The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 8
This nightly ritual was in stark contrast to Western culture. We tend to spend our nights separated from one another. Our storyteller is the television or the internet, and children are hustled off to bed to follow some regimented idea of bedtime. After all, they have schedules to follow. We often go entire days with only the barest connections with one another, with the earth, with ourselves. We are busy people!
What I felt in the people of Dano was a deep sense that they knew their worth and their welcome. These two things are extensions of one another: worth and welcome. There wasn’t any anxiety of whether someone was good enough to be let inside the circle; this was a given. And don’t hear this as some altruistic practice. The generation of healthy and contented people was a necessity for the sustainability of the village; everyone was needed; therefore, their well-being was essential. A healthy village requires healthy individuals. And to become a healthy individual, you need a healthy village. They are mirrors of one another, the one supporting the other.
I wrote earlier about shame and how this toxic emotion situates itself in us as a consequence of an inadequate sense of belonging. Here is a story that beautifully illustrates the link between belonging and how vulnerable we become to shame saturating our psyches. While I was in Malidoma’s village, I met a young woman, about seventeen years old, with an extensive burn scar across her face. This did not seem to make her self-conscious; quite the contrary, she was ebullient, happy, and outgoing. One day I asked Malidoma about the scar. He said, “It was terrible. Her mother threw boiling water on her in a fit of rage.” I asked what happened after that. He said, “The village responded immediately and let this young girl know that what happened had nothing to do with her, that her mother was wrong to do this, and that she was loved and cherished by the people.”
At that point I understood something critical about belonging and shame. Many of us have had experiences of violation and injury, not unlike this young woman. The difference between her experience and ours is that she had a village that immediately responded and dissipated the pain of a shameful act. In other words, what occurred to her remained superficial; it did not penetrate beyond the skin and become a part of her story. She carries a scar, but her soul is intact. Her village could see her value and helped her to remember her essence.
Without a village to reflect back to us that we are valued, these ruptures are interpreted in silence, in a vacuum, and the conclusion we often come to is “I must have deserved this treatment” or “I was somehow responsible for this.” I hear versions of this story often in my practice.
Another facet of loss at this gate concerns the expectation of purpose in our lives. 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 understandings 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.
In our modern culture of hyperactivity and stress, we are seldom asked what we have carried into the world as a gift for the community. The frequent question is: “What do you do for a living?” Or worse: “How you do earn a living?” I find that question obscene. We have gone from being seen as valuable to the community, a carrier of gifts, to having to earn a living. No one asks, “What is the gift you carry in your soul? What have you brought with you into the heart of the village?” We long to feel cosmically significant, that it matters that we are here and that we make a difference. Like the Pueblo Indians who know it is their cosmic duty to sing the sun up every day, we also long to feel that we are needed to keep the whole wild, spinning world happening. The absence of this remains as a persistent grief in our psyches. We have become spiritually unemployed.
Hidden within the losses at this gate lies our diminished experience of who we truly are. Our experience of identity has been radically reduced over the centuries, especially in Western technological cultures. What was once a seamless intermingling of body, family, community, clan, ecology, and cosmos has been reduced to a narrow realm where we live as an isolated cell occasionally colliding with other isolated cells. Widespread feelings of loneliness are a reflection of this rupture in our greater identity. This passage from Sigmund Freud acknowledges this loss while at the same time normalizing this state as the consequence of living in modern culture. He wrote, “Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a once intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.”47
Whenever I talk about this loss with groups of people, there is a feeling of surprise and then sadness. They quickly realize that their experience of who they are has been compromised. What was meant to be a far-ranging identity riddled with intimacies with wild iris, stellar clusters, earthworms, and humans has been whittled down to the narrowest hub. We exist in a state of isolation, cut off from an encompassing community of others. We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves. We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world with uniformity and mediocrity. This reduction in vitality and vividness induces a smoldering rage. Domestication mutes the poetry and music of the world, crushing the articulated and nuanced rhythms that accompany all living things, what poet Federico García Lorca called the canto hondo, the deep song of the world. And we are emptied.
In a somewhat humorous fashion, Michael Ventura speaks to this reduction in identity. He writes, “You are not one person, you are many people, you are a community of moods and selves under one name. Parts of you aren’t even human, they’re part mammal, part reptile, part rose, part moon, part wind. And life is a question of which parts are dominant—which, in effect, possess you. (I think most people walk around possessed by the dullest parts of themselves; this, the worst state of possession, is called “normal.”)48
To be left with a “shrunken residue” or to walk around “possessed by the dullest parts” of ourselves is a great loss. Rather than enjoying a rich fullness that envelops us throughout our lifetime, we instead inhabit a sense of self that feels cut off from the world. Rilke reminds us—exhorts us—to not lose the world.
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.49
To not be cut off, however, we need to be moving in a rhythm that is syncopated with that of the oaks and willows, heartbeats and touch. We must recall the original cadence of the soul. One of my most memorable teachings about slowing down came from my mentor, Clarke Berry, a Jungian analyst with whom I apprenticed, following licensure. I was young, and I knew I was in need of a mentor, someone who could teach me the art of sitting with others in therapy. The Jung Institute in San Francisco referred me to Clarke along with other analysts, but when I met him, I knew I was in the right place. Our first meeting, over thirty years ago, was unforgettable. When we sat down, Clarke reached to his left, placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, “This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves.” Then he pointed to a small clock also sitting there and added, “It hates this.” What an amazing thing to tell this young therapist. It is the single most important thing I ever learned about therapy, about working with the soul. I share this story with every person I work with; I use it as a means of calming the urgency to change and helping patients return to a rhythm that enables them to listen once again to their own soul.
Facing Emptiness
The unconscious disappointment that lingers from the failure to receive these necessary elements in our life slowly evolves into a sense of emptiness. Nearly every day in my practice, someone speaks to this feeling of hollowness. And I think, how good to name it, to bring it into the room and sit with it. How important it is to keep it in front of us, instead of having it trail behind us, out of sight, pulling us away from others and from life.
When I first consciously faced my own emptiness, it felt like a sheer drop off a cliff; I could not find the way back up. I was floating in a sea of pain and sorrow that had no words. All I could do was try to welcome what came, weep every day, and let those close to me know what I was going through. I needed to tend and care for this vulnerable place. This well of grief was deeper than anything else I had faced in my life, and the terrain was suffused with emptiness and darkness. There was no one else in this place, no hands to comfort, no arms to hold and support. No other voices could assure me of my connection to the world. I felt utterly alone. Whether or not there is any personal history to this perception is not what is important. What did matter was that I stumbled into this place, and its truth was undeniable. Daily weeping was something I had never experienced before. In fact, I had always been in control of myself emotionally, having shaped a life made up only of the known. I stayed in the well-lit areas, at the shallow end of the pool. I kept other people outside safe peripheries. I had built a strategically controlled life in which I was appreciated and respected. But when I plunged into this place of emptiness, it was like a wall that had been blocking my view was shattered, and I could finally see how I was limiting my life in hopes of avoiding the emptiness. For whatever reason—perhaps grace—the lens of my perception was being cleansed by my tears and I could finally begin to see the layers of invulnerability I had established to keep myself safe and alone.
My story is far from unique. Many of us are running away from this hollowness. The courage it takes to face this emotional vacuum is tremendous. I have never been so fragile, so out of control, so inundated by wave after wave of grief as I was when I finally faced the emptiness within, but I am grateful that I did so. It is as though the ocean floor of my psyche shifted, and an air pocket rose to the surface of my life. This pocket held precious pieces of my life from times when I could not process the grief, loss, betrayal, and disappointment that was moving through my world. These times had been too much for me emotionally, and so they broke free from consciousness, going subterranean, waiting till the time when I could face them once again. When that emptiness appeared, the arms of community were there to hold me, helping me to endure the terror of that aloneness. It was because I felt held and loved that I was able to descend into these places of darkness. My psyche had waited until the vessel was strong enough to take the heat of this confrontation with these pieces of my soul life.
Facing our emptiness is key to our freedom. Until we do, we are driven by lifelong patterns of avoidance. It is important to remember that this emptiness is not a reflection of personal failing, but a symptom of a wider loss. When we abandoned the Old Ways, established over hundreds of generations, we lost the traditions that made us feel held and embodied. The psychological, emotional, and cultural design that offered us assurance and security in the face of grief or loss has been replaced by a belief system that generates anxiety and a sense of insecurity. Emptiness now saturates our culture. Addictions, consumption, and materialism are symptoms of this condition. More accurately, they are attempts to cope with the unbearable feelings of barrenness.
To be empty, to feel empty, is to live in the wasteland near the gates of death. This is intolerable to the soul. We were not meant to live such shallow lives. Our heritage and our psychic makeup are designed for an elaborate richness of imagination and creativity that allows us to feel intimately connected to the ongoing creation. We were meant to drop below the surface of things and to experience the depths of life in the same ways that our deep-time ancestors did. Their lives were filled with story, ritual, and circles of sharing. Their lives were not shamefully hidden away but known—losses, defeats, grief, pains, joys, births, deaths, dreams, sorrows; the communal draw of life was open and acknowledged. This is what the soul expected, what it is we need today.
A young man of twenty-five participated in one of our annual gatherings in Southern California. He came filled with the bravado of youth, covering his tracks of suffering and pain through a multitude of strategies. What lingered beneath these tired patterns was his hunger to be seen, known, and welcomed. He wept the most wrenching tears upon being called “brother” by one of the men. He later shared that he had considered joining a monastery, just so he could hear that word spoken to him by another man.
During our time together, we held a grief ritual. Everyone there, save this young man, had experienced this ritual before. Seeing these people dropping to their knees in grief broke him open. He wept and wept, falling to his knees. Slowly he began to welcome individuals back from the grief shrine and to feel his place in the village solidify. He was home. He later whispered to me, “I have been waiting for this all my life.”
He recognized that he needed this circle, that his soul required the singing, the poetry, the touching. Every experience of these primary satisfactions helped to restore his being. For him, this was the beginning of a new life.
The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief
The fifth gate of grief is what I call “ancestral grief.” This is the grief we carry in our bodies from sorrows experienced by our ancestors. Much of this grief lingers in a layer of silence, unacknowledged. Many of our ancestors arrived in the Americas after leaving their homes, family members, and communities behind. Some arrived here after being abducted and forced into slavery. These generations often survived without a feeling of home, living with only marginal connections with the Old Ways to guide them. The traditions that had nourished and held their people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years were difficult to sustain on the new continent. They lived betwixt and between the Old and the New Worlds, attempting to create something that would enable them to endure. Without the protective shelter of the village, they often coped in ways that created a secondary layer of suffering: alcoholism, isolation, rage, and a restrictive silence that cut them off from the living support of others. There was a gap in the dream of what it meant to be human. The rich and nuanced patterns of culture that had evolved over time were replaced with strategies designed simply to help them survive. Gone were the patterns that held myth, song, ritual, and the poetic imagination as the heartbeat of the people.
We hold this ancestral grief in our beings, even after many generations in the new land. This sorrow becomes concentrated over time, gathering grief unto itself, and is carried in our psyches unconsciously as a diminished inheritance. The psychic inheritance from our ancestors was meant to be a blessing, but instead it is a layer of heaviness. The stoic façade and behaviors of these generations left behind a legacy of unattended pain. Mayan shaman Martín Prechtel says that we are surrounded by the ghosts of unwept ancestors.50 The truth in this statement is visible in many of the people I see in my practice.
Sometimes I will be working with someone who carries a sadness that is hard to identify, but it is there nonetheless. After exploring many possible sources for this sorrow, I often ask if there was something in the family history that might be lingering in his or her body. Following some reflection, there is often a memory of some loss, some wounding that occurred to a grandparent or some experience of abandonment that resides in the psychic history of the lineage. Sometimes it centers on the great tear in the psychic foundations of a family following the suicide of a child, parent, or sibling. I have worked with a number of individuals who carry the inheritance of this wound. In this place, grief and shame become intermingled, making it difficult to sort through the confusing emotions that accompany the story. These individuals often feel haunted by the fear that this may also become their destiny.
One woman I worked with struggled for years with her body image. She held a lingering hatred and contempt for herself. She never felt good enough, pretty enough, or loveable. Something shifted during our work, and the shape of this wound actually intensified. She began to feel disgusted by anything remotely associated with sexuality. She had never felt this way before, but it was now so overpowering that she could not let her husband be near her physically. We explored this feeling from her personal history and from the cultural wounds of women and sexuality. None of this lifted the oppressive weight of these feelings. One day I said to her, “I don’t think this is yours. I think this belongs to your ancestors, and it is coming down the generations into your body seeking healing.” She thought about this and something resonated in her body. At that point, it felt that the only way to move this would be through ritual. We talked about some ways she could approach it, and she decided to move forward in the following days. After her ritual, she wrote,
