Francis Weller: Pushing Through Solid Rock

     I am moved to again share more of the deep wisdom I've found in Francis Weller's beautiful book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. I find here a distillation of what I have been learning, and the healing and wisdom that I have been absorbing, over the past 37 years. Francis Weller speaks eloquently to the need for our wholeness, and to the ever growing storms that arise within ourselves and in our world when we neglect our hearts and souls. 

     The excerpt that I am sharing here comes from the chapter "Pushing Through Solid Rock," a process which first began for me in 1983. I had been disassociated, depressed, addicted, and weighed down by the great losses that I had experienced in my young life. I also had not known how to cope other than by trying to bury my pain, trauma, and grief deep in my heart. Since that time, learning how to embrace rather than reject what I carried in my heart has acted to free me to grow into the wholeness of who I truly am.

     It is also my belief that we are asked individually and together to journey through the darkness of these times and, through this process, to emerge with stronger hearts and greater wisdom. In the middle of it all is the essence of what I believe to be our true human nature — one which embodies the Light and the Love which we and our hurting world hunger for.

     First, we may need to consciously cultivate, in an ongoing way, the willingness, courage, support, and Grace to continue to push through whatever the solid rocks are that we carry within ourselves. In these heartbreaking times of Trump, COVID-19, a warming planet, devastating poverty and suffering, and other painful, frightening, and sad realities that we are faced with, our open-heartedness is a needed gift that we can bestow upon ourselves, our loved ones and communities, and the world. Bless us all on our journeys. — Molly

 

Pushing Through Solid Rock

Grief is itself a medicine.

— John Cowper

Many of us face challenges when we approach our grief. The most commonly noted obstacle, perhaps, is that we live in a flatline culture, one that avoids depths of feeling. We have compressed the range of our emotional lives to the narrowest band. Consequently, those feelings that rumble deep  in our souls as grief gets congested there, rarely finding a positive expression, such as a grief ritual. Our culture, which wants to keep us busy and distracted twenty-four hours a day, keeps shunting grief to the background. We stand in brightly lit areas of what is familiar and comfortable, not realizing we have lost something essential to the life of the soul. Rilke wrote a moving grief poem over one hundred years ago.
 

It's possible I am pushing through solid rock

in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;

I am such a long way in I see no way through,

and no space; everything is close to my face,

and everything close to my face is stone.

Rilke's vivid description of the grief state is remarkable. When we enter the territory of sorrow, especially in those times of intense grief, it feels like we are surrounded by a thick and  impenetrable wall of stone. Rilke also recognized that most of us enter this space alone, unaccompanied by people who could help us hold the weight of the time.  

He goes on from there with a humble confession — a prayer, really.

I don't have much knowledge in grief yet —

so this  massive darkness makes me small.

You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,

and my great grief cry will happen to you.

This poem is filled with self-compassion. Even in the midst of not knowing, he realizes that his grief is a gift to God. The absence of this realization has pushed our grief into regions difficult to access. In these times, it seems like pushing through solid rock to simply feel our sorrows. 

The collective denial of our underlying emotional life has contributed to an array of troubles and symptoms. What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair. Martin Prechtel calls this the gray-sky culture, one in which we do not choose to live an exuberant life, filled with the wonder of the world and the beauty of day-to-day existence, one in which we do not welcome the sorrow that comes with the inevitable losses that accompany us on our walk here. This refusal to enter the depths has shrunk the visible horizon for many of us, dimmed our participation in the joys and sorrows of the world. We suffer from what I call premature death — we turn away from life and are ambivalent toward the world, neither in it nor out of it, lacking a commitment to fully say yes to life.

I remember the difficulty I faced when I attended my first grief ritual. I watched as dozens of men and women fell to their knees, weeping and expressing their sorrow. I could not touch my grief, could not coax it to the surface and onto the ground. I stood there numb, frightened by the raw display of suffering. It wasn't until I participated in my third grief ritual that I was able to release my tears. I needed to keep going, needed to be near the energy of sorrow. I couldn't run away, because I was aware that I had a reservoir of grief in my body but lacked the means of freeing it. I realized now how frozen I as, how disconnected I had become from my emotional body. Learning to befriend this vulnerable piece of soul has, in turn, opened the way to experiencing a much wider array of emotions — joy, love, anger, sadness, delight, amazement — the entire range of emotional landscape.

The Shadow of Private Pain

There are other factors at work that obscure the free and unfettered expression of grief. In the chapters above, I pointed out there those of us who live in the West are conditioned to accept the notion of private pain. This cultural conditioning predisposes us to maintain a lock on our grief, shackling it in the smallest concealed place in our soul. In our isolation, we deprive ourselves of the very things that we require to stay emotionally vital: community, ritual, nature, compassion, reflection, beauty, and love. Private pain is a legacy of the creed of rugged individualism. In this narrow story, we find ourselves caught in the shadow of the heroic archetype. We are conditioned from birth by the image of the hero, the one who needs no one, the one who rises above his or her pain, the one who is always in control and never vulnerable. We are imprisoned by this image, forced into a fiction of false independence that severs our kinship with the Earth, with sensuous reality, with the myriad wonders of the world. This is a source of grief for many of us.

Facing the sorrows of the world requires that we remain intimate with the world. In my practice some years ago, I worked with a woman who was deep in grief about the war in Iraq. She wept and wept about the land being poisoned by fragments of bombs made with depleted uranium. She cried about the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed or wounded by the assault. After sitting with her for some time as she cried, I asked her if she had noticed the plum blossoms that were blooming outside the window. She paused and said, "No." I asked her if she had noticed the mustard in bloom. Again she replied, "No." I then said to her, "We cannot face the horrors of Iraq with any sense of balance without also remembering the beauty of the world — the plum blossoms and mustard blooming." We must couple grief and gratitude in a way that encourages us to stay open to life.

I had the opportunity once to work with a group of clergy about the place of grief in their lives. Within a few minutes of starting my talk, there were visible signs of sorrow in the room. I paused and asked what they were feeling. Slowly they revealed the grief that they were carrying. One man had just lost his wife, a woman shared the her divorce had been finalized a couple of weeks earlier, and another woman said that someone who lived near her had just hung himself and that her son was going in for a brain scan. Another woman shared that a popular restaurant in her town was closing due to bankruptcy and that everyone was feeling the loss. I asked them, "How many of you have a place to take your grief?" No one raised a hand. We talked for a long time about the idea of private pain. Slowly they came to realize how imprisoning this perspective is to the soul. They wanted more, a way to move into and through their grief, and so we decided to explore ways to bring grief work into their parishes and to free their own lives from the  grip of the private grief they carry.

Giving Emotions a Bottom

Another facet of our aversion to grief is fear. Hundreds of times in my practice as a therapist, I have heard how fearful people are of dropping into the well of grief. The most frequent comment is "If I go there, I'll never return." What I found myself saying one day was rather surprising. "If you don't go there, you'll never return." It seems that our wholesale abandonment of this core emotion has cost us dearly, pressed us toward the surface of our lives. We live superficial lives and feel the gnawing aches of something missing. If we are to return to the richly textured life of soul and to participate with the soul of the world, we must pass through the intense region of grief and sorrow. This requires that we, once again, put faith in grief. This requires that we give grief a bottom, a foundation upon which to come to rest.

Several years ago in my practice, an image came to me of a pair of hands cupped together, as if to gather water from a stream. The thought that accompanied the image was that we need to catch and contain the full range of feeling attached to any emotional experience — provide a bottom for it. For example, when we were children, and we fell and scraped our knees, we hopefully were able to find someone into whose lap we could climb, a safe place where we were allowed to cry. And if we were fortunate, this caregiver would offer soothing words to let us know that everything would be all right. In that moment, we were able to feel the full weight of our pain and move through the emotional force it carried. In essence, our pain had a bottom, and because of that, we could build trust in our ability to move through pain.

Now imagine if we had come home as a young teenager, after a friend betrayed us or after our first crush rejected us. As we walked through the door, carrying our heartbreaking grief, imagine that no one knew how to respond to our sorrow. Or what if our grief wasn't even acknowledged, or even worse, what if we were shamed for feeling the way we did? In such a situation, with no love and compassion surrounding us, the holding container for our powerful emotions would never take shape. In such circumstances, the grief would begin to feel bottomless, and we would feel panicked whenever it came near our awareness. We would quickly learn to fear the free fall of grief. This feeling of being bottomless, of having no place to stand, no safe container to hold us, can happen with any emotion. Since this scenario has been experienced by so many of us in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, finding a safe container that will enable us, once again, to build faith in our emotional lives is essential for our well-being.

We are brought back to the fundamental practice of self-compassion and learning how to regulate the fear that comes upon us when we move into places of sorrow. Granting ourselves a bottom — through patient attention to our needs — settles us and reassures us that we will be held when we enter the room of grief. We also remember that we can ask for help and support from those who know and love us. As neuroscience continues to discover, we can re-modulate our earlier conditioning.....

William Blake said, "The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy." When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addition, or anesthesia. On a visit to Africa, I remarked to one women that she had a lot of joy. Her response stunned me: "That's because I cry a lot." This was a very un-American sentiment. She didn't say it was because she shopped a lot, worked a lot, or kept herself busy. Here was Blake in Burkina Faso — sorrow and joy, grief and gratitude, side by side. It is indeed the mark of the mature adult to be able to carry these two truths simultaneously. Life is hard, filled with loss and suffering. Life is glorious, stunning, and incomparable. To deny either truth is to live in some fantasy of the ideal or to be crushed by the weight of pain. Instead, both are true, and it requires a familiarity with both sorrow and joy to fully encompass the full range of being human.

— Francis Weller

Excerpts from The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals

of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

 Please go here for more information:

https://www.francisweller.net/books.html 

Please also check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaI-4c92Mqo