Mallory: So for today’s Just One Question, I am pulling a question from a recent favorite episode of mine that was with Francis Weller. Francis is a psychotherapist, a writer, and a soul activist. He’s someone who’s really introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people.
Chris: Yeah, and I think what comes up for me from him is his work on grief and loss. I saw him on Anderson Cooper’s All There Is, and it was amazingly powerful.
Mallory: Yeah, yeah. In this particular episode, he’s talking about his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which is about grief.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Mallory: And honestly, just on a personal note, we recorded this episode a week after I’d lost someone really close to me, so it resonated, to say the least.
Chris: I’m so sorry to hear that.
Mallory: No, you know, the universe likes to give you what you need in the moment sometimes.
Chris: Yeah. So the universe brought you Francis Weller.
Mallory: And that was a great gift, honestly.
Chris: Yeah.
Mallory: So in this episode, we’re exploring whether grief has an end or a bottom. Can I get to the bottom of my grief? When will I reach the bottom of it? Can I create a bottom? Is there a safe place to land in my grief?
Chris: We’ve talked about grief so many times, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody frame it quite like that.
Mallory: Yeah. Honestly, nobody really does it like Francis does.
Chris: Nice. Here is Tami Simon asking Francis Weller, how can I find a bottom to my grief?
Tami Simon: You mentioned the skill set that we can bring to this process, and there are two skills or capacities that you write about in The Wild Edge of Sorrow that I want to hear more about and learn more about. I’ve never heard them quite explained in this way. One is that you say we can offer our grief a bottom, and I thought, I want to hear more about this, because from my own underworld descent, if you will — when I’ve been in such a period, there are times when it just feels like I’ve dropped into a hole and I am just dropping. I don’t feel the bottom. So I’m like, what does this mean when Francis says we can learn how to offer a bottom to our grief?
Francis Weller: That’s a really important question, because most of the people I’ve worked with — here, but also in ritual settings — they weren’t shown how to create a bottom for their grief. So whenever you get near it, there’s a certain anxiety. I almost never see a pure grief moment; I see a grief-panic moment when the grief comes up. There’s almost a panic that comes along, like, “Oh — can I swear?”
Tami Simon: Whatever.
Francis Weller: Oh, shit, I’m gonna be drowning in this. I’m gonna be in free fall forever. Well, that’s because they were never taught that there is actually a place to hold the grief.
The other part that makes it feel bottomless is that we’ve been asked to carry our grief privately, and in a sense we can’t manufacture our own bottom — it’s a collaborative process. When the community gathers for any particular loss, and we take it into ritual, we take it into conversation, we take it into practices, I learned that I can drop in and I can return. That’s the value of having a bottom — in a sense, the bottom is the way that we generate faith that this is not a territory that’s going to take me hostage. It’s actually a nutrient-dense territory, here to deepen and open me up to more of my capacities to be human.
I’ve been a lifelong associate with melancholy. It’s been an energy that’s accompanied me my whole life, and I can give historical reasons for that — I don’t know if that’s history or soul or character temperament — but what I had to learn is how to relinquish a certain heroic fiction. The heroic ideal is the primary one we have in this culture, and the heroic ideal is always rising above — being successful, being in control, never falling apart. And that ideology prohibits us from actually asking for what we need to create the bottom. So what I had to do, out of my own pain and my own grief and loneliness, was confess myself fallible and human, as you would say, and tell a few people about what I was carrying. Their response allowed me to fall into a space to be held.
See, grief requires two things, as I wrote about: containment and release. But if it’s a solo project, you can’t do both jobs — you become a chronic containment field for your sorrow. We need our spaces and places, friendships, circles, communities where we don’t have to be the one doing the containment. We step into a container, and through that we begin to feel like, “I’m going to be held, and I only have one job to do at that moment, which is to cry, to weep, to wail, to bellow.” That helps give it a greater sense of faith — that I will be held adequately in this time. And then, as you become more aware of it, you become a place of holding others in grief. We begin to enter this exclusive ecology of the sacred, knowing that at any given moment I’ll be the one on my knees and you’ll be the one holding me, or vice versa. That’s just the truth, particularly as we become more and more engaged with what I call the long dark, which is where we are now. Right now, as a planet, we’re in the long dark, and in this time things will continue to break down — psychologically, economically, socially.
I just wrote a foreword for the book by Duane Elgin called Choosing Earth, and it was a hard book to read, because he does the next seven decades and forecasts the most likely, possible, probable outcome of each of these decades. It was scary — very scary. And so I ended up writing that the keynote for the coming decades, maybe two generations at least, will be grief. So we need to know that there is a bottom to this. We need to know that there are practices. We need to know that I can take up an apprenticeship. Otherwise, the time ahead will be overwhelmingly difficult. It’s not to say there won’t be beauty and joy and love — absolutely there will be — but our capacity to register those things hinges on our capacity to stay open in our heart and our soul, which means I need to know how to process the material of grief.
When I first began offering rituals back in the late nineties, early two-thousands, I had to convince people to come. They’d say, “Why would I want to spend a weekend crying? There are so many great TV shows on.” But eventually — I remember, around 2011 or so, I first self-published this book, because no publisher was interested in a grief book at that point. So I self-published it, and I remember going to a book reading once. The people were very friendly and warm — the owners of the place gave us a little lunch and said, “If just a handful of people come, we’ll sit in a circle and you can read and we can talk.” I said, “That’s great, I have no expectations.” He came out a little later and said, “There’s quite a crowd gathering.” Came out later and said, “It’s standing room only.” That wasn’t for me, because no one knew my name at that point — the theme was grief, and the place was packed.
Something happened in the middle of the last two decades where the denial began to break, and that’s one of my hopes right now, if I have any hope right now — that the denial is breaking. More and more people — you start reading stuff out on the internet, there’s a whole lot of stuff about grief out there right now that wasn’t there ten years ago. People weren’t offering grief rituals. So to see that happening is actually encouraging to me — that we’re actually going to hold this territory. And the consequence of that, in terms of the long dark, is that we get to stay current. Part of the beauty of doing grief work is it gets you into the current moment. Most of us are facing our past — not only our past, but our generations’ past. We rarely feel like we’re living in the present moment; the pull is chronically toward the old wounds. And so what I love about grief work is it actually gets me here — I’m in the current moment. And the only ones who can respond meaningfully to the long dark are those who get to stay current, who are present enough to register what’s happening to our collective body, to our ecological systems, and provide a context for them to stay current.
Because, you know, many times we have environmental activists come to our rituals, and they’re burnt out. It’s an ironic term, “burnt out,” because what they’re actually doing is drowning in sorrow. They have no outlets for this grief, so all of their passion turns into smoke and ash. And so, to keep them current, to keep them available — regular visits to the grief shrine. If we were a sane culture, there’d be a grief ritual in every community at least once a month. But we’re not a sane culture. We have people coming from Australia and England and Canada and all across the United States, and it’s wonderful to have them come to our rituals, but that is at the heart of the trouble — you have to travel, what is it, eight thousand miles from Australia, for the privilege of crying with other human beings. That’s a core symptom of our times — what we have forgotten. It’s what I call the amnesia and the anesthesia. We have forgotten so much of what we need in order to stay alive and open and engaged and participating in the joys and sorrows of the world.
It brings me right back to that heroic ideal of control, and there’s a certain way that that requirement of being in control is also a way of deadening us. And so we rely upon stimulation — stimulants and excitement — but rarely do we touch joy, because that’s not in the same category. So part of what I feel is that our ability to know this territory is what keeps us closest to our aliveness. Now, like I say, when you’re in the midst of your grief, you’re anything but passive or still — you’re on the ground at times, you’re rolling, you’re crying. It’s very vital, very alive. But that’s where we need to have faith — that it’s not a place to be caught perpetually, eternally. It’s a place that actually allows us to feel our being.
I remember coming home from a retreat one time with my friend Richard, and he said, “So, Francis, are you happy?” I said, “I have moments — I have moments of being happy — but I’ve given up trying to be happy.” In this happiness culture, when I’m not happy, I feel like I’m failing. So what I want is to be alive, and every one of these emotions has vitality in them — sorrow has vitality, anger has vitality. I want to be able to feel into what is alive in my body and in my soul. I don’t want to try to narrow it down to one acceptable emotional terrain of happiness. It’s lovely, but — that ain’t life.
Mallory: Listen to the full episode with Francis at soundstrue.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s also available on our premium membership platform, SoundsTrue One. You can learn more about that at join.soundstrue.com. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.
