The warmth of Francis’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." - Dr. Risa Kaparo, author of Awakening Somatic Intelligence To honor our grief, to grant it space and time in our frantic world, is to fulfill a covenant with soul—to welcome all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.” Francis Weller is the ultimate grief sage of our time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that results from embracing our sorrow. The Wild Edge of Sorrow is extraordinary. I'm going to be giving it to a lot of people. So many of the themes explored are things I care deeply about. For example, the betrayal of our Great Expectation that life is supposed to be far more magical, authentic, intimate, and alive than what has been offered to us as normal. The ongoing pain of separation from community and nature that we all feel. And the pain of the earth. Reading Weller’s book, I've realized that we have a lot of unprocessed grief to share. This book will be a gift to many." - Charles Eisenstein, author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible I also appreciate Weller’s focus on grief rituals and practices. This gives his book a practical angle that goes beyond merely trying to “think” or “feel” a certain way about grief. There’s plenty of helpful suggestions about what we can “do” about it as well, but not in the diminishing sense of “solving” or “getting rid” of our grief.

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

The gate entering “the places that have not known love” was most fascinating for me. Weller calls these “neglected pieces of soul,” the parts of ourselves that we hold in contempt, that we’ve banished into detention centers on the outskirts of who we are. It’s impossible to grieve for something that we feel is “outside our circle of worth.” Again, this is nearly universal. Weller laments that “we live in a society drenched in shame.” Our feelings of worthlessness and self-doubt are legion, much of it due to what he calls “slow trauma,” not dramatic events that happen to us, but all the love and attention that has been withheld. 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.Another potential obstacle is Weller’s belief that the modern world is essentially broken, and we along with it. He has a lot to say about “our entire suicidal culture––our death-dealing, nature-consuming, hell-bent-on-our-collective-demise society,” none of it good (138). At the same time, he heaps uncritical praise on indigenous ways of living and knowing, to the point where I felt like he overindulged in “ noble savage” thinking and appeals to antiquity. It’s not that the modern world is perfect and we can’t learn anything useful from other or older cultures, but Weller’s “new = bad, old = good” narrative is very consistent and overly simplistic. 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.” Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.”

The wild edge of sorrow : rituals of renewal and the sacred The wild edge of sorrow : rituals of renewal and the sacred

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. 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.

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.”

Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun The Geography Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun

Most of us instinctively turn from what makes us uncomfortable. Yet often the greatest gifts lie hidden in what we avoid. Certainly at this time we have much to grieve both as individuals and as a culture; but our collective amnesia about the traditional practices of grieving keep us from uncovering the buried treasures that could be our salvation. In fact, the accumulated weight of our ungrieved losses may be at the root of what is fragmenting our world." A rich and varied conversation between Michael Lerner, founder and director of Commonweal and Francis Weller, exploring the Long Dark that is emerging in our culture and the planet. ​Paradigm shift means creating uplifting alternatives to capitalism and the consumer culture in every way possible. Those individuals and groups who are leading the charge are called upon to share what they are learning. This is not a time to be shy. No one enjoys feeling sad. We do everything in our power to evade, avoid, distract, delay, bypass, bargain with, deny, dismiss, and repress sorrow. Yet one man has the courage to ask us to consider signing up for “an apprenticeship with sorrow.” That man is psychotherapist and author, Francis Weller, in his new book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and The Sacred Work of Grief. (North Atlantic Books, 2015) This book is an instruction manual for those who understand that as the author writes, “Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.” (xviii) The Wild Edge of Sorrow is extraordinary. I'm going to be giving it to a lot of people. So many of the themes explored are things I care deeply about. For example, the betrayal of our Great Expectation that life is supposed to be far more magical, authentic, intimate, and alive than what has been offered to us as normal. The ongoing pain of separation from community and nature that we all feel. And the pain of the earth. Reading Weller’s book, I've realized that we have a lot of unprocessed grief to share. This book will be a gift to many."

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Google Books

The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that result from embracing our sorrow.” Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time. Any form will do—writing, drawing, meditation, prayer, dance, or something else—as long as we continue to show up and maintain our effort. A practice offers ballast, something to help us hold steady in difficult times. This deepens our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them. Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion. (See the resources at the end of this book for more on developing the practice of compassion.)”Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with psychotherapist, writer, & soul activist Francis Weller, talking about the saturation of sorrow we’re faced with in these times - & how we might trust, befriend, & accompany our grief with slow encounters, to return with medicine for our community, as we more wholly & fully renter LIFE. In my work with grieving individuals and in the grief workshops I offer, I commonly hear two misconceptions. One is the assumption that the myriad types of grief we experience are separate from each other, as if we could compartmentalize them. People often ask me if the workshop is for people grieving the loss of loved ones or if it is for people grieving our withering planet or if it is for people who have a terminal illness. When this happens I share Francis Weller’s explanation of The Five Gates of Grief which include every type of grief we can experience and how they are interrelated. In his 2011 book on grief Entering The Healing Ground, the Five Gates are clarified, but then explained in more depth in The Wild Edge of Sorrow. The basic premise and basic assertion that grief is important and necessary to human and planetary health and well-being is one that I agree with wholeheartedly and I was hoping I might find more tools to engage with the healing and transformational experience of grief both individually and collectively. 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. ​