Grief Rituals For Uncertain Times With Francis Weller

Grief is not a problem to solve, but a sacred territory to tend. In this intimate conversation, Francis Weller shares wisdom from decades of guiding others through grief rituals, drawing from ancestral traditions, poetry, and the deep soul work of community. Together, we explore how collective grief can be a portal to healing, connection, and transformation in uncertain times.

Trigger Warning: This practice may include references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

How can we respond to uncertainty and loss with the power of soul work?

That's what we're going to explore today with Frances Weller on The Wise Effort Show.

Welcome back.

I'm Dr.

Diana Hill,

And this is The Wise Effort Show.

This show is about how to use your energy in a way that is regenerative,

Restorative,

And also offering to others.

We've been focusing on wise effort in community over the past month,

And today I had the great honor of talking with Frances Weller.

I've spoken about his gates of grief so many times because he's been so influential to me.

According to Frances,

We are going into what he calls the long dark.

I certainly feel a little bit like the long dark these days.

The long dark in terms of our culture,

In terms of the earth,

What's happening to our planet,

But also maybe even a long dark for you personally in your own life.

What Frances Weller argues is that we need skills to survive this long dark,

And probably one of the most important things that we need is community,

The skill of entering into the darkness with others,

Whether that's the darkness of having lost somebody that you love,

The darkness of a cancer diagnosis,

The darkness of what's happening in your neighborhood or even in your own inner world,

Your own trauma,

That humans were not meant to do it alone.

Frances writes that we must become fluent in manners of the soul.

We are being forced into what he calls a rough initiation,

A rough initiation.

There's initiations that we move through in our life,

The initiation of adolescence or the initiation of marriage or the initiation of a new job or retirement,

But this one's a rough one,

Folks.

Rough initiations have four qualities to them,

According to Weller.

One,

We leave the world that was known.

So there's a diagnosis,

An accident,

A death of somebody,

And it shatters the world that we were once in.

Are you in a rough initiation where you're leaving the world that was known to you?

The second quality of a rough initiation is that there's a radical alteration in our sense of self.

The familiar self is shaken and disrupted and we don't know who we are anymore.

We're shaken up a little bit.

Maybe you are going through a significant loss or transition and you start to question,

Who am I and who do I want to be?

And then third,

There is a realization that nothing will ever be the same.

We can never return to the world that was.

We are left radically changed by the encounter.

Frances Weller is encouraging us to wake up,

Connect to each other,

Go into the dark together so that we can respond in a way that is soulful when life meets us with overwhelming circumstances.

Today we're going to talk about being astonished by beauty,

The value of ritual and repetition,

How to create a ritual,

And really what is the medicine for the long dark.

So whatever long dark you're in,

I hope you find this conversation helpful to you.

Enjoy the wise words of Frances Weller.

Where is this wooden,

Beautiful space behind you?

My little cabin is along the Russian River in Sonoma County,

Northern California,

Up in the hills.

This is a 1930s old river cabin that's been our home now for 23 years and it's my little sanctuary.

Yeah,

I was just saying everything we love we will lose,

Right?

I had my own little cabin that I had to tear down and now I'm relocated,

But it still is in me and I resonate with that space of having a space that we can go to.

You talk about sort of the vessel,

Creating the vessel,

Whether it's a physical vessel around us or an inner vessel.

And your new book,

I think,

Will create for many of us that space of a place to go to,

Especially right now where at the individual level people are experiencing,

You know,

Just being human,

The nature of being human is that we suffer,

But then also at a very,

We're going through what you described,

The long dark collectively right now.

We're at a time of great uncertainty and loss.

Can we begin there about talking about the long dark,

What we're entering into or what we are in?

We'll start off light,

Yes,

Yeah.

Yeah,

No,

No,

We're going to go deep quick.

Well,

The long dark is an image that's been sitting with me for quite a few years that we have been on this ascension path for several thousand,

Maybe three or four thousand years,

And ascension had much more to do with control and domination,

Colonization ultimately,

And all the other ways that we've tried to subvert the earth into something for our use.

Well,

At some point,

Ascension begins to crash and we're in the crash right now.

Some call it the collapse,

Some call it the great reckoning.

I like using the image of the long dark because that's what we're heading into,

Or that's what we are in.

It's a place of the unknown.

There's nothing in front of us that we can say is predictable.

We don't know.

So,

We're living in this time of descent,

And that takes us in the territory of soul.

The direction that we're heading now is downward into the darkness,

And what I like about that,

If I can like it,

Is that it invites a different way of being in relationship to culture,

To planet,

To watershed.

The darkness invites a stillness,

A listening.

It invites humility because we don't know what's happening.

We don't know where we're going.

We're not going to think our way through the long dark.

And the other part of the long dark is that it's going to be generations.

We're not just talking about a few years to get through a current administration or through some crisis time.

No,

We're talking about a long dark,

You know,

Probably at least 50 years,

Where humanity will have to wrestle with the questions of to be or not to be.

So,

That's kind of where we are right now.

We have to get really quiet and listen to what's being called forth at this time from us.

It made me think of when I read it.

Paul Simon just came to Los Angeles.

He was,

I think it's probably,

Everyone always says it's their last tour,

But this one really might be his last.

And it made me think of when I was a kid listening to that song,

Hello Darkness,

My old friend,

Like over and over.

It was like my parents' music.

So,

I used to listen to that song over and over.

And when you're in the long dark,

It's actually really satisfying to remember these things.

What you're describing of the building up of striving,

Getting,

And grasping at things,

And then the crash that happened.

But it also happens in our lives as we move through the course of adolescence into adulthood and into eldership.

There's a period of time of grasping,

Growing,

And then something crashes inevitably for all of us.

And when it crashes,

That's when you need the soul work.

And if you haven't been doing it,

Anderson Cooper interviewed you.

And I was listening to that interview and he was just like,

I don't even know how to be with this sadness around my dad's death.

I've been just protecting myself by building myself up for all these years.

And it's just overwhelming me.

So,

People are experiencing this at the individual level,

But also the big collective level.

And the soul work is central.

I don't know how we would get through this time without soul work.

It's the only thing that makes sense to me.

Again,

This territory of descent takes us down into vulnerability,

Into grief,

Into sadness,

Into tenderness.

It takes us right down into the very heart of who we are as human beings.

Because we all can face each other and see in one another the losses,

The grief,

Like you're sharing about your cabin.

You know,

It's very personal.

That was a big loss for you.

And collectively,

We're breathing in this loss every day now.

The loss of human respect and regard,

Loss of languages and cultures,

Genocides,

And all of these things are slamming into us every day.

And without soul,

How do you process that?

The only option we have is anesthesia.

To go into numbness,

To dissociate,

To disconnect,

To distract,

Whether through alcohol or,

You know,

Busyness or shopping or whatever.

But ultimately,

All the strategies begin to fail.

And that's what I was saying with Anderson,

Is that your strategies have finally failed.

And this is a good day.

It's a hard day.

It's a really hard day,

You know,

But it's also the point at which you might find a larger imagination of who you are and what you're connected to.

I think a common experience that people have is,

If I allow myself to go into the long dark,

It's going to be so immense and scary and horrible that I either won't come out or I can't handle it.

For me,

Grief,

I mean,

I've just learned so much from you about grief.

And grief shows up when I drive from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles,

And there's five lanes on my side of the road and five lanes on the other side of the road.

And you're driving by and you see the cell tower that's shaped like a palm tree.

They're trying to make the cell tower look like a tree to not disturb the birds.

It's so offensive to me on so many levels.

And my whole body is,

I hate this.

I hate every minute.

I want to reject it.

I want to not feel it.

I want to not see it.

I want to go back home to my little space or my version of the Russian River.

And I need to see it.

But so many folks have that experience where I think their soul is picking up on something.

And they don't want to go there because it's too immense.

It feels too big.

And one of the suggestions you make is you actually need to be immense in the immensity of grief.

Yeah,

That comes from a moment of working with a young woman at a cancer help program some years ago.

And she was young,

32,

And just got married and all the dreams of childhood,

Having children and all that.

And then she was diagnosed with a very serious glioblastoma brain cancer.

And she was terrified.

So she sat down with me in my individual session with her,

And she was sharing how scared she was.

And I understood,

Of course,

She was terrified.

And I said,

Well,

Can you remember a moment in your lifetime when you met something or felt something that you might consider the sacred?

And she thought for a few moments and then realized,

Yes,

I do.

I remember being in a sweat lodge one time.

And it was one of those lodges that had an opening in the roof so I could see the stars through the opening.

And in that moment,

I felt this profound connection to the ancestors.

I said,

OK,

In that moment,

Was the self that you felt you were in that moment bigger than the terror you're feeling right now?

She said,

Absolutely.

So that's who you need to be now.

You need to be immense.

You need to be able to get your arms around everything,

The hope,

The love,

The connection,

The dream,

But also the fear,

The grief,

The anger,

The powerlessness,

All of those things.

We have to become so big right now.

The problem that most of us face,

Diane,

Is that we're being asked to do this alone.

And in our isolation,

Who the hell can face what's happening in the currency of the world?

I mean,

None of us can.

We have to feel tethered to other human beings and to the places that we live,

To the Redwoods and to the Doug Fir and the Oak and the Maple and the Toheys and the Robins.

We need to feel our kinship with this larger breathing world and with our friendships.

Otherwise,

It's way too much.

And so most of us end up shutting down and going back into that anesthesia and finding some way to avoid the darkness.

But then what we're left with is a collective of people skimming up to the surface,

Participating in the very destruction that's creating more of the long dark.

So our job,

I think,

Right now as human beings is to become more and more familiar with what's happening in the darkness,

Because certain things can only happen in the darkness.

You know,

Like our heartbeat right now,

Or everything I'm seeing out my windows,

All of these trees are there because of what's happening in the darkness.

Underground,

The root systems,

The mycelia,

The microbes,

The minerals,

All feeding this life.

The same with our heartbeat and our oxygen and all that's happening in the darkness.

But for some reason,

We are terrified of the darkness.

We always are scrambling to find the well-lit area,

You know,

And we don't know how to come into that shelter.

Rilke,

Rainer Maria Rilke had a little poem,

Part of a poem that says,

And 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.

So that's someone who understood that the darkness is as sacred as the light.

We're very light-obsessed in this culture and in our psychology and our spiritualities.

We love the light,

Nothing wrong with that.

Light is beautiful,

But its corresponding element of darkness has become so binaried into good and bad,

Holy and evil.

And all of the associations that come around darkness do not benefit us right now,

Because that is where we are.

And we can handle darkness when we're not alone in it.

My son was just talking the other night about how he,

There was like half an hour where he was alone at the house,

He's 12,

And we were driving and we were going to come home and get him.

He was here by himself and he said,

Every single noise was so loud.

I was like,

Is that somebody coming to get me?

But then as soon as we're home,

That darkness is different,

Right?

So part of what you talk about is doing this in community,

Of being able to go into the dark in community.

And that's what we do in therapy,

But we also need to do it outside of just a therapy room,

But just in our conversations.

How do we be in the darkness with somebody else and get better,

More skillful at holding other people's darkness,

Whether they're going through cancer or they're going through a loss?

What are some of the skills that you talked about community,

But there's also ritual and restraint and repetition.

Your book goes through all of these sort of these essays that teach us how to be in the long dark.

What are some of the essential skills that we need to go into that darkness?

I think one of the most important ones is imagination,

Which doesn't get much attention at all in psychological fields.

But to me,

Imagination is not,

Again,

Not something I do.

I don't imagine.

I fantasize at times,

But I am imagined.

So Carl Jung said that the primary activity of psyche is image making.

That's its primary activity,

Is the generation of images.

Now we are most aware of that at night when we go to bed and we dream and we see,

But you didn't make that dream up.

You were in the dream.

You're a participant in the dream.

And the dreamer is psyche or soul is the dreamer.

So what we can do and what I feel like my life has been kind of devoted to is listening to hear the dream of the world.

What is the dreamy earth sharing with us right now?

What rituals do we need right now?

What songs do we need?

So,

You know,

When I use the term long dark,

We could say,

Well,

You know,

Traditional cultures,

Particularly in the United States,

In this continent,

They've been in the long dark for 500 years.

And African Americans in this continent have been in the long dark for 400 years.

But the eternal song went underground but never disappeared.

They were able to sustain that song,

You know,

Through their rituals,

Many of them done secretly or songs or languages or stories.

They didn't die out.

Whereas for most of us as white European descendants,

Those stories were silenced.

The rituals were forgotten.

You know,

The ancestors abandoned.

So we have nothing in a sense,

You know,

I barely know any of my ancestors.

I don't know anything about where we came from.

And I don't know any of the rituals that we once practiced.

And we are bereft.

And so in this emptiness,

We have become the most consumptive,

Colonizing energy the planet has ever seen.

If you were to speak in the way that you're speaking to,

I don't know,

A group of 30 year olds that are out at a bar,

You know,

They would be like,

What planet are you on talking about ritual?

And at the same time,

They are craving it.

And there's ways in which we can recreate it that makes sense in our current times.

You know,

I run this road that's by my house that has the foothills on one side,

The ocean by the other.

And I've been running it for 12 years,

Same road,

Same path,

Same neighbors.

And about two years ago,

This rock emerged that had this name on it,

Which was Harley.

And it was one of the dogs along my road that died.

And they put this rock out.

And now every time I run it,

There's flowers on this rock.

And then there's been other rocks that have been placed next to that rock with other names.

And people are walking and putting flowers,

Honoring whatever their Harley is.

Right.

So there's a ritual that makes sense in our current ethos that touches us and helps us to have contact with grief.

A lot of folks,

They feel it's so foreign,

But it's also they crave it.

And there's ways you can do it that are sort of here and now make sense in your day.

You know,

A little mini altar,

A candle,

You light a rock,

A flower that you place.

Just the other week I went,

I did a walking session with a client and we walked to her mom's grave and we put our hands on our grave.

And it just took a minute,

You know,

Bring your,

Have you ever thought about bringing your therapist to your mom's or your mom's grave?

It's like,

It's possible if we open ourselves up to imagination that it could,

That it could be different,

That this becomes part of our daily experience of honoring grief and loss.

Just,

I want to bring that up because I think sometimes people think it's so foreign to them,

But it's,

It is foreign,

But familiar.

I like what you just said.

It's foreign,

But familiar.

Carl Jung had a phrase,

He called,

He had a phrase called the,

That what we suffer from is loss of connection to the instincts,

To the age old,

Unforgotten wisdom at the core of the psyche.

So when we do rituals,

When people come to our grief rituals or our gratitude or our renewing the world rituals or whatever one we're hosting,

After it's over,

Somebody might say something like,

You know,

I've never done anything like that before in my life,

But it felt oddly familiar.

So what is that in the psyche,

Right?

The archaic psyche remembers this rhythm,

This cadence.

In fact,

That's what we've been longing to feel and to hear and to register,

Because once that signal is given,

Some different part of the psyche can step forward.

And until that signal is given,

It's hard to grieve,

It's hard to give thanks,

It's hard to bring our kids into initiatory experiences,

But that frequency is what we're longing for in many ways.

And it doesn't have to be complicated,

It doesn't have to be a three-day grief ritual.

Like you said,

Lighting a candle,

Being quiet for a moment,

Saying a prayer together,

Or sharing a poem.

Those 30-year-olds at the bar are practicing ritualistic behavior,

Right?

We're gathering at the bar to be together,

To be in community.

Well,

That's only one half-step away from a ritual.

You know,

If we make it intentional,

If there's an invocational idea that we're trying to invoke some relationship to something bigger than us,

Whatever that is—mystery,

Spirit,

Ancestors,

God,

Whatever you want to call it—but when we bring that energy into the field,

We feel somehow connected to a larger imaginal presence.

You know,

And I think that's part of what ritual does,

Is it breaks us open to that imaginal terrain.

And in that,

There's an infusion of inspiration,

Dream,

Creativity,

Connectivity.

Yeah,

We're ritually starved.

Absolutely.

It's a select few that will sign up for the grief ritual,

And those that will are going to get a lot out of it.

The clients that I am most impacted by are often the ones that come in at the most raw point in their grief.

You know,

So I can think about a client that I had who was a teenager,

And her mom died when she was two,

And she had this box of letters that her mom had written to her from the age of zero to two.

And she brought them into my office,

And she said,

Like,

I've had this box of letters sitting in my room,

And I want to read them with you.

So we spent a year reading these letters,

And it became a ritual of reading these letters.

And there was one card that she had,

Which was—this was back in the day when you had those Hallmark cards that when you opened to them,

You could record your little voice in it,

And it had her mom's voice in it.

And she was like,

I don't want to open it because I don't want to lose her voice.

Like,

I don't want to use it up.

Like,

There's only so much battery life in this little card.

So I open it only every once in a while,

And it was also so painful.

There's something about the preciousness and the pain and in community with another person going into those dark spaces,

But those dark spaces are also so incredibly beautiful.

And that was her initiation into adulthood.

Read those letters that her mom wrote to her when she was one years old.

And we all have that.

We have maybe the letters of our adolescence that we shoved away,

But also things,

Experiences when you write in The Wild at Jussaro about the parts of ourselves that haven't known love.

These are all places that we need to go into to do this soul work and to do ritual around.

What would it look like for somebody if they want to do a daily ritual or if they want to do a larger community ritual?

How do you set it up?

There are certain elements that are necessary.

Containment is essential.

The vesseling piece is like,

The stronger the containment field,

The more heat can be generated in the ritual process.

Some rituals are not intended for heat and for generating change.

They're just keeping the material warm.

So reading those letters was a beautiful way for her to keep the material warm so it can keep moving.

So when we ignore grief,

When we push it to the sidelines,

When we repress it,

It gets cold.

And grief that gets cold congeals in the heart and hardens there.

So what we're trying to do in ritual,

Whether it's the beautiful ritual you just shared with this young woman sharing her letters,

Or something more intentional,

What we're trying to do is create warmth.

And the three-day ritual,

We're creating heat.

So that's the intention is to generate enough heat so that by the time we get into the ritual process itself,

The cooking has been done and we're ready to spill over and share.

That's what people are afraid of,

The spillover part.

That it's just going to pour out of me and I'm never going to stop crying.

This is what people say.

Like,

If I start,

I'll never stop.

It's endless.

Yeah,

I'm sure you've heard that.

I've heard that.

And I often say to them,

If you don't go there,

You're not going to come back.

So we lock away so much of our vitality in the repression of grief.

And so to bring it in,

To become a little bit more fluent in it,

A little bit more comfortable in the conversation with sorrow,

That's what ritual can do.

It can build our faith in it.

It can also help give it a bottom.

So there isn't that constant terror that if I go there,

I'm going to disappear.

So people who have come to our grief rituals over and over and over again,

There's a certain confidence and a certain faith that grief is not here to take me hostage.

It's actually here to ripen me as a human being.

You know,

It's here to actually develop my capacities for compassion and presence.

It's actually the training ground for elderhood.

There is no such thing as an elder who does not know how to compost grief very thoroughly,

Their own,

But also the communities,

The earth's,

You know,

The cosmos.

You know,

They're able to digest this material.

That's what makes that person capable of turning towards anybody on the street and say,

I can stand here with you,

Especially the young ones.

They need that.

So what do we do to design a ritual?

We make agreements.

Again,

I would start very simple,

Like maybe having three or four people over to your house and saying tonight's topic is sorrow or loss.

And let's just agree that we're not going to fix anybody.

We're not going to give any advice at all.

We're going to witness one another because what grief really wants is deep witnessing.

When that witnessing is granted,

The grief can continue to move.

But until it's witnessed fully,

It just circulates.

We recycle our sorrows again and again.

And again,

That's partly because the psyche is waiting for that signal frequency.

You know,

It's good to go to a therapist by all means.

So when people come to see me,

I'll often say to them,

This is a good place to learn how to tolerate contact with this energy.

Grief can be overwhelming.

So you're learning the skill of how to be present with your grief.

But ultimately,

You're going to need a larger holding vessel for this grief because your psyche is expecting that.

And again,

Going back to the grief book,

The fourth gate of grief is what we expected and did not receive.

We expected rituals to help hold this inevitable encounter with loss in our lifetimes,

But almost none of us got that.

And so we become a self-contained receptor site or receptacle for sorrow with no place to go.

And so it begins to become so overwhelming that we have no clue about how to approach it.

And then we go into the anesthesia and the deadening of our own life.

You know,

So yes,

Inviting people over,

Making agreements towards no advice,

Deep listening,

Spaciousness,

The very things that we need in order to feel heard and held,

And also to be someone who can witness and hold.

You know,

Those are the basic elements of ritual.

The invocation of something larger is important.

Again,

That can happen in silence like we did before we started,

You know,

Just holding a moment of silence to touch into the majesty and the magnificence of the earth or the ever-present energies of the ancestors.

We could define ritual simply by saying it's any action,

Any gesture individually or communally whose intention it is to bridge to the transpersonal dimensions,

To the spiritual,

To the sacred.

That's what ritual basically is,

Is an attempt to engage larger forces on our behalf or on the community's behalf or on the,

You know,

The earth's behalf.

I was actually a rare bird that I grew up with ritual.

My parents had a death altar in our living room.

It was always kind of embarrassing when people came over because they had like the Tibetan house of the dead on it,

And my mom grew up in Peru,

And so it was like part of the Peruvian culture,

And my dad was Buddhist,

Was part of the Buddhist culture,

And their death altar is full.

The older you get,

The more you got on your death altar.

And so then I started a death altar in our living room,

And it's like,

You know,

It's got like my stillborn baby's footprints on it.

Yeah,

That's a conversation starter.

My kids know about it.

It's not a secret,

And it actually explains a lot between how I parented my first versus how I parent my youngest,

That grief,

How it influenced me as a mother and continues to influence me as a mother because it woke me up to something,

Which is everything I love I will lose,

Including my children.

You know,

I feel grief on the freeway.

I felt grief yesterday in my kitchen.

My son was in there.

My 15-year-old son was in there making a smoothie with his shirt off.

This is what you get with a teenager,

His shirt off.

And I look at him,

And I'm like,

Where's my little boy with his skinny little arms that I could wrap my whole hand around?

Like I could wrap my whole hand around this little arm,

And there's loss.

And if we do not honor that,

I would feel so lost in it.

It just would be so overwhelming.

I would be pushing him away.

Or there is something about rituals that we can do in the rites of passage of our adolescence that we've also lost.

I mean,

Those are built into so many of our religions and so many of our ancient practices of growing up,

And we've lost those rituals as well.

So there's lots of ways you can do an altar in your living room,

But it's just not part of our conversation or our ways of being.

No,

No,

I think you're right.

But there is so much,

Again,

Ritualistic behavior in our society.

You know,

Going to a sporting event,

Graduation,

You know,

There's so many things that are so close to being ritual.

If we,

Again,

Invoked more of the sacred,

More of a sense of intentionality,

You know,

The purpose of ritual,

Whether it's healing or transformation or initiation or identifying some new identity in your being,

Like elderhood,

That would be wonderful.

So I'm curious about you,

Francis Weller.

Like,

How did you get to this work?

Because you must have gone through tremendous loss to know it so well.

I'm imagining that you've been through things that have led you to do this work.

You don't talk about it much in your interviews.

Yeah,

Of course.

Anything that we teach,

We teach because we have had to encounter it.

We don't teach what we don't know,

You know.

That's abstraction,

And that's fine.

But no,

There's been a fair number of losses,

Yes,

In my life,

Beginning very young in my life with my dad.

He had a massive stroke when I was very young and never spoke again.

And so,

In some sense,

My youth ended in that very abrupt moment in 1973,

I think it was,

A long time ago.

And then I,

In a sense,

Became the pseudo-father.

I had to feed him and take care of him and,

You know,

Be jettisoned into a much larger world than I was prepared to be in.

And there was also no space to really process that loss,

You know,

None,

Because suddenly we're back into emergency mode.

We're in survival mode.

And how do we take care of all the things that need to get taken care of?

But the biggest erosion was my sense of my own value,

My own worth.

The circumstances around my youth generated a lot of feelings of shame,

Of worthlessness.

And so one of the biggest erosions in my life was a sense of value and dignity and the amount of self-hatred and contempt that I carried for,

Oh God,

Most of the first 40 years of my life.

Even though I was doing this work in the world,

Beginning in my late 20s,

I still couldn't shake this feeling of being defective and deformed and unworthy of belonging or love.

So that's a huge amount of erosion.

And I began studying with this African teacher,

Maladoma Somé,

And I wrote him a letter and said,

I don't know what's going on,

But I need help.

And he invited me to come down.

He was living in Oakland at the time,

So I went down to see him.

And what I identified was that I was inside village for the first time in my life.

That frequency was given,

And my psyche was responding to the frequency.

It knew there was a holding space now that had the right frequency for this grief to be expressed.

That was my beginning.

This was 1995,

So what,

30 years ago?

Was my beginning in understanding that grief is not something I'm supposed to just shove away because it would expose me as,

Again,

Broken,

Unworthy,

Defective,

Flawed.

But that through that grieving,

Those places at the second gate,

The places that I've not known,

Love,

Were finally being held,

Finally being blessed.

James Hillman once said that people come to therapy not so much to have their wounds fixed,

But to have their wounds blessed.

And that's what it felt like.

It was finally my wounds were being blessed.

They weren't commentaries on me.

They weren't definitions that said I'm broken and lose shape,

And they were just simply the experiences that I had and now being able to grieve them.

It's been incredibly freeing,

So I can actually be back in the world again wholeheartedly.

There's such a knitting together of trauma and that feeling of defectiveness for so many people.

For me,

It's the same thing.

It's like tied up in the painful experience that I went through as an adolescent is my defectiveness,

The feeling of defectiveness that I carry.

And then I do all this sort of,

My girlfriend said the other day,

You're really good at sublimination.

You're really good at it.

I do all this performance stuff to get away from the defectiveness.

And it's actually,

I need to go back to that part that's entangled in the trauma,

But not alone and letting people in to see it.

This part,

This corner of me that I really,

Really don't like,

I really can't stand it.

I don't even want to get close to it.

But then if I've had one or two or five people see that corner of me and still love me,

Then it is that healing that you're talking about.

And that's the long dark.

I mean,

I think there's the long dark of our own stuff that we have to learn how to be with,

Too.

Yeah,

We can be with the big long dark.

Yeah.

Thank you for sharing that,

Francis.

Oh,

You're welcome.

I mean,

Trauma,

What makes trauma trauma is that it's uncontained.

You know,

I share the story in The Wild Lodge of Sorrow about a young woman that I met when I was in Malidoma's Village in West Africa.

And she was so joyful.

And she also had this scar across her face.

Half her face was scarred.

And I asked what had happened to her.

And he said,

Oh,

It was terrible.

Her mother threw boiling water on her in the fit of rage one day.

I said,

Well,

What happened?

He said,

Well,

The whole village got around this young woman and said,

This had nothing to do with you.

You are beautiful.

You are ours.

You are loved.

You are cherished.

And in that moment,

I understood that what could have been a traumatic event was dissipated into a grievous event.

I was sad that that happened.

But trauma becomes a definition,

Right?

Like,

I somehow deserve that.

I wasn't good enough.

I wasn't what they wanted.

I was wrong.

I was bad.

Whatever we interiorize from trauma that's not witnessed is what really becomes the trauma.

Because a painful encounter all by itself is not necessarily traumatic.

But unwitnessed,

Uncontained trauma.

Hillman also said that any wound experienced without containment can be life-threatening.

Wow.

So,

You know,

We may not die from it,

But some part of our life begins to diminish when we don't.

Like,

Those little corners of yourself that you feel are unacceptable,

By keeping them locked away,

We are diminished,

Right?

The vitality that could come out of their presence in your life,

In my life,

That's part of what makes us human,

You know?

My shame has become my medicine,

You know?

But as long as I kept it at bay and pushed it away,

My first words to my therapist when I seriously got into therapy in my,

I don't know,

Mid-twenties,

My first words to him were,

Well,

I want you to help me get rid of some parts of me.

Right,

Of course.

He'd be kind of,

You know,

Smile at that and,

You know,

Thankfully did not buy into the agenda.

Because any agenda based on that kind of self-hatred is bound to fail.

Psyche will not participate in that agenda.

So until I could begin to say that these are outcast brothers of mine,

Weakness,

Inadequacy,

Shame,

Loneliness,

Fear,

Again,

Can I get my arms around them?

That's the imitation to immensity,

Is to,

Can I get my arms around them,

You know?

There's a way in which whatever we reject becomes a place of psychic attention,

You know?

We're almost bound to pay attention to it if it's,

Psyche keeps bringing us back to those places of wounds that have not been reconciled,

That have not been held adequately.

Yeah,

There's the wounds that we haven't tended to,

Or weren't tended to,

That we carry forward.

And in some ways I feel like I'm like reliving my adolescence right now and a lot of like thrashing about in my adolescence because there's pieces of it that I haven't really fully worked through that I'm working through now.

But then there's also the traumas of our world.

I was talking with a good friend of mine last night.

We were just at a concert and she's an attorney.

She just went back to work.

Her job is to oversee all this paperwork for prosecution of domestic abuse and child abuse.

So she's reading through from eight to five every day.

She's just like reading through all these papers and she's just overseeing it all.

And what she was saying was at the end of the day,

She's consumed so much of this and she doesn't know what to do with it.

And then she's also not,

She used to go up in court and like fight for these folks,

Right?

But she's not doing that anymore.

So it's just like all inside of her.

And it made me think about how we feel when we read the news.

That's what I write about in the new book,

What is the Medicine?

How do we do this?

How do we not just collapse and bury ourselves in distraction?

But there are medicines available,

Which is fortunate.

The first one we've talked a little bit about,

Which is friendship and community.

You know,

That we can't possibly engage the long dark or the news of the day or eight hours of digesting this material without friendship.

You know,

She has you.

She can talk about this with you.

The second thing I mentioned was imagination.

The third thing is what I call the deep time ancestral inheritance,

That we're not the first one facing a long dark.

How did our ancestors do this?

How did they get through the long dark?

There is what I call a trail on the ground.

If we get quiet enough and listen to hear,

We have a wisdom that knows how to hold each other in sorrow and in trauma and overwhelm and in loneliness.

We know that.

One thing I wrote about in that essay is that what is the medicine we need for the long dark,

But also what medicine do we bring to the long dark?

And lastly,

And surprisingly,

Is what medicine do we find in the long dark?

That there actually is medicine in the long dark for us.

So those medicines,

What we need is the ones I just mentioned.

What we bring is our own wounds.

Our own wounds are gateways into our own medicine.

I remember giving a talk years ago,

And at five in the morning I woke up with this line that had to be put into this talk on wounds.

And the line was,

Our wounds are the unripened seeds of initiation.

And so when we begin to hold our wounds from soul's perspective,

They are the gateways into our medicine.

Like I said before,

My shame has become the rootstock of my medicine.

I was given a name by the people of West Africa.

The name translates as,

He who set straight the bone.

So I can go into those very twisted places of shame and self-contempt and help reset the bone,

You know,

Not to take away anything,

But the commentaries on those stories.

Can we set those straight again?

Can we get the bone lined up again?

It hurts to reset bones.

It takes a lot of courage.

It does.

It does.

It does.

All right.

You're a courageous human.

Yeah.

And then also another medicine that we bring to the long dark is our capacity to separate from the wound.

That's an amazingly important psychological skill.

So with your friend,

You know,

To be able to separate from what she just ingested for eight hours and to remember her larger identity,

To remember her capacity to have friendships and to relish in beauty and to call upon story and humor and imagination,

And we have what we need.

And we also can bring that into ritual,

You know,

For her when she comes home,

What is her ritual of return?

How does she set down the day and say,

This is not mine to carry?

And sometimes you need to take it into a larger ritual,

Which we could talk about.

And then the medicine we find in the long dark,

The first two were kind of surprising to me.

The first two are kind of a pair,

Rest and patience,

You know.

But in the long dark,

Starkness invites slowing down.

It invites us becoming more akin to a feeling of rest and rejuvenation.

And we're not good on rest in this culture.

And patience is that ability to really grant spaciousness to mystery,

To not knowing.

You know,

Like I said,

We're not going to think our way through the long dark,

But we might be able to be imagined into the long dark.

And you also write about the beauty,

The way that I connect,

I think,

To my ancestors is I always have plants or flowers,

Something alive.

Even when I was a kid,

I had plants in my room.

And when I got scared,

I'd take a plant under the covers with me and I'd pull the covers over and I would go into that dark.

I learned about how they give us oxygen.

I won't suffocate in here if I have my little plant with me.

It was something that was taught to me by my mom and my grandma.

Sometimes we want to go and appropriate other cultures outside,

But we can also go into our own,

Like you're saying,

Our own lineage,

Our own culture.

What do we remember about our own little pieces,

Little fragments of it?

And it feels right when it comes from your lineage sometimes.

I'm curious about that for my friend to ask her about what could she even put in her ritual in her day of while she's reading those papers to remember her immensity.

Like there is something so much bigger than what's written in these papers or something that's so much bigger than what's written in the news.

And it's often not written in.

They don't write about that part,

The immense part.

No,

Nor about beauty.

I mean,

Beauty is probably the most neglected elements in our psychological world.

I mean,

Hillman was probably one of the first ones to readdress it as not so much as trying to be beautiful,

But to increase our capacity to be touched by beauty,

You know,

What he called an aesthetic response,

You know,

And that ability to be moved by beauty.

He said that beauty is the means by which the gods touch the senses,

Reach the heart,

And attract us into life.

Wow,

Without beauty,

What is it that attracts us into life?

And if we're just surrounded by so much ugliness right now,

That we can contract from life.

We can withdraw from life.

So,

Everyday epiphanies of beauty of tulips and roses,

And we have sweet peas growing out there in profusions right now,

So every day,

Multiple times a day,

I go out there and just inhale the sweet peas and,

You know,

The beauty of the dahlias and roses,

And we need that.

That is medicinal.

That is absolutely medicinal.

We can't survive without beauty.

You see the beauty,

But in the beauty,

You see the loss,

And that's what a lot of,

I think,

Your teachings have offered me in my clinical work and in my own personal life is that it's all woven together,

And that when we enter into the grief and,

As you say,

Become an apprentice to sorrow,

There's so much richness in there,

A rich life that we can experience together.

Oh,

Absolutely.

Absolutely,

Dana.

Just,

You know,

That's such an important thing to close on of just being able to taste the bittersweet.

You know,

That life is really hard,

And life is exquisite,

And can we hold those simultaneously?

That's part of the training of the elder.

That's the deep work of the apprenticeship,

Is to relish the bittersweet.

You know,

That is really at the heart of our maturation.

Thank you for sharing a bit of your hard life that's made you so exquisite,

Too.

Now I can feel your dad with us,

Too.

So,

Thank you,

Francis Weller.

Thank you so much,

Dana.

Yes,

Thank you.

Good to be with you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wise Effort Podcast.

Wise Effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you,

And when you do so,

You'll get to savor the good of your life along the way.

I would like to thank my team,

My partner in all things,

Including the producer of this Craig,

Ashley Hyatt,

The podcast manager,

And thank you to Ben Gold at Bell and Branch for our music.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.

Reviews

I have a combination of happiness, sorrow, sadness, excitement, tears, joy- a myriad of visceral emotions to what was just shared by both you and your guest speaker, Francis Weller.