Getting *active* with our grief
Part 3 of our Five Gates of Grief series
How actively have you grieved today?
“Active grieving” might not sound like a way most of us are excited to spend our time, but perhaps it is just what we need.
“Not having practices to move through grief keeps our lives small.”
-Francis Weller
Just knowing that we need to give space to our grief and feeling into our intuition about it can be a powerful next step.
Feeling into layers of grief that may be lurking in the shadows, unnamed, might just be what we need as well, as we touched on in parts 1 and 2 , which name Weller’s Five Gates of Grief, of this series.
There are also a whole host of professionals and grass-roots movements to help us with this. (One we recently found and love is the not-for-profit organization You’re Going to Die, which holds a weekly community grief release every Wednesday evening.)
We are not meant to walk this path alone.
Weller emphasizes the importance of keeping grief a communal experience, and has been holding space for rituals around grief since 1997.
"[Grief has] always been shared and consequently has traditionally been regarded as a sacred process. Too often in modern times our grief becomes private, carrying an invisible mantle of shame forcing our sorrow underground, hidden from the eyes that would offer healing," he said.
The loss of these processes themselves is a source of grief we may not even know we hold, and speaks to Weller's fourth and fifth gates - that which our souls expected to experience in this lifetime, and didn’t; and ancestral grief.
Though Weller’s gates open up a slew of seemingly (because truly, they was there all along) new sources of grief in our already taxing everyday lives, he encourages us to be grateful for the experience. “A mature man, a mature woman, knows how to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. When we learn how to carry both together, now we are in the prayer of life,” Weller says.
It can be as easy to get lost in our grief as it can be to get lost in the delusion of toxic positivity. This reminder to hold both ends of the spectrum of our experience, feels like something meant to keep us individually and collectively in balance, whole.
(If interested, check out this interactive experience on The Five Gates, which includes a meditation at the end to help you feel into the gates somatically - or you can access the meditation only here as well.)
To end this series on Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief, we invite you to go deeper, and/or to join in the conversation about this topic over in our Five Gates thread.
We invite you to get active, and to comment with what you chose to do - or what’s holding you back.
Did you journal, sing, dance, speak…your grief?
Close your eyes and scribble your grief?
Have you found exactly where it is living in your body, and spoken to it yet? (What is it trying to tell you?)
Allow yourself to be seen by someone in all of your vulnerability and honesty?
Did you join in on a communal grief experience like this one from You’re Going to Die?
With wishes of gentleness for all of you, dear grieving ones <3
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The preceding was our take on Francis Weller’s work and is intended to share - but not to prescribe. We know grief can be many things - but rarely easy - and encourage all to seek help who may feel overwhelmed while moving through these experiences. Grief is hard, because life is precious <3.
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Resources:
Francis Weller, Wild Edge of Sorrow, book and web site, https://www.francisweller.net/the-wild-edge-of-sorrow-the-sacred-work-of-grief.html
Francis Weller on Grief (2013), Video:
You’re Going to Die, http://www.yg2d.com (We recommend following their socials)