An Interview With Francis Weller by Charles Eisenstein — Francis Weller: Of Grief and Reverence

Such an excellent interview by Charles Eisenstein

with Francis Weller. — Molly

Charles talks with Francis Weller about grief as a gateway to joy, to reverence, and to community, and the power of public grief to bring healing on a personal, community, and political level. From this episode:

"We have this projection onto sorrow and grief as if it is some depressed state, but it only becomes that way because of our avoidance. We become oppressed by the weight of all the unexpressed grief in our lives." - Francis Weller 

"We will not have truly compassionate politics unless we are able to let in the truth, and we can only let in the truth that hurts so much if we have ways to process the grief." - Charles Eisenstein

Francis Weller, MFT, is a psychotherapist, writer and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. Learn more about Francis on his website. You can also check out his organization, WisdomBridge.

 New & Ancient Story Podcast with Charles Eisenstein
Episode 04 - Francis Weller: Of Grief and Reverence

CE: Hello everybody, Charles Eisenstein once again. This week we’re joined by Francis Weller, who is known for his work in grief and ritual and community. His latest book is called The Wild Edge of Sorrow. The title alone speaks deeply to me. I’ve never experienced his work in person but I’ve done some grief work, a little bit, with people who have trained with him. And I’m bringing this topic - I think it’s really important when I speak of things like a more beautiful world, when I speak of hope, when I speak of possibilities beyond what we conventionally recognize as possible, when I speak about shifting our understanding of what’s real - sometimes what happens is that people undergo a kind of spiritual bypass, where the things that actually need to be faced and engaged and healed are kind of left by the wayside because after all, we’re moving into this glorious new future. But the problem if we try to do that is that the grief and sorrow, the wounds - they don’t just disappear magically. They lay in wait ready to erupt, or slowly leaking toxins into our society, into our psyches. And sooner or later they call for healing, and that’s something that’s appealed to me quite a lot. So Francis, maybe I’ll just ask you to riff on what I just said, and maybe how you got into this.

FW: OK, well, thanks for having me on, Charles. I think one of the most important pieces about grief is that it is really one of the primary ways that the heart remains soft. When we repress grief, when we turn away from it, one of the effects is a certain hardening of the heart. And if we want to enter into a more beautiful world that the heart knows is possible, the heart must remain responsive and reflexive. It has to have some capacity to be responsive to the circumstances of the world, both its beauty and its sorrow. But if we avoid it, if we turn away from it, it begins to congest [inaudible]. There’s a beautiful little poem by Denise Levertov where she said, “To speak of sorrow works upon it / moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul’s hall.” It’s a beautiful little instructive piece there, the [inaudible] don’t work with our sorrow, the pathway even to our own experience of it being ensouled becomes congested and blocked. So we have to participate in sorrow. It’s one of the ways [inaudible] moral obligation to digest the sorrows of the world, so that we can remain open and turning into the full encounter with life.

CE: Yeah. I think I know what you’re talking about. I think I’ve experienced that if I don’t have a safe way, or a way that feels safe to me, to experience sorrow - which, you know, growing up as a man especially in this culture, I haven’t had. I haven’t had a safe way. You know, in fact, if I showed any sign of sorrow or pretty much any emotion, I would be targeted by bullies or I would be shamed, or it would just create this kind of uncomfortable situation. So I learned to shut it down, to not feel. And so I’ve had a lifetime of practice in not feeling. And I think that’s kind of what you’re talking about, about hardening the heart, you know.

FW: Yeah, there’s a certain wisdom in shutting down, in part because of the way we have been asked to experience our sorrow, which is in private.

CE: Yeah.

FW. And that isolation in a sense becomes a condition that the psyche recognizes as untenable to processing grief. So there’s a certain way that we resist it and we avoid it because the conditions are not ripe for us to really encounter it. I can’t tell you the number of times that people have come to grief gatherings who have said, I don’t know why I’m here, I’m terrified. But by the time they begin to feel that they are doing it in the context of community or a village, some part of them begins to relax and says, oh my God, the permission has finally been granted. I can now enter that room, whereas I was not able to do that in my own solitude up until now.

CE: So I’m thinking that in other cultures grief was much more public, partly because all of life was a lot more public. People didn’t have large contained homes where they lived their lives in isolation from each other. And I’m thinking, and it seems like you’re saying that there’s some aspect of grief that cannot be fully realized if it’s in private.

FW: That’s right. Grief requires two things to really be moved. One is containment and one is release. If I’m doing it privately, I’m asked to do two jobs at once, which I cannot do, so I end up becoming an ongoing containment vessel for grief but never really allowed to set it down. The community is the containment, a friend is the containment that allows me to then simply do one job, which is to release it, to set it down, to move into it and to express it. But we can’t do it in private. We have to remember that grief has always been a communal process, always always always been communal. Only until the very recent time has it become this very interior, private thing that we’re asked to carry alone. And as you said before, Charles, almost with a quality of shame attached to it. Like, why aren’t you over that? Or, what’s wrong with you? You shouldn’t be feeling this. So, what I’ve noticed over the years is that when we have an emotional experience that is not held by others and given that containment, it begins to have an attachment to it that’s based on fear and shame. So I rarely see someone having a pure grief experience; they’re having a grief terror experience or a grief shame experience, because those other things have become so enmeshed in it. And part of our job as a community when we gather is to begin to take off the fear and take off the shame and simply sit with the sorrows that are around us all the time.

CE: Mm-hmm. So, there’s two things I want to explore. One is, when this really deep important aspect of life becomes public, or not necessarily public in the sense that the whole world gets to see it, but public in the sense that it’s shared with others, and you’re talking about it in community - I can’t help but think that once you’ve opened up this intimate realm of sharing, that other - you can’t just have community for grief and not community for other things too, right? [inaudible] a step toward community, which is what so many people are searching for.

FW: Yes. I consider grief a threshold emotion. When we can really enter that room together, it opens up the door to all the other rooms. But again, if that’s a place where the heart congeals and tightens, what possibility do I have of really entering into a much deeper, more intimate connection with you, or with a tree or with a creek or with the world? So again, that threshold place of sorrow is so fundamental to opening up into joy. I remember I walked up to a woman in Africa and I said to her, “You have so much joy.” And she turned to me and said, “That’s because I cry a lot.” It was a profoundly important moment, to see the connection between joy, exuberance, play, laughter - they come through that threshold place of probably the most common experience of human beings.

CE: Yeah. I’ve actually quoted that story. I’ve heard you tell it before. Why do you experience so much joy? It’s because I cry a lot. Because I think that kind of answers - one way that the discomfort with grief gets expressed is oh, you know, this is getting really heavy, or this is getting really negative, let’s not wallow in it. There’s this fear that if you enter grief, you’re going to get stuck there.

FW: Exactly, Charles. I think there’s this sense that grief is somewhat of a dead zone. And that’s why I called the title of my book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, because sorrow is nothing but feral. It’s wild. It’s so saturated with life force that when we’re in it, in some strange way we feel most alive. It’s an ironic state. And in a sense, when we’re in it, I feel most intimate with all of life. So we have this projection onto sorrow and onto grief as if it is some depressed state. Well, it only becomes that way because of our avoidance. We become oppressed by the weight of all the unexpressed grief in our life. And so in a sense, we have the sense that it’s a dead state or a negative state that we should avoid at all costs, and we should always focus on being happy. Happy is the new Mecca in our culture, and in consequence we don’t know how to befriend and take up what I call an apprenticeship with sorrow, that allows us to enter into a much deeper, more contact-ful and in a sense more compassionate encounter with the world.              

To continue this transcript, or to listen to the podcast, please go here: https://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story-podcast/episode-04-grief-and-reverence/