprenticeship is right relationship with sorrow, coming into right relationship. Some of you are familiar with the work of Gene Jenlin and focusing, which sometimes is a very useful practice for mindfulness. What Jenlin was trying to do was trying to discover what about any kind of therapy made it effective. And he found these certain steps along the way that made, but one of the most important things was coming into right relationship to the emotion that you're encountering. In other words, when we come up to grief, we tend to be binary. We're either trying to push it away or we're drowning in it. He says, try to imagine coming up into a companionship relationship with it. Like you're walking with grief side by side on a day-by-day basis. Not too far away that we go back into anesthesia, and not too close that we're just simply overwhelmed by the presence of it. Sometimes we will be. And when there's an acute loss in our lives, you absolutely will be. But that's when we're hoping that the tethers to community will keep us from floating away. The second thing is to develop a practice of some sort. Now, all of you on the screen are clearly developing practices of mindfulness. Practices are like ballasts, they're what give us ground when the storm winds blow fierce. The image I like comes from Kathleen Dean Moore, who wrote a book called Holdfast. And those of you who live on either coasts recognize this idea of the holdfast, maybe. A holdfast was when you go out to the ocean and you look down and you see the kelp beds, the kelp root structure forms a chemical bond to the rock below them. That's the hold fast. So that whenever, even the storms, no matter how fierce they are, the whole the holdfast keeps them in place. So practice is like that. When the storms become fierce, when the losses are intense, powerful, your practice helps to steady you and keep you in place. The third one is um maintaining an adult presence when grief arises. Very few of us had our grief adequately held as children. And so these places that were not occupied and held oftentimes feel bottomless, like a bottom never really fully formed around that emotional experience. So when it comes up, there's that terror again. And I, you know, many grief workshops, or even in my office, I can see it happen. When the grief comes into the room, suddenly the face of a 50-year-old disappears, and there's a face of a five-year-old. They become displaced by that child state, by the trauma state. And there's no longer an adult in the room. And the problem with that is that the child has no capacity to move the grief, to work with the grief. That child state is simply about survival. How do I not die in this moment? How do I not just get so overwhelmed that I disappear? Thankfully, we do that. I mean, thankfully we survived. Thankfully, we're all here. But we need to be able to develop capacities to, as Jung would say, Carl Jung would say, we have to learn how to separate from that child state, from what he called the complex, to be able to turn toward that fear, that overwhelm, and give it a bottom and be able to hold that part of our experience compassionately. So much of mindfulness is about the bringing of the compassion, right? The moment you're starting to bring compassion, you've already separated. Think about that. You can't bring compassion to something until you've separated from it. So if there's an intense state I'm in right now of grief or fear, I have to be able to step back enough to be able to turn toward it and say, I see you. And I can hold you now. I'm with you. That's an incredibly important thing to do with our grief. Until then, you'll what I call recycle grief over and over and over again. Because there won't be an adult presence there to help metabolize it and move it along. The next one is um silence and solitude. So as much as I am a huge fan of community around grief, the reality is we're going to spend a lot of our time alone with our grief. And how do we turn that from just simply endurance into sanctuary? So I remember working with a woman once quite a few years ago, and she said, You know, I hate going home at night. She was going through a very ugly divorce. And I said, What's what's what happens when you go home? She says, Oh, I gotta walk on the door that's cold and it's dark and nobody there to greet me. It's I just hate it. I said, Well, can you imagine it? That's the holiest time of day. That when you open the door, the one you are greeting is the one who's feeling so alone, so desolate, so cold. And you walk in the door and you say, Oh, honey, I'm home. Let's put the soup on, let's start the fire, tell me about your day, sit with me, I'll get you warm again. That's that movement that turns it from isolation to silence and solitude. The fifth one is self-compassion. I don't need to say a whole lot about that to you all. Uh, I think you're probably immersed in that topic very deeply. But when I wrote my book, the first one, the wild edge of sorrow, I said that the work of grief, one of its values is that it opens us up to the suffering of others, to compassion for other people's suffering. And that's true. What I forgot to write in the book was it takes self-compassion to open to our own grief. We have to let ourselves know that my losses matter. And many of us get caught in the comparison model. Oh, my grief isn't as bad as so and so and such and such. And so we don't tend to open our hearts fully to our own losses, our own grief. And it's very important that we hold our sorrows as equally important.
Speaker 3 · 22:02And then the last piece of the apprenticeship is to remember our entanglement. Remember your entanglement. That we are not alone, that we are engaged with the ongoing movement and life of the planet.
Speaker 2 · 22:20The Anamamundi is what the alchemists would call it, the soul of the world. And we're all part of that.
Speaker 1 · 22:31Francis, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom around this. I think this is one of the maybe the one thing that I think is like the most overlooked teaching. And you know, a lot of people are scared. And, you know, as mindfulness teachers, I think part of our task is to invite that courage, that non-judgment, that self compassion. Thank you, Francis. And I just posted a link to Francis' website and a link where you can find his books and some of his audio. Thank you. Well, I wish everyone open to their grief. Take care, everybody. Thank you so much.
