The Five Gates of Grief
“Where there is Sorrow there is holy ground.”
- Oscar Wilde
Recently I completed a five month Grief Ritual Leadership training with Francis Weller, author of the profound book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. As a soul activist, Weller believes that grief tending is essential to living a soulful life. He has facilitated community grief rituals for decades and it was a delight to learn from his quiet and deep wisdom. I especially love his framework of the Five Gates of Grief, explored below. If the summary here calls you, I highly recommend reading this beautiful book. (Note all quotes below are from this book, unless otherwise noted).
The depth of our grief is a measure of, and mirror to, what we most deeply care about. Our own soul also bears a light to what we love most. Grief is a potent opening, a fierce and tender portal into our deepest unfolding soul journey. These five gates can help us metabolise our grief so we can receive the precious gifts that our grieving hearts hold.
Image: Earth Grief by Anahata Giri
The First Gate: Everything we love, we will lose
It is a painfully tender truth: everything is a gift, and nothing lasts. To lose those we love, is a rigorous test of our ability to fully live by life’s - and death’s - terms, based on the primal truth of impermanence.
From my experience of this gate, I know that grief, wild and raw, tenderises the heart like nothing else. In 2015, my younger sister, aged 45 years old, died, after a courageous three and a half year journey with breast cancer. I still remember those first few days of mourning. It felt like my nervous system and cells were trembling in profound shock. I could not leave the house, eat, think or do much at all. For weeks the grief condensed into an ache in my chest and heart and tears poured out. Over the next months, the shock would hit hard in moments, as though my whole system was recalibrating around the fracture of my world, without my sister here in physical form. Small rituals helped. I lit a candle each day in front of a treasured ‘sisters’ photo, taken eleven days before my sister died. I wrote letters to my sister, journalled and cried - a lot. I had to muster courage and grit to ride the waves of emotion. When the grief was most painful, I would say to myself ‘just this’ and stay with sensations, with my breathing - just like breathing through contractions of the labour of childbirth - to remain anchored in the field of witness, of feeling, of presence.
Image: Sisters
The grief of the first gate evokes deep surrender to powerful transformation, as described in this poem:
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
A word here about the power of ritual, that can be done both in solitude or with others. As Weller teaches, ritual offers two things required to move grief through: containment and release. The simple structure of ritual, supported by intention, nature, calling on ancestors, drumming, singing, sacred objects as simple as a candle and so on, gives a container for the griever to release and let go into their grief. It can be powerful to follow your own intuition and design your own ritual. Towards the end of this article is an example of a simple grief ritual.
My grieving has forever opened, strengthened and softened my heart. I am more connected to my own vulnerability, and to profound gratitude and love for the preciousness of all life. Grief for my sister is still here. It is an expression of both a love lost - and a love that remains. This is the two-fold medicine of this gate: vulnerability and love.
The Second Gate: The Places In Me that Have Not Known Love
This entrance to grief is through the parts of ourselves that have not known love, that we have banished in shame, isolation or despair. These shamed parts of ourselves usually arise from extended neglect, harm, violation or developmental trauma. Shame is endemic in our society - and does not only stem from overt violence, but also stems from the failure of caregivers to consistently tend to our emotional needs as children or from repeated rupture in the caregiver-child connection.
Shame can reinforce a painful, debilitating and persistent sense of unworthiness. Shame is a sickness - or even loss - of the soul. Many indigenous cultures describe soul loss as the most dangerous condition a human being could face. Facing this gate can feel like facing a crisis.
A key way through is to internalise a nurturing adult, mother or father archetype and use this to create an internal, compassionate holding space. Mindfulness, meditation and self-designed ritual are useful tools that enable this attentive inner parent or adult to simply hold space for the profound pain and loss of the places that have not known love. Through the compassionate, steady, loving gaze of the inner parent, these outcast parts can be welcomed home. Of course, sometimes support is needed from a good listener, friend or therapist.
This is a gate of maturation, where we learn to tend to our wounded shamed aspect. The medicine of this gate is compassion, including self-compassion.
Image: Holding Grief by Anahata Giri
The Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World
This gate opens when we consciously feel the losses of the world around us. Much of our grief is not only personal, but is shared communally, culturally, ecologically, globally. With ecological and humanitarian crisis across our turmoiled planet, with a human culture seeped in violence and trauma, with species, languages and cultures disappearing, our hearts and souls bear heavy injuries.
Weller (pp 46-47) writes, “We are enveloped in a field of consciousness; everything possesses soul. This was known to every indigenous culture. What we feel from the surrounding world is not a projection of our own minds outwards..We can travel just about anywhere in the world and we will inevitably come across vestiges of clear-cuts, those bleeding and scarred lands that look so desolate and violated. These places announce themselves as a wound, a rupture where life once moved and breathed…What if…the feelings we have when we pass through these zones of destruction are actually arising from the land itself?…What if this is anima mundi, the soul of the world, weeping through us?”
Image: Lament: wild mercy is in our hands by Anahata Giri
“To live a life of soul means living with sensitivity to the plight of the planet.” (p.48). This gate highlights the devastation that results from our loss of connection with nature. As biologist Paul Shepherd said, “The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” (as quoted in Weller, p.50). We are meant to be entwined with the wild, breathing natural world. Many of us suffer from what ecophilosopher Richard Louv describes as ‘nature deficit disorder’.
When we let the sorrows of the world in, Weller writes (p.52) that we become, “in some strange, alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet.” Expressing grief for the world can bring a tender, fierce, protective love of this precious web of life. This is the medicine of the fourth gate: entanglement.
The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive
This is one of the most difficult gates to recognise and calls forth loss of things we may not even have realised that we have lost. This gate names a profound sense of rupture in our felt sense of belonging. We humans are designed to be held in the living culture of the village and in rich relationship with the web of life. Weller describes his experience in Malidoma Some’s village of Dano in West Africa, where at dusk every day, adults and children would gather and share stories of their day, in a container of warmth and welcome, a profound mirroring of the worth of every individual.
Many of us do not know this level of community, of connection, of village - and may not recognise that this is a loss within us. Yet, it is in our bones to expect many eyes seeing us, many hearts witnessing us in a highly participatory way of living, in relationship with humans and more-than-humans. Modernised culture diminishes our identity as an isolated and conditioned individual. Being embedded in community affirms that our identity is interdependent with the whole web of life.
We rarely talk about this gate, but the underlying sorrow here might be evoked by questions like: Where is my village? Who are my people? Where is my home or place? Who knows and sees me? Where are the rituals that connect me to a wider sense of identity, as part of the web of life? The village used to help each individual name their gifts for the world, their purpose. Loss of purpose is another facet of this gate. In modern culture we no longer ask “What is the gift you carry in your soul, that will benefit the village?” There is a deep longing to know our way to contribute, not just for ourselves, for the sake of the whole earth community.
A lack of community and a lack of embeddedness in nature results in purposelessness and meaninglessness. “Emptiness now saturates our culture.” (p.62). The medicine of this gate is needed now more than ever: the medicine of belonging.
The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief
This gate opens us into the grief we carry in our bodies from the sorrows experienced by our ancestors. This grief can be deeply buried, carried unconsciously, and can include a loss of connection with our ancestral roots, a sense of diminished ancestral inheritance. In modern culture, we no longer turn to our ancestors as a source of connection with invisible powers, with the legacy of ritual, stories, songs, imagination and wisdom of those that have come before us. These ancestors include human and more-than-human ancestors.
Almost all of our grief is ancestral grief. We have inherited transgenerational wounds and trauma. Ancestral grief can revolve around our personal familial lines and can also revolve around our cultural ancestral grief. Here in Australia, as in most cultures, we have unfinished business around grieving the systemic violence and oppression of indigenous people. Reconciling ancestral grief means reconciling the genocide that stains our lands and hearts. There is much work here for us to do as a culture, to grieve so that we can make genuine reconciliation with our past. When we walk through the gate of ancestral grief we receive the medicine of wisdom.
A Grief Ritual: Speaking your grief to the Earth (p. 164)
(You might like to warm up your grief with journalling and remembering and setting an intention for this practice).
Find a place that feels utterly safe and where you will not be disturbed, a garden or nature place. Dig a small hole into which you can speak your grief. Begin with some words of gratitude for the earth who can receive your grief. Allow mother earth to hold you in this ritual. Then lie down on your belly and speak, whisper, cry, howl, your grief into the earth. Earth will take and reshape your grief into nutrients for all life. You might place objects or written messages into your hole. Adapt the ritual to your needs, following whatever feels right to honour your grief. When you are finished, thank Earth for her holding. It is very important to then close the hole over and leave the ground as close to how you found it.
Our shared grief brings gifts
Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh was asked what we need to do to save our world. “What we most need to do,” he replied, “is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”
What if grief was one of the ways the earth is calling us home? The five gates of grief can helps us name, acknowledge and hold tenderly the wild grief within, whatever gateway we walk through. Grief tending is not done to fix what is broken but rather to bless what is broken (James Hillman). In a culture that individualises grief, it is important that we grieve not only in solitude, but also together, in community. We need a return to our ancient lineage of grief ritual, to call in the transformative power of grief tending.
Our shared grief brings powerful medicine needed by our world: the vulnerability and love of the first gate; compassion of the second gate; entanglement of the third gate; belonging of the fourth gate and wisdom of the fifth gate. “Grief is our common bond. Opening to our sorrow connects us with everyone, everywhere.” Will we reap the harvest of our shared grief?
This beautiful poem by Rashani Rea points to the rich harvest and solace that meeting our deep sorrow can bring:
The Unbroken
There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.
Written by Anahata Giri
April 2024
Reference:
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, North Atlantic Books, U.S.A. 2015
Anahata Giri is a soul guide and apprentice to love in all its forms, including grief. Her work explores experiential gateways to help people follow the thread of their own soul and emerge with renewed love and belonging, meaning and purpose.