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.” 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 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: 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.”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - WisdomBridge The Wild Edge of Sorrow - WisdomBridge

I recently interviewed Stephen Jenkinson, known to some as the Griefwalker. In the interview he spoke of the etymology of the word “catastrophe.” The Greek prefix cata, refers to a descent—a going down and inward. “Strophe” is a suffix that is associated with braiding or interweaving a connection. In summary, Jenkinson asserted that this time of “catastrophe” compels us to descend—to go downward rather than soaring; to focus inwardly as much as we pay attention to the external world—and, to do this together in connection and community. For Jenkinson, conscious grieving is a skill that we must develop at this moment of loss and demise. And he further concludes that our work is to open to the descent together and to create communities of individuals who are practicing the skill of grieving for ourselves and for the Earth. The violence, oppression and injustice wear us down, no matter how much we try to run from it or medicate it. We suffer greatly from both amnesia and anesthesia—a painful cycle of forgetting and numbing. Weller implores us to get out of our individual denial bubbles and embrace what psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan calls “intervulnerability,” an increased awareness of the suffering all around us, in both humans and more-than-humans, and to focus our attention and energy on healing the whole.While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of rituals and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those we have harmed.” But what more does an apprenticeship with sorrow offer us? Do we merely discharge our grief and move on? 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 Human beings, for millennia before the advent of civilization, were nurtured and supported from birth by a village, not a nuclear family. This has been a disastrous shift—yet another thing to grieve.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Google Books

In a powerful side-note, Weller cautions readers to avoid the widespread blame flung at so many parents: In that moment, I understood powerfully the cost to a child who had to be the one to make the overture of repair. If I hadn’t gone in there, my son would have had to ingest his fear that I did not want to be his father any longer. The worst part of it, however, is that he would have felt it was his fault—if he hadn’t been so exuberant, so needy for my attention, I might still hold him in my heart. He would feel he had to restrain these parts of himself in the future if he was to receive my love once again.” Anyone who reads this book will immediately notice the artfulness and passion of Weller’s writing. He’s clearly a gifted therapist with much experience and wisdom to share with his clients and readers.

I think Weller’s core idea of cultivating a lifelong “apprenticeship with sorrow,” is an excellent invitation, one that extends well beyond the realm of grief work. Sadness, loss, and failure are replete in any human life, and Weller does a great job of showing how we can meet these challenges with acceptance, curiosity, humility, and compassion. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller offers his readers a breath-taking and dramatic journey of inner discovery into personal pain resolution, plane-tary healing and Soul development. It is an essential publication - one that offers precious guidance and insight for those who are strong enough, as well as mature enough, to probe and ch allenge the darkness." - Spirituality Today. ​ Weller is drawing on thirty years of experience in the therapy room, concisely summarizing Jung and Freud, relaying many stories that arise from clients. But he also peppers us with quotes from poets like Rilke and Rumi, Mary Oliver and David Whyte. The icing on the cake is the way he draws on indigenous wisdom and soul-tenders like Pema Chodron and John O’Donohue. I'm just not into participating in ancient rituals like sitting in a circle of strangers and wailing about my troubles thru gushing tears and the beat of drums. 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.”

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This book is a work of beauty: beauty in its language, its poetic sensibility, in its deepinsights intothenature of loss and its effect on the human soul.Weller’s bookis, finally, ahealing balm. It shows how our tears may be theredemptive waters we have needed for so long.” 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.” At this time of year we sit in a transition moment between summer and fall. Vacations are ending or have ended, children and college students are contemplating returning to the classroom, and in the Northern Hemisphere, most of us are aware that within the next two months, we may experience the first frost or even the first snowfall. 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.At times, grief invites us into a terrain that reduces us to our most naked self. We find it hard to meet the day, to accomplish the smallest of tasks, to tolerate the greetings of others. We feel estranged from the world and only marginally able to navigate the necessities of eating, sleeping, and self-care. Some other presence takes over in times of intense grief, and we are humbled, brought to our knees. We live close to the ground, the gravity of sorrow felt deep in our bones.”

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

For many, summer is a time to forget all of that—warm days and nights, cannon ball dives in the swimming pool, perhaps even a summer romance. As a child, I remember how short-lived all summers seemed to be and how onerous the return to school felt in the fall. 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. 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. Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon.”Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need. To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity. In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment - simply being who we are confirms our place in the village. That is one of the fundamental understanding about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully. Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge.”