The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 9
Over the past year I have been working with parts of myself that have been deeply neglected and misunderstood. There are several of these parts, but I think the one that has most affected me throughout my adult life has been my sexuality or erotic life. I come from a long lineage of frigid women. Women who have been taught that it is best to keep our sexual selves deadened and cloistered. Women who have been taught that in order to be good and righteous, we must, above all else, eschew and tacitly hate the part of us that desires the erotic.
I have come to see this story as an ancestral curse. It is an ancient family of lies so paramount and awesome that the erotic lives of generations of women have been destroyed (and certainly, in many cases, never even begun). When my mentor suggested that a ritual was needed in order to break this curse in my life, I was hesitant, to put it gingerly. I was doubtful that something as simple as a ritual could do so, but I’ve learned that soul work can only be done on a soul level.
Leaving my conscious mind out of it as much as I could, I went with instinct when creating my ritual. I somehow knew I needed the earth for this. Actual dirt or sand or loam. And I needed water, a large body of water. The earth possesses the energy of the erotic feminine, which is what I was invoking in my own life, and so I knew I needed sacred contact with her somehow. And I felt sure part of this contact needed to be submersion in her waters. I decided to go to a beach during a time I knew would be quite empty. I sat down in the sand and began to write down every bit of the old story I wanted to forget. I wrote without stopping for as long as the thoughts kept coming. My physical body had a pretty intense reaction to this part of the ritual. I began to sweat as I wrote, and I felt so nauseous at one point that I actually had to run to the bathroom. It was as if my body was ready to expel the lies of this curse even before my conscious mind was. With a marker, I then wrote the dominant words of the curse on a large rock and set it aside. Originally, this was my plan for the writing portion of the ritual, but as I sat there, I felt like there was more needed from me. I started to write in my journal again, and out began to pour my deep, hidden desires of the erotic feminine in my life. I wrote words and phrases that I have never allowed myself to think about, let alone bring into the world in black and white. This new story turned out to be much more difficult to write than the old. I was embarrassed by my fantasies and shamed by the “dirty” and “inappropriate” words I was using. But as I wrote, these words—my truth—got easier to write. And then they began to flow with relative ease, and the shame and embarrassment I have ALWAYS carried with them were no longer the principal emotions I was feeling. Instead I felt excitement and desire and a sort of tingling energy throughout my whole body. These were subtle and still a bit quiet, but they were there! When my pen stopped moving, I knew I was done with this part.
I picked up the rock, took off my cover-up and walked into the waves. I threw that rock as far away as I could, and then allowed the water to envelope me. Actually, the word I would use is caress. I allowed the sea to caress my entire body, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t push the pleasure of being touched out of my mind. I embraced it and laughed out loud. I raised my hands up to the sun and twirled in circles. And then I went and lay on the wet sand, face down. I rubbed every part of my skin against the grainy sand and then rolled over and did the same on my back. I spread out my arms and legs (like a snow angel) and let myself feel the earth and her energy holding my glorious body. In that moment of sacred contact, I realized that I have the same exact erotic nature as the earth. All of that energy and feminine sexuality is inside of me, and it is my birthright, my soul’s duty, to embrace and fully live my erotic life.
It is strange, really, because I spend much of my time communing with nature, and though I have had many glorious moments of sacred knowing, I have never experienced anything as profound and lasting as I did during this ritual. And what baffles me even more is that I didn’t really believe that a simple little ritual I cooked up one afternoon would change a lifetime story of shame, guilt, and denial, but it has. When I stood up from the sand, something had shifted within me. I mean, I was actually standing differently. I felt lighter, fuller, more present in my body. But even more, I felt sexy, and somehow I truly believed that my body is a beautiful, perfect, erotic part of me that I get to celebrate and enjoy. It has been two months since this day, and however impossible it seems to my conscious mind, I have not once fallen back into the old story. I am thirty-eight years old, and for the first time in my life, I am finally able to look at and touch myself with awe and gratitude.51
Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our own lives but also eases ancestral suffering in the other world. One young man carried a feeling of shame for which he could not account. We had been working with this issue for some time when I thought to ask one day if there were any stories he knew of concerning his parents or grandparents that might be contributing to his shameful feelings. Almost immediately his grandfather’s alcoholism flooded into his mind. He had never met his grandfather, but there was a curious absence of discussion in the family regarding this important individual. As we talked about him further, he could sense the shame that the family bore about their refusal to acknowledge the man and how that shame had “infected” him in his youth. He slowly realized that the shame he was carrying was not his, but his family’s shame over this man and his struggle with alcohol.
Ancestral grief also speaks to the grief that remains in our collective soul for the abuses of millions of individuals. It carries the weight of our genocide of the indigenous cultures that were encountered when European settlers arrived in the New World. It speaks to the shameful legacy of slavery and to the killing fields of the Civil War. This grief carries the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It carries the suffering of many cultures across the planet whose paths collided with the march of progress. All this weighs on our psyches. This grief is so immense it is hard to reconcile. We have much work to do here as a culture, and it may take many grief rituals and rituals of reconciliation with the Native Americans of this land, with the descendants of the Africans who were enslaved, and at places of death and destruction to begin to heal this lingering sorrow. The long shadow of this violence persists in our psyches, and we need to address it and work with it until there is some genuine atonement for these wrongs. This is clearly part of the “sequestered pain” that Stephen Levine spoke of that generates the persistent hum of sorrow in the background of our lives.
One other facet of ancestral grief revolves around the loss of the ancestors. We no longer look to our ancestors as a source of connection with the invisible powers in the world. In a very real way, we have lost our connection to the land, language, imagination, rituals, songs, and stories of our ancestors and, because of this, we feel homeless. In our obsession with progress and our addiction to the new, this is a grief we deny. It is a grief that comes with the pressures our ancestors felt to assimilate and become part of the American culture and to abandon their connection with the Old World. My parents were the children of German immigrants, and they rarely spoke the old language except when they needed to say something to one another and not have me and my siblings understand what they were discussing. There was a feeling that this heritage and history was something that needed to stay hidden. I felt confused about why this secret, special language was not part of my own world. Healing this loss of our ancestors often requires that we reconnect with our forgotten lineage. Since I began to do so, I have found immense richness in the myths and stories of the ancient Germani and how they lived in direct connection with the living earth. This acknowledgment of my ancestors provided ballast for my life; it restored a foundation that had been missing, one from which I could move more deeply into relationship with the wider world. This is a form of ancestral soul retrieval each of us can do. As we do so, we become better able to set our souls into this soil and become indigenous on this land.
There are other pathways of grief, other thresholds that could warrant their own gate. Trauma, as we have seen, is one territory that may need its own gate. When we are exposed to violence, whether in wartime, natural disasters, or the violations of our integrity in body and soul through rape, molestation, or assault, some part of us splits off in order to survive. While this move is necessary in order for us to keep on living, it also carries a loss of our essential wholeness. Trauma always carries grief, though not every grief carries trauma. Therefore, grief work is a primary ingredient in the resolution of trauma. Ultimately, these gates all lead to the same chamber, the communal hall of sorrows. It makes no difference which door we open, which threshold we cross. Every one of us has grief at each of these gates. When we feel hesitant or uncertain of our worthiness to touch our sorrow, knowing these gates are there offers us a way to connect with our losses, wounds, and disappointments.
All too often we deny our grief because it is not as severe as someone else’s. How can we possibly compare our sorrows to those who are suffering the horrors of war or the devastation brought about by tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, or intolerable poverty? It is easy to dismiss our grief when we compare it to circumstances we consider to be much worse than our own. But the grief is ours, and we must treat it as worthy of attention. In fact, it is essential for us to welcome our grief, whatever form it takes. When we do, we open ourselves to our shared experiences in life. Grief is our common bond. Opening to our sorrow connects us with everyone, everywhere. There is no gesture of kindness that is wasted, no offering of compassion that is useless. We can be generous to every sorrow we see. It is sacred work.
Four
Stories of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal
The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.
—JOANNA MACY
In the desert of the Kalahari, the people known as the !Kung regularly gather to tend their community by holding an all-night healing ritual. Sometimes the ritual is called because someone is ill or has suffered a loss. At other times, it is part of the ongoing maintenance of the people. At least four times a month, they gather to care for the needs of the people.
The ritual begins at dusk, when women gather around the fire and begin singing and rhythmically clapping. This signals to the men and other women that it is time to dance. Slowly, over the course of the night, the energy builds until one or more of the dancers are filled with the power of Num—the healing energy of the cosmos. Contact with the Num is intense, bordering on painful, and at times it is overwhelming. It is like kissing lightening. When the Num arrives, the dancer shakes, often falling to the ground in a state of intense excitation. Once contacted, the Num is transferred into those who are ill or grieving, and healing takes place. Those who risk contacting the Num don’t do so on their own behalf, but for the sake of the community as a whole. Everyone is touched and soothed, held and comforted. It is an intimate and soulful time. In the morning, after the ritual is complete, everyone feels happy, and the village is renewed. Their regular visit to the healing ground keeps them healthy in body, soul, and community.
The Navajo have a similar process. To the Navajo, healing is seen in the context of their particular vision of the world and cosmos; it is a ritual of restoring balance, a return to beauty, or hozho. Beauty is the central organizing principle in their culture—not economics, technology, or politics. It is through beauty that all relations are maintained, and it is when beauty is lost or forgotten that someone gets ill.
Healing is experienced within a defined set of rituals that includes extensive community participation and elaborate sand paintings depicting gods, places, and events specifically centered on the illness being treated. Chants tell the story of the paintings. Healing occurs as a result of the direct interaction of the gods in the images with the individual and the witnessing community.
Thus healing is a restorative process invoking beauty through ritual. The powerful presence of the family and community of the individual who is ill broadens the context of illness to include the entire village. This recognizes that everyone is impacted by the illness. This is powerful medicine, as it frees the individual from having to carry the weight of the illness alone, which, as we have seen, is a major preoccupation of the Western mind.
Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another. The indigenous thought is when one of us is ill, all of us are ill. Taking this thought a little further, we see that healing is a matter, in great part, of having our connections to the community and the cosmos restored. This truth has been acknowledged in many studies. Our immune response is strengthened when we feel our connection with community. By regularly renewing the bonds of belonging, we support our ability to remain healthy and whole.
Nearly every indigenous culture has utilized ritual as a means of maintaining the health of the community, which has helped them endure for thousands of years. Ritual is a means of attuning ourselves with one another, to the land, and to the invisible worlds of spirit. Recovering this fundamental skill would help us better tend the needs of our soul and culture. For us to enter the healing ground, we need to become educated in the ways of ritual. It is a language that we have forgotten, but one that we are designed to understand and speak. We need to recover our ritual literacy.
Ritual offers us the two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release. Containment offers the holding space for the ones in grief. It provides the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of both the known and unknown layers of sorrow. I witnessed this beautifully during funeral rituals in Africa. For three days the community holds the bereaved within an elegant choreography of wailers, dancers, drummers, singers, witnesses, all focused on tending to their needs. This holding allows those deep in the throes of anguish to surrender completely to the requirements of grief. Nothing is held back; everything is thrown into the other world for the sake of the one who died. This is especially important, as it is their belief that the deceased cannot get to the land of the ancestors without a river of tears.
In the absence of this depth of community, the safe container is difficult to find. By default, we become the container ourselves, and when this happens, we cannot drop into the well of grief in which we can fully let go of the sorrows we carry. We recycle our grief, moving into it and then pulling it back into our bodies unreleased. Frequently in my practice patients tell me that they often cry in private. I ask them whether, at some point in this process, they ever allow their grief to be witnessed and shared with others. There is usually a quick retort of “No, I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone else.” When I push it a little further and ask them how it would feel if a friend came to them with his or her sorrows and pain, they respond that they would feel honored to sit with their friend and offer support. This disconnection between what we would offer others and what we feel we can ask for is extreme. We need to recover our right to ask for help in grief, otherwise it will continue to recycle perpetually. Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.
Psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan uses the term intervulnerability to describe the need for this mutually held space. When asked about this idea in an interview, she replied,
When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.52
Welcoming our sorrow eases the hardened places within us, allowing them to open and freeing us to once more feel our kinship with the living presence around us. This is deep activism, soul activism that actually encourages us to connect with the tears of the world. Grief keeps the heart flexible, fluid, and open to others. As such, it becomes a potent support for any other form of activism we may intend to take. I have worked with many people involved in social justice, ecological protection, and other forms of activism. I remember one man in his sixties who shared that he waked at five every morning with overwhelming feelings of dread for the world. His accumulated grief had become oppressive, weighing him down and strangling his ability to effectively address the issues with which he was concerned. After he attended a grief ritual that I offered in his hometown, he felt the weight lift from his heart. Our activism is directly connected to our heart’s ability to respond to the world. A congested heart, one burdened with unexpressed sorrow, cannot stay open to the world and, consequently, cannot be fully available for the healing work so needed at this time.
The Sacred Space of Ritual
It is in the sacred space of ritual that we are most able to acknowledge the weight of the grief we carry. We have, in modern culture, little understanding of the ways ritual works or how it can move us into a space capable of fully releasing our long-held sorrows.
We are creatures of ritual. We have been using rituals for tens of thousands of years. Ancient burial sites include careful placement of artifacts with the dead, such as bones carved and covered with ochre, pieces of flint for the hunt in the next world, food, and ornamented beads. In fact, grief over the loss of a loved one may have elicited our first ritual actions. There is something about ritual that resonates deep in the bone. It is a “language older than words,” relying not so much on speech as on gestures, rhythms, movements, and emotion. In this sense, ritual addresses something far more primal than language.
