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

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Simply said, 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.

Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun The Geography Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun

of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller Paradigm shift means creating uplifting alternatives to capitalism and the consumer culture in every way possible. Those individuals and groups who are leading the charge are called upon to share what they are learning. This is not a time to be shy. The warmth of Francis’s voice and his beautiful language, will speak directly to your soul, in a way your soul has longed to feel embraced. His words will open your heart to receive your own most tender and vulnerable feelings as a gift to be cherished as they may bring forth a new depth of connection to the soul of the world." - Dr. Risa Kaparo, author of Awakening Somatic Intelligence Beginning in 1997, Ibegan to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear is how difficult it is for us to attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul, slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death. Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it.No one enjoys feeling sad. We do everything in our power to evade, avoid, distract, delay, bypass, bargain with, deny, dismiss, and repress sorrow. Yet one man has the courage to ask us to consider signing up for “an apprenticeship with sorrow.” That man is psychotherapist and author, Francis Weller, in his new book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and The Sacred Work of Grief. (North Atlantic Books, 2015) This book is an instruction manual for those who understand that as the author writes, “Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.” (xviii) Where there is sorrow,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “there is holy ground.” These gatherings are an invitation to enter the sacred ground of grief and encounter the ways it enables us to walk in this world with its attendant harsh realities of loss and death. We discover how sorrow shakes us and breaks us open to depths of soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemythat transmutes suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by theexperience of sorrow, adding substance and weight to our world. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. In a very real way grief ripens us, pullsup from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the heart that knows sorrow that is also capable of genuine love.

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

This ritual brought us face-to-face with the reality of losing those we love. Letting go is a difficult skill to acquire, and yet we are offered no option but to practice. Every loss, personal or shared, prepares us for our own time of leaving. Letting go is not a passive state of acceptance but a recognition of the brevity of all things. This realization invites us to love fully now, in this moment, when what we love is here.” Resilience is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities. Thanks for your book. It's beautiful, clear and says this important thing with great directness and kindness. A fine work." -Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems Human beings, for millennia before the advent of civilization, were nurtured and supported from birth by a village, not a nuclear family. This has been a disastrous shift—yet another thing to grieve. A rich and varied conversation between Michael Lerner, founder and director of Commonweal and Francis Weller, exploring the Long Dark that is emerging in our culture and the planet. ​But what more does an apprenticeship with sorrow offer us? Do we merely discharge our grief and move on? 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 understanding 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.” Teacher and grief specialist Stephen Jenkinson says, “Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.”11 Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community.” One of Jung’s discoveries was that at the heart of every complex is a jewel of great price. When the complex was formed and splintered off from consciousness, it took a piece of something precious along with it to keep it safe.” As we come to the end of the sharing, there is a dawning recognition that this is our shared sorrow, the communal cup from which we all drink. It is ours to hold and to gradually empty. We do this together as we enter the healing ground.”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow Quotes - Goodreads The Wild Edge of Sorrow Quotes - Goodreads

F or a man who specializes in grief and sorrow, psychotherapist Francis Weller certainly seems joyful. When I arrived at his cabin in Forestville, California, he emerged with a smile and embraced me. His wife, Judith, headed off to garden while Francis led me into their home among the redwoods to talk.

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In a powerful side-note, Weller cautions readers to avoid the widespread blame flung at so many parents: 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. (See the resources at the end of this book for more on developing the practice of compassion.)” Most of us instinctively turn from what makes us uncomfortable. Yet often the greatest gifts lie hidden in what we avoid. Certainly at this time we have much to grieve both as individuals and as a culture; but our collective amnesia about the traditional practices of grieving keep us from uncovering the buried treasures that could be our salvation. In fact, the accumulated weight of our ungrieved losses may be at the root of what is fragmenting our world."

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sac…

Many of the great myths begin in a time such as this. The land has become barren, the king, corrupted, the ways of peace, lost. It is in these conditions, that a ripeness arises for radical change. It is a call to courage (from the French for full heart) and humility. Every one of us will be affected by the changes wrought by this difficult visitation. It is time to become immense. Francis Weller is the ultimate grief sage of our time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that results from embracing our sorrow." - Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author of Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypseand Collapsing Consciously . Silence and solitude allow us to move beyond thought and into our embodied experience. Grief is felt, sensed in the viscera of our bellies, the inner walls of our chests, the curve of our shoulders, the heaviness in our thighs. Grief is registered in our sinews and muscles. It feels laboured, as though a great weight has settled on our chest or a heaviness has entered our bones. We know grief by its felt experience; it is tangible. It is here, in our sighing and sensing body, that we encounter the terrain of sorrow.”We live in a culture in which, as Weller writes, “…grief has been colonized by the clinical world, taken hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes” whereas on the other hand, “…grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human.” (xviii) In the Absence of the Ordinary is filled with treasures of insight from the heart of a wise, poetic, and fearless guide for exploring the shadowy terrain of the soul. He reaches deep into the holy ground of our awakening — both individual and collective— and with fierce kindness, invites us to become purposeful apprentices of fear, sorrow, and loss. Francis Weller knows that beyond sorrow is new possibility that can be discovered in our encounter with soul loss and renewal. Weller offers a compassionate and prophetic voice as we navigate our world in great transition and cross the threshold from our adolescence and into our early adulthood as a human community. Weller offers an inspired, uplifting, and unique voice for moving into our deeply uncertain future. I highly recommend this book." To die before we die means that we must become radically honest with ourselves. We must shed the skins that do not foster aliveness. One man, while participating in the first weekend of the Men of Spirit initiation, suddenly realized how conscripted and narrow his life was. At that moment, he jumped out of his chair and flung it across the room in disgust. He clearly saw that he had unwittingly made an agreement to live small and to consistently tell himself what a good life he was living. This realization broke him open to the great well of grief he was carrying in his heart from all the times he had abandoned himself for the sake of fitting in and getting approval.” There is often a feeling of shame attached to the survivors of suicide, a hidden doubt that they might not have done enough to prevent this death. This is a doubling of the pain. Their grief is bound together with shame, making it more difficult to talk with others and get the support they need. Finding the courage to share your experience with others is an essential piece in mending this profound sorrow.”