The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 3
One of the most essential skills we need to develop in our apprenticeship is our ability to stay present in our adult selves when grief arises. I have often witnessed, both in my private practice and in workshop settings, individuals regressing into a child-like state when feelings of grief emerge. They suddenly feel panicked, overwhelmed, hopeless, alone, and ashamed. They slide into another mode of being when sorrow comes near, one in which their perspectives, feelings, and behavior radically change. It is important to help them restore a connection with their adult selves or they risk slipping farther into their dissociated state and possibly getting lost there for a prolonged time.
The child-like state is what Jung called a complex. Complexes are fragmentary bundles of concentrated emotional energy formed when we were confronted with an experience too intense for us to successfully digest. In these moments, the psyche splinters off the difficult material and creates an autonomous, semi-contained bundle to hold the highly charged material. It is stunning and fortunate that the psyche is able to do this. In these volatile times, we are spared the full weight of the encounter and allowed to retain some measure of control. We only have to think of anyone confronted with the overwhelming violence of war zones, a tornado ripping through a community, destroying everything in its path, or the devastation of rape or molestation. Complexes form as a consequence of trauma and are a major part of the experience in post-traumatic stress disorder. Our psyches dissociate, splitting off the offending material from consciousness for the time being.
For many of us, our experiences of loss were not adequately contained by those around us. We were not offered an adequate level of what trauma therapists call attunement to the emotional states that enveloped us. Attunement is a particular quality of attention, wedded with affection, offered by someone we love and trust. This deep attention is what enables us to make painful experiences tolerable. We feel held and comforted, reassured and safe. The failure to provide a safe and nurturing space in times of loss and grief can precipitate the formation of a complex. When the outer containment field of the parent or community is missing or too porous, the psyche will split off the overwhelming emotions, temporarily sparing us from direct exposure. The story, however, does not end there. Complexes return again and again and seem to carry the intention of being reabsorbed back into consciousness. When the complex appears, we are taken out of the present moment and situated back into our histories at the point of the trauma. What had been severed for the sake of our preservation must now be rejoined for the sake of our healing. In other words, the emotional material that was absorbed into the complex must ultimately be faced and reconciled. Until we do, the complex will “interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb the conscious performance.”10 Jung’s words help us see the necessity of confronting our circumstances and doing the hard, painful work of reconciling the complex. (See the resources at the end of this book for more on working with the complex.)
Establishing a relationship with grief, developing practices that keep us steady in times of distress, and staying present in our adult selves are among the central tasks in our apprenticeship with sorrow. This is the hard work of maturation. In the traditional language of apprenticeship, this would be called achieving mastery. In the language of soul, this is the work of becoming an elder. An elder is able to touch grief deftly and is able to craft sorrow into something nourishing for the community. 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.
Every mature culture has guided its people in this apprenticeship with grief. Underlying this education is an acknowledgment of our spiritual indebtedness to the cosmos for all we are given to sustain us day to day. These cultures honor this truth and have based their ritual life and teachings around it. Gestures of humility and purification such as sweat lodges and initiation rites acknowledged that we live in a sacramental cosmos and that life feeds on life. We cannot escape this truth, and the appropriate response to it is a ripened melancholy combined with rituals of gratitude. The Mayan people say we all carry a deep spiritual debt for what we are given, which we can never fully repay. They say it is important that we do our best to honor this debt with our eloquence and displays of ritual beauty. Our culture has, by and large, failed to honor this debt, and the results are precisely what we see—a world rapidly being emptied by a never-ending hunger for more.
Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anes-thetization. Grief deepens our connection with soul, taking us into territories of vulnerability, exposing the truth of our need for others in times of loss and suffering. I have been moved on many occasions when someone risked revealing what was present in his or her heart—raw, naked expression of sorrow.
Grief also reveals the undeniable reality of our bond with the world. Whatever fiction we carry that allows us to feel separate and insulated, the overwhelming suffering we feel during events such as the Gulf Coast oil spill and the World Trade Center tragedy—or any violation to our local community or the land we love—reminds us of our intimate connections. It is grief that offers us a way to respond to situations such as these. It is grief that moves us in the direction of contact, toward the helping hands and embrace of others. We need grief in order to heal these traumas and make sense of a world turned upside down. Remembering the wisdom of grief allows us to cultivate faith in a deeper pulse within the soul. It is the via negativa, the road through the depths that leads to what mythologist Michael Meade calls dark wisdom.12 Through this we are able to lean in to the world and trust the deeper currents that move through all things.
“Where there is sorrow,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “there is holy ground.” This book is a meditation on the sacred ground of grief and the ways it enables us to walk in this world with its realities of loss and death, how it shakes us and breaks us open to depths of soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by the experience of sorrow; as it adds substance and weight to our world. Beyond the crazed hunger in our culture to be exceptional, loss and sorrow wear away whatever masks we attempt to present to the world. Like the massive stone carvings in the jungles of Central America that now lie broken on the forest floor, the monuments we erect to our own importance collapse. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. Grief ripens us, pulls up 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 part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love. The heart familiar with loss is able to recognize “a still deeper grief . . . a sadness at the very heart of things”13 that binds us with the world. Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving.
I am an advocate for grief. I see the many ways it gifts us. While it is difficult to embrace grief and be moved by its muscular demands, without it we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breadth of love, the surprise of joy, we could not celebrate the sheer beauty of the world. Grief fosters each of these capabilities, deepening them by bringing gravity to the moment. Grief is the dark color that adds depth to the canvas, providing contrast and texture. Without these tones, our lives would be flat and uninteresting. This necessary encounter, in turn, enables these vital qualities to hold us in times of loss and sorrow.
I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive.
I see this work as soul activism, a form of deep resistance to the disconnected way in which our society has conditioned us to live. Grief is subversive, undermining our society’s quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life force. It is riddled with energy, an acknowledgment of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant, or ecosystem. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed; it cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from soul.
What has become clear to me is the powerful role grief plays in enabling us to face what is taking place in our lives, our communities, our ecologies, families, and culture. Through our ability to acknowledge the layers of loss, we can truly discover our capacity to respond, to protect, and to restore what has been damaged. Grief registers the sorrows that befall everything that matters deeply to our souls. Our hearts are kept flexible, fluid, and open to the world through this closeness with loss.
Two
To and from the Soul’s Hall
Embrace your grief, for there your soul will grow.
—CARL JUNG
We are gathered in a room, about thirty of us. We have come together to work the ground of grief. For two and a half days we have been together, turning over our sorrows like compost. The stories we have shared are moving and powerful, often bringing the entire circle to tears. There are stories of loss, death, abuse, worthlessness, and rage. We have been guided to these depths through a writing practice taught by my friend Kim Scanlon. And now we are ready. It is time for the grief ritual. For the last few hours we have been preparing the space, creating a grief shrine full of photos of ancestors, beloved friends who have died, images of species and cultures that have disappeared—the cumulative losses of the world—in a space made beautiful by boughs of fir, colorful cloths, and flowers. Everyone knows it is time to start, and there is tension in the air as we circle.
It begins quickly. Almost as soon as the invocation is complete and the drumming and singing have begun, a few of the participants rush the shrine. Their grief is brimming, pouring over the lip of the cup. We are now in the full flow of the ritual. Gradually the shrine fills with men and women in various postures. Some are standing, gesturing strongly toward the shrine, shouting their protests for the things that have happened in their lives. Others kneel with their heads in their hands, bodies shaking and heaving as the grief ripples through them. A few are on their bellies, unable to hold themselves up any longer; their sorrow hits them in wave after wave. It is beautiful. There are few things as genuine as a person grieving. There are no questions to ask, no wondering what someone is feeling. It is self-evident. We are revealing the heartache we carry, the sorrows we have shouldered for decades. We are in the tumult of releasing our tears. This is a holy night, and we go on for hours.
No one is alone at the shrine. Every person pouring grief from their warehouse of sorrows is being attended by another. This is not a time to go it alone. Attendants are there to witness and to provide whatever support is needed. Sometimes this means simply holding space for their deep work. Sometimes it means placing a hand on the person so he can feel that he is not alone. For others, the attendant becomes the lap into which the grieving person can crawl to weep her most bitter tears. This display of compassion is an essential piece in our ability to truly lay down our sorrows.
As we slowly come to the end of the ritual, there is a mixture of elation and exhaustion in the air. This form of soul maintenance is hard work, but it is necessary to keep us available to life. As we close, the participants are moving and swaying to the song we have been singing for hours. Their tears have washed them clean, and their faces are shining. The room is lighter. The participants’ bodies are giddy with joy—a wild alchemy of sorrow and joy, played out once again, as it always has been, in the container of sacred ritual.
And now we move around the circle and embrace one another, thankful for where we traveled and for the work we have done. It is time for cookies and fruit, for water and rest. For the time being, we are released from the weight of grief, but we know full well that tomorrow, when we return to our daily lives, we will begin to gather more. That is the way of things. Knowing, however, that we will come together again in a year—or perhaps sooner, as the need arises—reassures the psyche that we will not have to carry this burden alone for long.
When we gather on weekends to work with grief, we often begin by saying that we are entering into a sudden village.14 These rituals frequently bring together people from great distances, and yet slowly, over the time we share, the feeling of being in a village takes on a shape that is more than a longing; it becomes something tangible. These gatherings offer some of the constituent elements of a living community. The space is created for deep listening, respectful attention, and a container strong enough to receive our most painful and sorrowful revelations. In a very real way, we are able to generate a vessel capable of holding our joined hearts suffering. This space enables all of us to risk sharing the wild edge of sorrow.
In Bouncing Back, psychotherapist and neuroscience expert Linda Graham reveals how “bonding and belonging nourish resilience.” She relates how our sense of connection affects our ability to regulate our internal states during crisis and stress. She writes, “The process of being seen, understood, and accepted by an attuned, empathic other engenders a sense of genuine self-acceptance, a feeling that we are profoundly okay. We feel safe enough, strong enough, sure enough to venture courageously into the world and develop the competencies we need to deal with life’s challenges.”15 A sense of belonging offers us much-needed medicine in these times, which are marked by feelings of anonymity and isolation. In fact, belonging protects the heart from much of life’s unavoidable challenges.
One amazing example of this truth on a communal level comes from a longitudinal study of the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, an Italian American mining community. Researchers were curious why the rate of heart disease in this town was markedly lower than it was in the surrounding communities. They studied smoking rates, exercise patterns, dietary practices, the availability of medical services, and genetic factors—all to no avail. None of these could account for the difference. The study examined death certificates between 1935 and 1985. For the first thirty years, there was a marked difference between Roseto and the surrounding communities. In the 1960s, however, as cultural ferment swept the country, long-established patterns within the small community also began to change. Rather than living in multigenerational homes where sharing life and meals, rituals and traditions was the norm, people opted for single-family dwellings on the outskirts of town, and the young men and women left to find excitement in the bigger cities. As the bonds of connection frayed, so too did the protective effects for the heart. Disease rates rose and actually became higher than those of neighboring communities. The only thing that originally protected these people from heart disease was belonging. Now referred to as the “Roseto Effect,” we begin to understand the phrase brokenhearted more thoroughly. Linda Graham relates how the hormone oxytocin, often called the “love hormone,” is released when we are touched and held or when we engage with someone who cares. Genuine community heals body and soul.
We need to create circles of welcome in our lives in order to keep leaning into the world; to keep moving grief through our psyches and bodies, so we can taste the sweetness of life. Modern psychological theory utilizes the terms attunement and attachment. The language has become somewhat abstract and clinical, but what it means is that we require touch in body and soul to help us respond to difficult times with kindness and compassion and also to celebrate the sheer joy of being alive. We need these experiences to feel that we matter—quite literally—that we have matter and substance, that we take up space in the world. When we sense this, we feel that we are worthy of deep and lingering attention and that we can, in turn, offer our caring hearts to others in times of sorrow and pain. No matter who we are, we need the heartening touch of another. Even those of us who are introverted will, at times, require the devoted attention of a friend or a partner who can offer a sensitive ear to our tender woes.
Denise Levertov has an illuminating poem about grief.
To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall.16
It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, that, when left unattended, block our access to the soul. To be able to freely move in and out of the soul’s inner chambers, we must first clear the way. This requires finding meaningful ways to speak of sorrow.
