“Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out… though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love…”
– Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows (p. 478)

Grief root from Latin gravis  – heavy.

Notes from The Wild Edges of Sorrow by Francis Weller

“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.”  (Weller, 5)

“Establishing a relationship with grief, developing practices that keep us steady in times of distress, and staying present in our adult selves are among the central tasks in our apprenticeship.” (Weller, 7)

“An elder is able to touch grief deftly and is able to craft sorrow into something nourishing for the community.”  attunement / resonance.

“Grief deepens our connection with soul, taking us into territories of vulnerability, exposing the truth of our need for others in times of loss and suffering.”

Linda Graham Bouncing Back: “The process of being seen, understood, and accepted by an attuned, empathetic other engenders a sense of genuine self-acceptance, a feeling that we are profoundly okay.  We feel safe enough, strong enough, sure enough to venture courageously into the world and develop the competencies we need to deal with life’s challenges.”

Scandinavia (ancient) – Living in the ashes

A common practice for those dealing with loss to spend their days alongside the fires that were aligned down the center of a longhouse.  They would occupy this physical and psychic terrain until the felt they had fully moved through the underworld where grief had taken them.  Ash speaks to what remains, the barest semblance of what once was.  The soul in grief feels reduced, brought to the place where all other thoughts or matters dissipate into ash.  Little was expected of those in the sacred season of ash at the time lasting a year or more.  It was a time out of time, an underworld journey to the place of sorrow and emptying. (Weller, 16)

It was Jewish custom, in some communities, to wear black armbands to let others know you are in mourning. Bereaved are given a year to attend to their loss.  The community knows and can acknowledge the process from the inside and outside.

Grieving is intimately connected to memory and the witnessing of those memories and emotions.  Freeman House in his elegant book Totem Salmon says, “In one ancient language, the word memory derives from a word meaning mindful, in another from a word to describe a witness, in yet another it means, at root to grieve.  To witness mindfully is to grieve for what has been lost.” That is the intent and purpose of grief.  (Weller, 18)

“Grief acknowledges what has been lost and ensures that we don’t forget what must be remembered.” – memorials, places of mourning

5 gates of entrance to grief:

1. We will lose everything we love.

2. The places that have not known love.What we experience as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss.We believe we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.

3. The sorrows of the world – news, media, natural disasters, environmental devastation etc.

4. What we expected and did not receive.Core is the longing to belong.Feel valued for the gifts as a parent

5. Ancestral Grief

Clarissa P. Estes Interpreted Notes on Grief

Notes from Clarissa P. Estes (Interpreted) on Grief (Loveland CO, 2011):

Grief is no longer being able to love something that you once loved. Grief is a difficult subject.

After a certain amount of time, people say “it is time to move on” as grief cannot be tolerated by

many in this culture. Grief is seen as infectious. Catching. There is a cultural fear of being

exposed to personal grief as there is a philosophy of victimology. If you are a victim, you try to

take advantage of others while spreading your grief. The projection is that if you are

sympathetic they will never stop grieving. Of course, many think this because they have not

fully processed their own grief.

Grief can be present in the bitter woman, what she doesn’t door hasn’t done to heal. If we don’t

heal generations, grief is left to be passed on to others. There is generally no ceremony for grief

in the overculture.

There is a psychic process of grief. One cannot accept this twist of fate (the killing brute).

Sometimes your life force is murdered or put to sleep. It is taken from you, but the child spirit

will come back. When we grieve, we grieve because we are not allowed to love a person or

creature, and it is hard. However, if you lay too long in this grave you may remain dead and

bitter for life.

Part of healing from immense grief is that you must speak to how you were killed. You must

apprehend what captured you. If you do not speak of it or work towards healing it, the force of

that grief becomes a vampire that attaches to the wound like possession. These are energies

that live off of others (off of you).

Look for fastest way to get wind and fire energy is through your wound. When you see

sadness/ sorrow/ walking in hell/ not of earth consumed/ vacant and not watching, this energy

feasts off grief and promises something you feel as if no one can understand your grief. “I’ll

never let anyone hurt you.” “We can do this silently.” “People will intrude.” But when grief is not

acknowledged, what attaches to grief? It is the bitter woman. She doesn’t know something else

has gotten a hold of her. She is the one something of sorcery that wants to destroy beauty as

she has lost the ability to love.

Stories that can be used for grief:

“The Girl with the Hair of Gold” (northern Europe / Europe) – suppressed grief / trauma will keep coming up to the surface no matter how far buried inside it is.  We sometimes bury it so deeply that it gets forgotten … well, until it starts to grow out of the ground.  We may even hack off its ends trying to keep it submerged, but at some point, it comes out and a shepherd might take it and fashion the reeds of hair into a flute.  It is then the music can be heard.  Until the thing that killed us is named (even if just naming the emotions), that “justice” can be served.

Kintsugi –

“The Lyrd Wurm” (Swedish) – That the ugly part of what we birth (the twin to the beautiful) will come back with the need to be recognized and acknowledged.  That an elder (inside or outside) can help us know how to be with this and undress / take off layers of skin, wash this part of ourselves that may have been neglected over time, and what is underneath is beautiful.

“Sedna”  (Inuit) – Betrayal (or loss) may be the cause of a deep mourning or grief.  Possibly we had to cut off fingers of ourselves and leave it behind to drown to survive.  We must go down and acknowledge this part of ourself and feed it or the rest of our life could starve.  We can brush Sedna’s hair and sit still with her at the bottom of the river, as if we ignore her, our nourishment and sustenance can be affected.