The Five Gates Of Grief With Francis Weller

Many of us think about grief as what happens when someone we love dies, but we grieve so much more than that. We have little losses every day–our bodies age, our relationships change, and our planet suffers. This week on the podcast, Francis Weller shares the five gates of grief that all humans walk through and offers us insights into how ritual, community, and compassion can be resources in our apprenticeship with grief.

Transcript

Welcome back to Your Life in Process.

Many of us think about grief as what happens when someone we love dies,

But we grieve so much more than that.

We have little losses every day,

Like the grief that you feel when you see that your child is growing up,

Or the grief of your parents aging,

Friends who have seemed to disappear in your life,

Or the ending of things,

The ending of a career,

The ending of a marriage,

Even the end of our own health.

And what Francis Weller teaches us is that much of your grief is not personal.

It's part of our collective experience of being human.

We carry the grief of our ancestors,

The grief of our planet,

As we watch its natural habitats and species be lost.

We carry the grief of war,

Of racism,

Of political division.

I first started reading Francis Weller's book on grief a number of years ago,

When I was traveling through my own grief of having had a stillborn baby,

And his book became a refuge for me.

I would read little snippets of it here and there,

And feel oddly comforted in reading about grief while I was grieving.

It's often something that we like to avoid,

And many people may even not click on this podcast and listen to it when they see the headline of grief,

Where others may feel like they are craving it.

When your grief is intense,

You want to be with other people that are grieving as well.

And yet we live in a culture that has forgotten how to grieve.

We've forgotten how to have ritual.

We've forgotten how to be with other people that are grieving,

Or even celebrate in the fruits,

The ripening that happens as a result of grief.

So today's episode is a little different.

You know,

I like to bring on folks from all different facets of well-being,

And I think Francis Weller is the first Jungian therapist that I've ever interviewed.

I tend to lean towards cognitive behavioral therapists,

ACT therapists,

Or contemplative teachers.

Francis Weller is a psychotherapist,

A writer,

And what he calls a soul activist.

He's author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow,

Rituals of Renewal,

And The Sacred Work of Grief,

The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation,

And In the Absence of the Ordinary.

He's introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people.

For over 39 years,

He's worked as a psychotherapist and developed a style he calls soul-centered psychotherapy.

He's currently on staff at Commonweal Cancer Help Program,

And he's completing his fourth book,

The Alchemy of Initiation,

Soul Work and the Art of Ripening.

At the end of our conversation,

I will,

As always,

Offer you some practices,

And I hope that you remain open to receive these beautiful teachings of Francis Weller.

I want to let you know about a few events that I have coming up in the new year.

I love teaching in person.

It brings me so much vitality to see your faces and your living,

Breathing bodies.

And so there's some places that we could meet up if you want to meet up in the new year.

First,

In January,

Starting the third Friday of January,

I'm going to be leading a morning meditation at Yoga Soup on Friday mornings,

8 a.

M.

To 8.

40.

And that's going to be live and online.

So you can sign up for that at yogasoup.

Com.

On February 19th,

2023,

I'm going to be offering a live in-person workshop at Yoga Soup,

Body Image Flexibility,

Finding Freedom in the Body that You Have.

We're going to be using ACT,

And it's going to be experiential.

And then April 15th to 22nd,

I'm in Costa Rica at Blue Spirit.

Come with me.

I just have like two spots left,

And I know that you're on the fence about it.

Get off the fence and come with me to Costa Rica.

It is a life-changing and life-enhancing and life-lengthening experience.

So hope to see you there.

Well,

It's wonderful to join you,

Frances.

I just mentioned that you came into my life actually not as a therapy tool,

But actually in my own practice.

And I have a journal practice in the mornings and a meditation practice,

And I have books that I read and reread.

I open them up to just a random page and read a few lines and then journal for the day.

And yours is one of them.

I find it to be like a book of poetry and inspiration,

And it is read beautifully linearly,

But also just spot treatment,

You know,

Open to a page and you'll receive what you need.

But I came to you at a time of grief in my life,

And it's wonderful to have you here.

I'm delighted to be here,

Diana,

And thank you for the invitation to come and share our mutual concerns.

In the preface of your book,

There's a line that stands out in some ways as sort of the thesis of the whole thing,

Which is about your apprenticeship to grief.

And you write that every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow.

We must learn the art and craft of grief,

Discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us.

Let's begin there in terms of what you mean by an apprenticeship.

Many of us want to get through sorrow and get out of there as fast as possible,

But why would we see this as something to learn from?

Well,

Partly because grief is never too far from our shoulders,

From our heart.

It surrounds us constantly.

So it's not something that you have an event of grief,

You know.

Sometimes we do have an intense occurrence,

A loss of someone that we love.

But generally,

Grief comes around us in many,

Many ways.

So if I'm unskilled in being able to metabolize what's arriving at my door,

I have to learn to live very strategically and find ways to avoid the confrontation or the encounter with my life.

I like the idea of the apprenticeship because it implies a long process of learning,

You know,

As they did in the old traditions,

And they still do.

You would undertake a learning that could last for 5,

10,

15 years.

And that apprenticeship was one of devotion,

One of commitment.

And at the end of that process,

You would get this sense of mastery.

You've learned to master this craft,

Whether it's painting or weaving or carpentry or whatever.

In terms of soul work,

The apprenticeship does not lead to mastery,

At least to elderhood.

We have so few elders in this culture because so few of us have undertaken this apprenticeship.

So few of us have been encouraged to stay in the fierce embrace and engagement with sorrow.

So that ripening doesn't set in.

I just did a half-day workshop with a mindfulness training group.

And by the time we were done,

They recognized,

You know,

We don't ever talk about grief.

This is a place that's almost completely absent in our training.

So what is it about this culture that bypasses sorrow so thoroughly?

We don't talk about it,

But it's right under the surface.

It's so close.

And that's what strikes me.

Sometimes in workshops that I do with therapists,

We'll create a little belonging altar.

And I'll just sort of surprise them and say,

Find something in nature or bring something that maybe you have in your bag.

Sometimes these are on retreats,

And they'll kind of go through their stuff and they'll place it on the altar and then we'll form these groups.

And more often than not,

When people share,

It is things that are related to their grief.

You know,

It's things like,

Oh,

This is my wedding ring that I carry with me every time I travel from my wife that died.

Or this is a little card that my now 22-year-old daughter wrote me when she was two,

And I keep it in my wallet.

And there's an element of it's like it's right under the surface as soon as we give permission to it to start talking about it.

And then what I find is as soon as we start talking about,

Especially in circles,

It changes the energy of the group very quickly,

The connection,

The vibrancy.

And that's another sort of side of grief that you talk about,

Which is the life that comes to us from actually going there.

It's a very alive feeling talking about our sorrow.

So first,

Maybe let's start with why don't we go there?

Like,

What is it about,

And we say our culture,

And there's an assumption there when you say our culture,

That both of us are white.

We live in California.

We have some assumptions about what we mean by our culture.

But why is it so challenging to go there?

White capitalistic culture is basically driven by one image,

And that's the heroic image.

And so we're always supposed to be in control,

Always rising,

Always succeeding,

Never showing vulnerability.

And so we've abandoned the territory,

Basically,

Of grief,

Which is seen as weakness,

As failure almost.

So we're grief-phobic.

So we don't know how to go there.

We avoid it.

Even at funerals,

We apologize for crying,

Particularly in white funerals.

I'm sure you've heard many times in your practice when someone gets close to that edge of grief,

They go,

God,

If I go there,

I'm never coming back.

But in reality,

I say to them,

If you don't go there,

You're never coming back.

Because so much of our vital life gets locked away in these territories.

And so part of bringing grief back into our life is so that we can actually get current,

So we can actually be in the current of our life.

We can actually not just spend most of our lifetime facing our histories.

We can actually come into the current moment.

When we open to grief,

We feel alive,

Not happy,

But we are alive.

And that's what I just trust grief as a means of deepening our experience.

I was in West Africa some years ago,

And I remember saying to a woman there,

I said,

You have so much joy.

And her immediate response was,

Well,

That's because I cry a lot.

Such an un-American phrase.

You wouldn't say that here.

You'd say that's because I keep myself busy or I just bought a new car or I just went shopping.

But it would have nothing to do with tears or grief.

But here's that intuition that when we open that deeper register of sorrow,

The upper registers of joy become accessible.

There is a natural flow of grief.

We're not supposed to carry it around like a U-Haul.

I mean,

It's supposed to keep moving through us.

Well,

You mentioned the fear of if I go there,

I'll get stuck in it.

A related fear is if I go there,

Then you'll see it.

That's what I see when you talk about apologizing in my practice where someone gets to the edge of grief.

And I really especially see this with men where they get to the edge of their grief and they start to tear up.

And then I can feel it in the room like they're using effort for will to put it back in again.

And it's in part,

I think,

And even though I'm their therapist and we're in private and this is what people assume we do in therapy is cry.

Even though all those things,

They have this automatic,

I got to get that back inside.

I don't want you to see it.

And then I also am ashamed of it and it's ugly.

And what will you think?

It's weak.

It's all these things that we've been taught.

But grief is more than just losing someone that you love.

It's more than just losing a parent or losing a child.

You talk about these five gates that we are all walking through.

And that has been such a helpful framework for me as a therapist because I can start to identify grief in my patients and my clients much more quickly as the different gates that they're walking through.

And it's not always the gate of someone died.

It's the gate of,

Oh,

You're going through a divorce,

Even though you don't want to live with this person anymore.

It's the end of a marriage that you are hoping to get out of.

You are grieving and you're grieving the idea of what your life would have been like.

You're grieving the loss of that.

You're grieving the idea of family,

The belief around what you think a family is.

So let's talk about some of these gates.

The first gate is everything you love you will lose.

Let's start there because I think that's also the one that most of us think about.

What does that mean,

Everything we love we will lose?

It's kind of a fierce truth,

Isn't it?

I mean,

We get to hold on to nothing.

I mean,

This is the Buddhist idea of impermanence,

Right?

That we can love it fully,

But it's not something that we get to possess.

Everything will slip through our hands,

Whether through their disappearance,

Through death,

Or divorce,

Or my disappearance through death.

And people say,

Well,

Yes,

But I get to keep the memory of that love.

I say,

But only if you honor the rights of sorrow do you get to do that.

See,

If you can keep the heart open to grief,

Grief is the animation of the love that you had for that person that you lost.

It's something that's too hard to endure.

But we're not supposed to only endure grief.

We're meant to engage the grief and work with it and begin to bring more imagination to what's actually going on in that process.

So what is a practice?

Like what would be an example of like how we what would be an apprenticeship skill we could?

One thing you might do is continue the conversation with the one who has been lost.

You know,

We think that when someone dies that that's the end of the relationship.

But you could continue to have an ongoing conversation with this person.

We seem to not have much of a relationship to ancestors.

And so one of the things we can do is just keep the conversation going.

Speak to them.

Have a shrine in your home.

Have some way of honoring that loss.

Talk about them with friends.

Keep that relationship warm rather than having it just kind of be something we're supposed to get over.

Oftentimes clients will talk about,

And I've had this experience myself,

About spirit animals that they associate with the person that they've lost.

Whenever that animal shows up or that I had a client once that talked about a number.

Like whenever it was their father's favorite number,

Whenever I saw that number,

I reminded them.

So anytime it was like 333,

Okay,

That's the time to check in with my dad.

And that's a way to keep that,

Like you said,

Keep them alive in your current experience.

It's not about getting stuck in the past.

It's that they're present with you in the here and now.

Right.

Yeah.

So the second gate of grief,

People often don't think about this as something that we're grieving.

But it's the places that have not known love.

And I see this gate is related to shame,

Related to the sort of parts of ourselves that have not known love and that are sort of lonely in there,

Grieving those parts as well.

Can you speak to that,

The second gate of grief?

No,

You're absolutely right.

Unfortunately,

Through educational systems,

Family systems,

Religious systems,

We're told that there are parts of us that are not acceptable.

So we cut them off,

We cut off our anger,

We cut off our sadness,

We cut off our exuberance,

Our sensuality.

And we begin to relate to these parts of ourselves in the same way they were related to,

Which is oftentimes with judgment or contempt.

And we feel ashamed of these pieces,

Like you said.

And so that's a loss to our integrity.

And any loss is worthy of grieving,

But we can't grieve for something that we hold with contempt.

So that's the problem.

The restoration and the reclamation of these pieces requires warmth and compassion and welcoming.

So I know you probably experienced this too.

People come to therapy and there's often this urgency to change.

But underneath that urgency is a lot of self-hatred.

I remember going to my therapy for the first real serious time and I said,

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

Like I hated these parts of me.

They were what was causing me trouble in the world.

And if I could get rid of them,

Then I'd be acceptable.

And of course,

My mission failed miserably,

And these parts became what redeemed me and my place in the world.

But I really had to find some way of bringing compassion.

So my life has been a lot about how do I welcome all of these pieces back?

And that comes through the gateway of grieving them.

They have to see my own remorse,

My own loss,

That it mattered that they were gone.

And I had to go out and make amends with them because I maintained the distance through my own judgment,

My own criticism,

My own hatred of these parts.

So I had to go and make amends.

Sometimes the making amends,

Or at least in my practice of making amends with those parts of myself,

Has been through letter writing with those parts.

And actually letting them,

For me,

Mine is more around parts of my body that I've banished or neglected or harmed.

And I went through,

I think it was through a therapy practice where I had different parts of my body write letters to me,

Like,

Your esophagus,

Let your esophagus write you a letter about what it's been like to be your esophagus.

And how,

When we can listen to those parts,

Give them a little bit of room,

Then yeah,

The amends almost come flowing.

You can go passion for yourself,

But that's an interesting kind of the way of looking at it through the lens of that there's loss there,

There's grief there.

And we can't,

What you said,

We can't grieve something that we hate or that we've banished.

Grief rituals are very much part of your work.

And you're sort of booked out.

It's hard to get into one of your grief rituals.

Everyone wants to come in and grieve together.

So tell us a little bit about that,

Because it's something that humans have been doing forever,

And yet something that we think is totally wacko now.

Like,

That is crazy that you would go somewhere and go grieve with a group of people that you don't know.

So tell us a little bit about that.

What is a grief ritual?

What does it look like?

Well,

You know,

When we first started,

It was hard to convince people to come.

Like,

Why would I want to go spend a weekend crying with people I don't even know?

And over the years,

As the veneer of denial has been cracking,

The need has gotten greater and greater.

So we have people coming from Australia and England and Canada,

All across the United States,

Just to have the privilege of being able to grieve side by side with another human being.

But even that's part of the symptom of our problem,

Is that you have to travel 10,

000 miles to grieve.

I often begin our grief rituals by saying,

Isn't it strange?

We need a workshop on grief.

But given all that,

They are amazed at what happens when you get a group of people who are willing to speak to the heart of their grief.

When we open the circle,

There's usually 25 to 40 people.

And when they go around,

I ask them to share one thread of grief that they've walked in with,

Because they usually have more than one thread.

And by the time everyone shares,

I ask,

Well,

Has anyone heard anything that they could relate to?

And they may not have had that experience,

Like a suicide or cancer or death of a child,

But they could certainly understand it,

Because we all understand loss.

We all understand grief.

And I say,

Well,

This is our first lesson,

That it isn't my grief.

It is our grief.

That grief is shared.

Grief is communal.

Imagine what that feels like to have 10 people by your side,

All weeping at the same time.

It's amazing.

This is some people's worst nightmare.

It's interesting,

Because it makes me also think about the conversations that people are having around psychedelics and MDMA.

And when I've had clients that talk about therapeutic psychedelic experiences,

They often will say things like,

I just went in there and cried for eight hours.

And it was so great,

Because I didn't care.

And I could just talk through every single thing.

And so there's a liberation of the mind.

The default mode network gets kind of quieted down a little bit,

So that you can really enter into it.

The Batch of the Gates of Grief,

The third gate,

Is related to what you're talking about,

Because it's the sorrows of the world.

And I think that's something that's more at the surface for people right now.

And that can be everything from the horrors of racism,

The climate change and destruction.

Sometimes I'll look out at my brown lawn,

Because we refused to water the poor thing for years.

And I feel sorrowful.

It's so dead,

Because it hasn't been watered in the way that things used to be watered in California.

It's just more desert.

But the loss of our species,

It's immense.

And how does one walk through that gate?

And what are some of the practices that can help us with that?

Because certainly trying to tune out from the sorrows or being addicted to technology,

Just to continue to read them on our phones,

Is not helpful either.

Yeah,

I remember when we began doing grief rituals,

There might be one or two people in the circle there because of earth grief.

Now it's oftentimes well over half the people are there because of what's crushing their hearts,

And they have no place to take it.

So I've done a lot of grief rituals with environmental activists who are facing burnout,

Again,

Because of the amount of grief they ingest but don't express.

So we want to keep that cycle moving in and out.

And there's many ways we can honor our earth grief.

My friend Trevi Johnson wrote a book called Radical Joy for Hard Times.

She goes out to places that have been desecrated,

Like clear cuts,

And offers rituals there.

They create beauty in these places.

They'll make a mandala of rose petals and different ways of saying,

We see what's happened here,

And we're not going to ignore it.

We're going to honor what's happened here.

So we do a lot of work with just being able to acknowledge in our own neighborhoods the many ways that the earth is suffering,

Whether it's the disappearance of salmon.

We have very,

Very few salmon coming up our creeks now.

So how do we acknowledge that?

How do we hold that?

Well,

You can't do it individually.

It's too great a weight.

So we have to gather in community and consistently do the work of grieving together.

There's a practice from Joanna Macy,

I'm sure that you've heard of it,

Of the Council for All Beings.

Yes,

Yeah.

And we did it last year.

I was leading a retreat in Costa Rica over Earth Day.

I mean,

What a place to be on Earth Day,

Costa Rica.

And in the Council for All Beings,

What we did,

I kind of modified it for the group,

But we laid down and we had sort of a being come to us that is someone that's touched,

A being that's either touched us or is calling for our help or in some way we're moved to connect with in a sort of in a visualization.

And then we stood around this water,

This kind of area of flowing water out in nature,

And each one of us went up to a rock in the center and we spoke for that being.

Like,

I'm Diana.

I spoke for the coyotes,

The poor coyotes that come and eat my chickens.

But I have connected with the coyotes for this Council of All Beings because they're coming down here to eat my chickens because they don't have other things to eat.

They have to come down.

And also I'm in their space,

Obviously.

They were here first.

But I spoke for the coyotes and the coyotes that we left behind when everything was burning and I was driving away in my nice vehicle.

So it's powerful to start to make contact with that grief.

And one of the things that you wrote in Wild Age of Pharaoh that I was like,

Oh,

That is so good,

Is you said,

It's just good manners.

Like,

Why would we grieve something that is on its way out?

And how does that actually change the world if we're doing these types of rituals?

But you said it's good manners to grieve.

Can you speak to that a little bit?

Well,

My friend Carolyn Baker was doing a podcast and invited me onto her podcast and she sent me this list of questions.

And one of them was,

Well,

If we are ending,

If this is really what we're facing as a species and other species are disappearing,

Why don't we just go to excess,

Drink and do drugs?

And,

You know,

Why should we honor this?

Why should we work with grief?

And I was dumbfounded.

And I went to bed that night just going,

I don't know how to answer this question.

I said to my wife,

I woke up in the morning,

I looked at her,

I said,

I think I have a response.

I said,

It's about good manners.

That no matter what is happening,

It is right for us to grieve for the disappearance of a species.

It's right for us to take down the dams as a way that might make the species live even after we disappear.

Whatever we can do by the breaking open of the heart,

Which happens primarily through grief,

That can help the species or the planet thrive beyond our being here is good manners.

It is the right thing for us to do.

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

There is something about walking through that gate that feels very powerful.

Can we speak on that one for a moment?

That one slowly emerged over many,

Many grief rituals.

People would start saying things like,

This is what I've been waiting for.

This is what I was hoping for,

Was a village,

Some place where I could be seen,

I could be welcomed for who I am,

Where I could express my grief whenever I needed to express it.

And then I realized that that is what we expected,

That our genetic and spiritual and psychological inheritance was developed over hundreds of thousands of years to expect the same things that our deep time ancestors expected,

Which was what I call the primary satisfactions.

To be together when times were hard,

To celebrate together,

To give thanks together,

To gather food together,

To sing together,

To hear the stories told at night or on the fire.

And almost none of that has taken shape in our lives.

In a culture,

There is some sense of emptiness and self-blame.

What did I do that this did not occur?

I feel like there's something missing in my life,

There's some gap,

There's some emptiness.

And then we try to fill it up with specialness,

Busyness,

Addiction,

Rank,

Privilege,

Power,

Well,

Material goods.

But that never satisfies what the soul is aching for,

Which are those original requirements,

What we expected and did not receive.

We don't even know to grieve this until we get a taste of it,

And then we go,

That's what I've been missing.

It isn't a personal failure,

It's a cultural failure.

We have not given our people an adequate sense of belonging,

An adequate sense of being held in times of trouble and sorrow.

So we are taught basically to fend for ourselves,

And this lingers upon us as a sense of solitary confinement.

And I'm curious about your work with cancer patients,

Because when I've worked with clients that are going through illness or cancer,

It feels very solitary.

It feels like I have to go off and do this treatment.

Oftentimes you have to leave your family,

Or you leave work and you go off,

And there's sort of the shame around it,

And you don't share about what you're going through because it feels like it's too much for people to handle.

So how do we make that bridge for folks?

What does that look like?

Well,

Fortunately for my contact with cancer patients is through the Cancer Help Program in Bolinas,

California,

Through Commonweal.

So we are recapitulating that original matrix for healing,

Communal,

Ritual,

Story,

Food,

Time together.

We are gathering the original threads of what the healing environment looked like,

And we're embodying that there.

Outside of that context,

When I'm working with an individual with cancer,

I'll say to them that they are going through a rough initiation.

And initiations make no sense outside of community.

So your cancer isn't just for you.

Your healing journey is not just for you.

It will make sense in the long run when you see that there's medicine that you've gathered as a giveaway.

So their rough initiation has to be set back into the context of belonging,

Into the context of community.

Yeah,

So that kind of relates to what you've written about in terms of becoming a sort of ancestors in training.

Like that there's wisdom that you are gaining through this experience that then becomes your offering,

And then you become that elder that our communities need.

Which kind of falls into this last gate,

Which is our ancestral grief.

The grief of those that came before us that we carry,

And that certainly science is starting to show is in our DNA,

It's in our bodies.

It's also just passed down through our learning histories.

But this idea of the challenges that our ancestors faced that we know and feel that also need to be grieved.

Yeah,

This one is getting more and more complicated,

This last gate.

The more I sit with it,

The more I see that almost all grief is ancestral grief.

The fact that I carry shame,

Well,

Where did that begin?

Is that an original wound that I'm carrying,

Or does that have generations before it?

Well,

Of course it does.

So much of what we're carrying in our bodies is not personal,

But it is inherited.

I'm the current curator of this grief,

And it's my job to work with it.

But it's also my job to understand what the essence of this grief has to do with.

Collectively,

In this country,

We're still dealing with the ancestral grief around racism,

And the Holocaust of millions of Indigenous people being killed.

And we've never really addressed it,

So this is the haunting of our ancestor.

This grief is still so vitally alive on this continent,

Because we never turn to face it.

And until we do,

These things will continue to torment us.

So this is part of the ancestral grief.

We could spend a long time talking about this one gate.

So it's what happened when our ancestors were severed from their homeland.

They lost place.

They oftentimes lost story.

They've lost traditions.

My parents spoke German to each other,

But never to us.

It was as if that language had to die.

So many,

Many things have just got severed,

And we were supposed to become somehow disconnected from our ancestral ground.

Well,

That's a profound loss.

It's a profound loss that we don't even really know,

Again,

How to register.

That's why all these four gates are great,

The last four.

We rarely have language for it.

We have imagination for it or rituals for it.

So that grief just lingers on us,

Like collects around us like sediment.

And as we begin to work it,

There is movement again,

There is warmth again,

And there is life again that rises up underneath what was oppressed by that weight,

Which is so oppressive,

So deadly.

So the practices for ancestral grief,

You said,

Is we begin to work it.

What does that mean?

Well,

We get people to begin to have a relationship with one or two ancestors,

And they do rituals for them.

We also recognize that while we're doing our work in that room,

When we're doing a grief ritual,

We're doing it for them as well.

Because once you get into that ritual space,

You're no longer time-bound,

Are you?

You're affecting future generations,

And you're affecting past generations.

And we're healing them as we're addressing this wound now.

But I think it's so important to have—I mean,

My shrine back here,

There's lots of ancestors back there,

And they're there helping me hold all that I do.

The other ancestral tree I would encourage people to work with is your soul lineage,

Not just your genetic lineage,

But your soul lineage.

Who are you all connected to through stroll?

Like for me,

I go back through James Hillman and Young and Rico and Heraclitus and Pacino,

And that's my soul lineage.

And they're also part of what I honor as my ancestors,

As well as this place I live.

The redwood trees,

These are all ancestors,

You know.

You need a great deal of wisdom there to work with.

Really,

There's that transgenerational transmission of trauma,

But there's also the transgenerational transmission of courage and imagination and fidelity and resilience.

Otherwise,

You and I would not be having this conversation.

So it's not just the trauma and the grief we're inheriting,

But it's also that other wellspring of possibility so that we can pass that on to the generations that are still dreaming themselves into being.

Yeah.

There's a beautiful practice from Thich Nhat Hanh.

You would take,

When you do the five mindfulness trainings with him,

It's the touchings of the earth.

And each touching of the earth,

You recognize something that you want to honor.

And one of them is your ancestors.

And you actually get down,

You go prostrate all the way.

You start standing,

And you get all the way down,

Prostrate,

Full belly to the floor,

Forehead to the floor.

I honor my ancestors,

And I connect deeply with them.

And it's pretty powerful to do that.

And it is a ritual.

It's a practice.

It's something that you repeat.

When I say powerful,

It's empowering to make contact with your ancestors.

And I would,

Yes,

Add to that.

For me,

It's spiritual teachers that I put in.

I don't relate so much to the white male psychologists of our past.

But for me,

It's spiritual teachers or people that have come into my life as mentors as well.

So this fifth gate is one that gives us strength as we have good manners for our ancestors as well.

Absolutely.

And it's a nice one to help us remember that we are not just a single cell bouncing off of other cells.

We are a wild inheritance of a rich,

Rich lineage.

And that is helpful in times when we feel afraid,

Is to know that we have this template of wisdom underneath us.

The last question I want to ask of you is that,

You know,

At the very beginning you shared about,

You know,

Sort of the becoming an elder.

And in many ways,

You've been practicing this grief apprenticeship for over,

You know,

You've been doing this for 39 years.

So I would say you may fit into the category of a true elder here.

And what is something that you would like to offer?

What is sort of a message you'd like to share with us?

It's a beautiful invitation.

I just think that we have to have faith that there is intelligence inside of grief and sorrow.

And it's not trying to take us hostage.

It's not trying to bring us into a place of dark depression.

It's actually trying to ripen us and deepen us so that we can stay connected to this extremely sumptuous,

Exquisite life that we have for such a brief time.

The first step is coming into right relationship with sorrow.

Don't push it away.

Don't drown in it either,

But learn to walk with it as a companion.

In my work,

I say the work of a mature human being is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other,

And to be stretched large by these two presences in our life.

If we only pick up grief,

Over time we will become bitter.

We will not sense that beauty and joy.

If we only pick up gratitude,

However,

We'll lack a depth of compassion for other people's sorrows.

But together,

They make the prayer of life.

Grief and joy,

Grief and gratitude.

Hold both,

Become immense,

Give what you can give to this world.

You are needed.

Thank you.

It's a beautiful way to end.

Thank you,

Diane.

So Francis Weller and I walked through the five gates of grief together.

And,

You know,

There's a myth to grief that we need to progress in some way.

He writes in his book that progress is one of our culture's most cherished fictions,

But it can do great harm when applied to the life of the soul.

Grief is not linear.

And as we learned from Francis Weller today,

It's something that we continue to revisit over the course of our lives and that we need to get better at visiting.

Grief is part of having a loving heart,

A beating heart.

The five gates of grief that Francis and I talked about were the first gate,

Which is everything we love,

We will lose.

You've already lost things that you love in your life.

And the practice this week around the first gate is to have a conversation with something or somebody that you have lost.

The second gate of grief is the places that have not known love.

So those are places within you that are shame spots.

And that is where self-compassion is a powerful tool.

I really like to do letter writing,

Compassionate letter writing,

Writing a letter from that part of you to you,

And then maybe you writing a letter back to that part of you.

The third gate is the sorrows of the world.

And that's where we talk about the collective grief that we have around the losses of our planet.

And grief rituals can be a beautiful practice for the sorrows of the world.

And that can be anything from joining a community,

Joining a church,

A song circle,

A community of people that meditate together.

Compassion meditation can be really powerful resources as well.

Inside LA and Mindful Heart programs are two programs that offer online meditation and compassion meditation.

And then the fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive.

Keeping a journal practice can be helpful with that fourth gate.

And finally,

Our ancestral grief,

Honoring and making contact with one or two of your ancestors,

Either getting a picture out or creating an altar.

Maybe it's practicing the five touchings of the earth.

I will put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Thank you for joining me today in this conversation.

It's always an honor and delight to share this space with you all.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Your Life in Process.

When you enter your life in process,

When you become psychologically flexible,

You become free.

If you like this episode or think it would be helpful to somebody,

Please leave a review over at podchaser.

Com.

And if you have any questions,

You can leave them for me by phone at 805-457-2776.

Or send me a voicemail by email at podcast at your life in process.

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I want to thank my team,

Craig,

Angela Stubbs,

Ashley Hyatt,

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

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

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