Grief as a Gateway and my Apprenticeship with Sorrow

Dear Ones,

I hope this finds you well and tending the holy ground of a fertile inner garden by nurturing the depths, the darkness, and the informing wisdom of Sophia. No plant can reach for the light and offer its beauty and nectar to the world without roots in the darkness below.

Just one month from today will be the one year anniversary of the death of my father. My mom died 7 years ago, so this was the death of my second parent. Just this past week a dear friend of mine died unexpectedly from heart failure. Another elder in our spiritual community just crossed over. My ancestor altar is full and I am feeling the pull into the darkness.

It has already been a year of diving into the depths after the death of my father, luckily with great support from an amazing therapist at Santa Barbara Hospice (Kelsey Retesco), friends, family, sangha (my spiritual family), clients, wild mother nature, and my own deep well of spiritual sadhana (support).

I have learned so much about tending grief from teachers like author Francis Weller, who wrote The Wild Edge of Sorrow; Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Laurence Cole, the community song leader and grief tender from Port Townsend, Washington, as well as one of his teachers, Malidoma Patrice Some, author of the book Of Water and Spirit: Ritual Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman.

Malidoma Some was a guest teacher when I studied at Naropa University and I was introduced to his work then, almost 30 years ago. His speaking and writing deeply influenced me. It has continued to unfold through working with his direct students who studied with him in the African Dagara tribe's traditions of grief tending. These community grief rituals are powerful and potent portals for depth, renewal, and rebirth.

Laurence Cole, the community song leader and grief tender, mentioned above, is a student of Some and his wife Sobonfu, and has brought the precious work of tending grief to many of us here in the 'grief phobic' culture of the west.

This grief phobia is something I have been aware of for a long time, but recently heard it echoed through the wise words of my therapist at hospice after my father's death.

When we are afraid and unwilling to go into the depths, it makes us shallow people.

Truly tended and honored grief helps us to develop a rudder, a balance sent deep into the darkness to help us navigate this world ‘above'. It gives us depth.

Another of my most profound teachers, herbalist and author Stephen Harrod Buhner, wrote this beautiful essay on grief at the beginning of COVID when the whole world was in grief and he had just personally received a terminal diagnosis and was staring straight into the face of his own immanent death (he died December 2022).

When writing about grief, Buhner had this to say:

“I know the terror of that place for I have been there many times (this is in fact a territory that the vegetalista must enter to become what the Green is demanding they become – and they will have to do so many times). I have found, over the years of my life, that the only true solution to the terror of that place is to one day decide not to flee it, but to turn the face toward it, to enter it, to descend and discover what it is trying to teach. I speak from personal experience when I say that doing so is terrifying, especially for people who have never done it before. (The first time is always the hardest.) That our culture has so little understanding of what that state actually is, that our healers are so terrified of it as well, makes the descent all the more difficult."

I have been blessed to experience clinical suicidal depression twice in my life now, to be a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and have experienced my fair share of deep grief in my life.

I wrote a newsletter last year Healing Through Wholeness and Heart Wisdom for National Mental Health Month where I went into my childhood experiences of abuse and some of the depth work I have done to metabolize and digest and truly FEEL the grief of my life. Which, surprisingly, has allowed me also to feel more profoundly the joy.

Another great teacher of mine, psychiatrist, teacher, and author Gabor Mate, says that healing is not about feeling better, it's about getting better at feeling.

That is what an invitation to apprentice with sorrow is about, that is, an invitation to FEEL more, not less.

Tibetan Buddhist teacher and founder of Naropa calls it the awakened or genuine heart of sadness, when we are awake, when we are conscious and we feel, this life, with all it's joys and pain, breaks us open, and as my dear poetry and life teacher Leonard Cohen wrote 'there is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light get's in". Trungpa writes, in his book Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior “The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full. You would like to spill your heart’s blood, give your heart to others. For the warrior, this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness."

As Kierkegard writes “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards". In retrospect, that is why I say I am blessed to have experienced suicidal depression and abuse (oh yeah, and almost 8 years of chronic and crippling back pain after a spinal nerve injury). I can see looking back that I received so many gifts from facing these challenges and losses.

It is true, I'm never particularly keen to go into the depths, but I am always grateful for the jewels I return with when I make it back up above and can bring those jewels, that medicine, back to my community to share.

One of the ways I am able to share that treasure of the depths is by sitting with someone in their grief, not being afraid of it, not needing to fix and change it, and understanding with a heart of compassion the profundity of their suffering.

I listen from a heart of sadness, and again as Trungpa writes in Shambhala “This kind of sadness doesn’t come from being mistreated. You don’t feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed. There is no skin or tissue covering it; it is pure raw meat. Even if a tiny mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched. Your experience is raw and tender and so personal."

Grief is a gateway, as Francis Weller writes, to deeper compassion and creativity. It's a gateway to becoming a fully mature and eldered human.

As we move from Autumn Equinox towards Winter Solstice, I hope these thoughts help you to develop inner light, so that you may find your way and do your work in your own apprenticeship with sorrow and experience of joy.

Much Love,

Liz

P.S. One more of my grief teachers that didn't make it into the article is Martin Prechtel, who wrote a beautiful book on grief tending entitled The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise.

P.S.S. If you end up reading that, my favorite book by Prechtel is The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Life of People as Plants

I hope to hear from you soon for yoga, massage, shoveling manure, harvesting plants, Ayurvedic lifestyle guidance (ritucharya and dinacharya), Ayurvedic Bodywork, Craniosacral Therapy, or even if you just want to tell me what your favorite book is that you're reading right now.

P.S.S.S. A reminder that the beautiful and talented Carrie DeVaney is working out of my Carpinteria office on Tuesdays. (I as usual am in my office Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday when not teaching at Waldorf.)

You can see more about Carrie's work here. She is a phenomenal Myofascial Release therapist as well as an insightful and compassionate Intuitive Life Coach and I highly recommend her work.

I love cemeteries. I visit them all over the world. They are a wonderful place to contemplate death and time. They are quiet and sacred, and often in some of the most lovely locations. The above grave, with Japanese Maple and typewriter, is at one of my favorite cemeteries a short walk through the woods from where my parents used to live.

The above gravestone is at the Alae Cemetary in Hilo Hawaii. I went here just weeks before my father died last year. The headstone shows the tragic deaths of three infants/children in one family in the early 1900's. There are so many stories to listen to from the voices of graves.

The Alae Cemetery in Hilo and it's stunning monkey pod tree. The cemetery is on the hill overlooking the ocean with this amazing tree at it's center. I identified with this headstone of Betty Jane Torres. Long live the pagans and the witches (you can read my journal/newsletter The Season of the Witch about why I identify as a witch).

The autumn leaves last November as I walked to the hospital where my father was in hospice care, the hospital, St Michael's hospital in the distance. You can read my newsletter Shining Threads of Connection to learn about Rudolph Steiner who called St Michael the ruling saint of our age.