The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

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Silence is a practice of emptying, of letting go. It is a process of hollowing ourselves out so we can open to what is emerging. Our work is to make ourselves receptive. The organ of receiving is the human heart, and it is here that we feel the deep ache of loss, the bittersweet reminders of all that we loved, the piercing artifacts of betrayal, and the sheer truth of impermanence. Love and loss, as we know so well, forever entwined.” This was a rich dive into the territory of initiation and its profound capacity to reshape our lives. Here is the description from Mark Groves, the host for this potent podcast: Paradigm shift means creating uplifting alternatives to capitalism and the consumer culture in every way possible. Those individuals and groups who are leading the charge are called upon to share what they are learning. This is not a time to be shy.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow – Radical Discipleship The Wild Edge of Sorrow – Radical Discipleship

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.” As long as the complex remains outside of awareness, we will find ourselves acting out of compulsion, reacting to scenes in our life with the same consciousness that was traumatized in the first place. What we seek is the ability to encounter life openly, freely and with soul. We cannot control what comes to us, what moods arise, what circumstances befall us. What we can do is work to maintain our adult presence, keeping it anchored and firmly rooted. This enables us to meet our life with compassion and to receive our suffering without judgments. This is a core piece in our apprenticeship with sorrow.” The warmth of Weller’s voice and his beautiful language, will speak directly to your soul, in a way your soul has longed to feel embraced. His words will open your heart to receive your own most tender and vulnerable feelings as a gift to be cherished as they may bring forth a new depth of connection to the soul of the world.” Beginning in 1997, Ibegan to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear is how difficult it is for us to attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul, slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death. In a powerful side-note, Weller cautions readers to avoid the widespread blame flung at so many parents:We will, in truth, spend many of our hours alone with our grief. In the cover of our solitude, we encounter another layer in our apprenticeship with sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. Our ability to drop into this interior world and do the difficult work of metabolizing sorrow is dependent on the community that surrounds us. Even when we are alone, it is necessary to feel the tethers of concern and kindness holding us as we step off into the unknown and encounter the wild edge of sorrow.” This ritual brought us face-to-face with the reality of losing those we love. Letting go is a difficult skill to acquire, and yet we are offered no option but to practice. Every loss, personal or shared, prepares us for our own time of leaving. Letting go is not a passive state of acceptance but a recognition of the brevity of all things. This realization invites us to love fully now, in this moment, when what we love is here.” Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.” Over the last thirty years, I have worked with grief in my practice as a psychotherapist and workshop leader. Beginning in 1997, Ibegan to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear to me is how difficult it is for us to attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul, slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death.

Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun The Geography Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun

No one enjoys feeling sad. We do everything in our power to evade, avoid, distract, delay, bypass, bargain with, deny, dismiss, and repress sorrow. Yet one man has the courage to ask us to consider signing up for “an apprenticeship with sorrow.” That man is psychotherapist and author, Francis Weller, in his new book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and The Sacred Work of Grief. (North Atlantic Books, 2015) This book is an instruction manual for those who understand that as the author writes, “Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.” (xviii) The “Five Gateways” are interesting and instructive opportunities for reflection. They are as follows: (1) Everything We Love, We Will Lose, (2) The Places That Have Not Known Love, (3) The Sorrows of the World, (4) What We Expected and Did Not Receive, (5) Ancestral Grief

Francis Weller is the ultimate grief sage of our time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that results from embracing our sorrow." - Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author of Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypseand Collapsing Consciously . If you are one of those people who has always carried an amorphous sadness with you that never attached to an event or person, this book explains why. You also learn why it's so important to do this work before you're on your death bed. Plus, Weller gives you some ways to process grief in the Resources section at the end.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Booktopia The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Booktopia

To die before we die means that we must become radically honest with ourselves. We must shed the skins that do not foster aliveness. One man, while participating in the first weekend of the Men of Spirit initiation, suddenly realized how conscripted and narrow his life was. At that moment, he jumped out of his chair and flung it across the room in disgust. He clearly saw that he had unwittingly made an agreement to live small and to consistently tell himself what a good life he was living. This realization broke him open to the great well of grief he was carrying in his heart from all the times he had abandoned himself for the sake of fitting in and getting approval.” Ritual is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again. It has the strength and elasticity to contain what we cannot contain on our own, what we cannot face in solitude.” of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller On the morning of June 6, 2015, I briefly watched the funeral of Beau Biden, son of the current Vice-President, Joe Biden. As so-called mourners entered the church and took their seats, I witnessed one of the most tightly controlled and sanitized displays of grief repression imaginable. I saw few tears and a host of well-behaved people who vigilantly maintained an image of composure, and when President Obama gave the eulogy, his five seconds of “tearing up” made international headlines.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-03-19 08:01:29 Boxid IA40077717 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Col_number COL-658 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Francis Weller is the ultimate grief sage of our time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that results from embracing our sorrow. I’m someone who strictly reads books with a pen in hand. I do, after all, have standards. Francis Weller, though, is someone who writes books that force me to rearrange my standards for what gets underlined. His recent release The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief(2015) follows that trend. One-fourth of my copy is penned up. If I applied normal standards, though, it would easily be two-thirds. Paragraphs swim through waves of sentences pounding the reader with profundity. For the most part, I’m a typically unexpressive, work-it-out-in-my-head white heterosexual male. Weller, though, sparks something deeper in me. I found myself nodding, slapping inanimate objects, muttering out loud “Yep, holy shit.” An example from early in the book: