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Embodiment Matters Podcast
A Response To Our Times With Francis Weller
00:54:10
In this, our second conversation with Francis Weller, we once again have a wonderful, deep conversation covering many soulful topics, including: Letting go of searching for an answer, and instead leaning into our own unique response to these times. We...
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- [00:02]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Welcome to the Embodiment Matters podcast with me, Erin Gieseman Rabke and my husband, Carl Rabke. Embodiment Matters is an ongoing, rich conversation about what it really means to be embodied and why and how Embodiment Matters so much in our daily lives and in our modern world. You can find out more about our wonderful guests, about our work, you can sign up for our newsletter and find out how to become a supporting member of our podcast online@entodiment matters.com hello friends, it's Erin here and I'm so excited to share this episode with you. This is our first repeat guest. We're delighted to have this conversation with our friend and mentor, mentor Frances Weller, who is a fantastic human being who is the author of the Wild Edge of Sorrow, a book if you haven't read yet, you may want to get yourself a copy of because it is just about. Everybody I've talked to who's been introduced to this book exclaims how life changing it is and what a gift it is. So in this episode we speak about, you know, how to live today while the world is there's just so much grief and so much suffering. Francis explains his model of the five Gates of Grief. Even just having this named, so many people find so very healing and compassionate to know that grief is not just about, you know, losing someone you love, but there are many ways into grief. We speak about the importance of being awake during these days. And also Francis gives a great plug for numbness. He speaks a little bit about a beautiful, spontaneous grief ritual, actually, I don't know if you could call it a grief ritual, but a special ritual he and a few hundred people did on the west coast of the United States in response to many dying whales who were washing up on shore. That's very beautiful. Oh, we speak about belonging and ritual and just being with our sorrows. And there's so much in this conversation. We also talk about sort of the fear of moving toward grief, thinking it's going to make our pain worse, and the fact that a heart that is oppressed by untouched sorrow is not a very happy heart. The way that when we move toward our grief and allow space, especially with support of others, for that to move through, then it also makes space for so much more joy in life. And we end the conversation actually, in a beautiful a beautiful inquiry into living with joy in a world that's full of suffering. I think you'll really appreciate it. I just want to say again, a shout out for our supporters. We are so grateful for your support really helps us in creating these podcasts and taking the time out of our very full schedules to make them available for you. So if you're interested in becoming a supporter of the podcast, it's just $2 a month. You can head over to embodimentmatters.com and we would love to have your support. And thank you all so much. Enjoy the show.
- [03:51]
Hi, Francis.
- [03:53]
Francis Weller
Hello, Erin.
- [03:54]
Carl Rabke
Hi, Francis. Great to be here with you.
- [03:57]
Francis Weller
Greetings, Carl.
- [03:59]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
This is our first double feature podcast conversation where we get to return and continue the conversation with you. And we're just so grateful for the time to do that.
- [04:10]
Francis Weller
I'm delighted to be with you both again.
- [04:12]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Thank you. I wanted to start by continuing a conversation, a phrase that's come up several times in the last months. So here we are in late August of 2019, and the Amazon is on fire. And there's a lot of. And not only that place, but there's a lot of suffering happening in the world right now. And I know you have said before when we've talked about this, that there's no answer. And I know this tendency in my own mind and in many of us that we're looking for, like, just some way to tie it up with a neat bow and somebody help me make sense of this. And you've said many times that there's no answer, but there is a response, and I would just love to hear you talk about that a little bit about responses. What do you mean by that in terms of being in the world today?
- [05:13]
Francis Weller
Well, I. I mean, the. The Amazon and plastics in the ocean, the. I mean, all of these things. Who can pretend to have the answers to those things?
- [05:27]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yeah.
- [05:28]
Francis Weller
Answers are like trying to give ourselves some sense of assurance. They. They comfort us to a degree, but beyond a certain scope of influence, which is usually within our own household or maybe our community, it's hard to have that sense of being able to supply an answer for something so extraordinarily complex. But the good news is that we do have the capacity to respond. And the response takes us back to something much more intrinsic to heart and soul, which has to do with affection. How does this touch me? How do I feel about this that's happening? And out of that sense of how it occurs to my own heart, to my own soul, there will be a response. And each of us must listen very precisely to hear what shape that response takes in the world. It can be, for instance, doing a grief ritual. It can be being kinder to the people that you encounter on the street. It can be picking up garbage. It can be talking to your representatives. There's many, many responses. I'm not saying we're limited to a response, but should we be responding every day to the world around us? Whether it's appreciation and awe, that's a response. Bending on our knees, genuflecting in gratitude, that's a response. Helping where there is suffering, that's a response. So then it's really our deep obligation as participants in this ongoing unfolding drama that we not go passive. One thing is to get answers. The other thing is to actually try to kind of avoid the confrontation through a certain passivity or helplessness. Yeah.
- [07:34]
Carl Rabke
And it seems like if people are going for a solution or an answer, that can lead to such an overwhelming paralysis, like it's too big, but the response angle gives some forward movement.
- [07:52]
Francis Weller
Well, and I think it involves more of who we are than the abstractions of ideas. I mean, ideas are wonderful. I love ideas. I play with ideas all the time. But what we need is really the heart's capacity and the soul's intimacy with the living world. That's what I think has the most meaning in these times.
- [08:16]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
I just love that invitation. And it seems like, you know, you mentioned grief ritual as one of the possible responses, and we know that's something you do beautifully and are coming to Salt Lake City to do soon. And what you said about not going passive and how important it is, you know, one of the most radical things, it seems like, and important things right now is to pay attention and be present. And it's hard for people. A lot of people aren't doing that, you know, and it seems like grief is such an essential skill to allow us to stay present to what's happening right now.
- [09:00]
Francis Weller
It is. I want to put a plug in for denial and numbness, you know, all praise to that human capacity, in part why I'm saying that, not tongue in cheek, but really quite literally, that most of us are asked to confront the ongoing traumatic input from the world on our own. And on my own individually, I can't. My psyche was designed to process within my watershed, the news of what's happening within where I can walk and what I can see and touch and feel. But we are getting bombarded with information every single day about the latest catastrophe, the latest bit of very unsavory news from the politicians or whatever. This is not what we're wired to do. And given the fact that we are also simultaneously conscripted into a certain isolated confinement, solitary confinement, numbness becomes almost like a life Saving process. So I don't want to strip people of that denial and numbness and passivity. What I want to do is offer a larger context into which they can bring that and then maybe find some warmth in that space that could generate a larger and more vital and vivid response. That makes sense. Yeah.
- [10:51]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yeah, it's beautiful. I was just thinking in the bombardment that you said of spending five minutes on social media and seeing, you know, my cousin's baby is so cute, and the local high school is on lockdown because somebody came with a gun and then the Amazon, and now a great part of Africa is having fires and then, oh, let me try to sell you a bra. It's crazy. In three minutes, just what you're saying. Like, oh, my God. Just imagining when we used to live as human beings in a way that we had the news of our village and not everything all the time. Yeah.
- [11:38]
Francis Weller
Well, the cognitive dissonance has reached a height that we never would have anticipated.
- [11:43]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yeah.
- [11:44]
Francis Weller
What we're seeing and what's being displayed as normal makes us either feel crazy or that we do not belong to the system, which can also add to that feeling of being disconnected or somehow not a part of what's happening through our local culture.
- [12:11]
Carl Rabke
Francis, I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the five gates of grief, because I found that so illuminating when I first heard you talk about it, and how often we. We confine appropriate grieving to the ending of a relationship or the death of a spouse or a pet or something. And, yeah, if you could talk to that a little bit, because it really opened my sense of how much and how many ways there are to grieve.
- [12:44]
Francis Weller
I'd be happy to. I mean, when people arrive at my office, typically the complaint is one of depression. You know, feeling very heavy, empty, kind of lifeless. And when I sit with them for any length of time, it really becomes quickly apparent that what they're suffering from isn't so much depression, but oppression. They are. They are weighted down by the un metabolized sorrows of a lifetime. And not being able to identify them as grief losses, it's hard to really then mourn them. So what these five gates have shown me over the many years of working with people is that grief arrives at our door in many, many shapes. But culturally, like you said, Aaron or Carl, the only one that's really acknowledged is the death of something or the ending of something that we loved. Relationship or a house or a pet, somehow we're given credence to our grief by others. In those moments, the other four gates basically then operate covertly. They don't rise to the level of being honored. So then we're left to kind of carry in our backpacks, which soon turn into u hauls of this enormous legacy of sorrow. So let me just name them, and maybe if you have more you want to ask about that, we can go there. But that first gate is that everything you love, you will lose. And that's a fierce way to start. But it's a deep inherent truth that we get to keep nothing, that everything that we love, we will lose at some point along the way, either by our own disappearance or by theirs. So we have to really accept the rights of grief in order to really enter into the full embrace of love. The second gate is those parts of us, those places that have never known love. Now, I don't know about your life, but in my situation, in my family and in my upbringing, in my Catholic church and in the educational systems, I was told very clearly what parts of me were not acceptable. My wildness, my exuberance, my eroticism, my imagination, my sadness. These all became pieces of me that I were told in very either overt ways, by punishment or by shame. These were not allowable. So they had to be excised. They had to be gotten rid of. Now, the psyche longs for wholeness to some degree. It wants all of its capacities to be manifest and expressed in the world. So anytime it loses a piece of ourselves, that's a loss. And any loss is worthy of grief. But we cannot grieve now for something that we've learned to hold with contempt. The moment it's excised from our own interior home and sent into what I call the wasteland. We begin to adapt a relationship to that peace as caustic as the one that told us in the first place that it was not welcome. So now we live with this kind of dis ease with those parts of us. And when they arise in somebody else, we also judge them and belittle them or envy them at times as well. So is that clear for the second gate? Yeah. The third gate is the sorrows of the world. Now this one is becoming more and more like a. What's the best image? A rattling cage of bones. It is coming at us at such great intensity and speed that we cannot duck it any longer. So the sorrows of the world include the Amazon and Africa, the fires, the same time way, all the ice is melting, and they're now holding funerals for glaciers that have disappeared. We just held A ritual a month ago for close to 200 whales that have washed up on the shores of the coastline from Mexico to Alaska. These whales are starving to death. So these are the sorrows of the world. They touch us every day from the roadkill that we pass on the sides of the. Of our trips into to work, to the disappearance of languages and the silencing of cultures. And these are. For a long time, we were able to see them as something outside of ourselves. But now we're really beginning to feel how inseparable our experience of psyche is from what's happening in the world.
- [18:11]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Mm.
- [18:12]
Francis Weller
So this is impinging on us all the time. If you noticed. I'm sure you can. There's a certain anxiety in the culture right now. And this anxiety is not personal. It is the. It is that collective anxiety about what is happening to the fabric of not just society and culture, but what's happening to the very fabric of the environment. The thing that we took for granted forever is now showing signs, inexplicable signs, of decay and erosion, and we're in dangerous straits. So that's the third gate. It doesn't get easier from here. The fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive. This one took a long time for me to articulate, but every time we got together in ritual space, you could feel this longing begin to arise. People began to say, this is what I've been looking for. I've been aching for something like this. And then I began to sense, well, we're shapeful. How could you long for something if it's never been there? Well, it's always been there. It's what we expected and did not receive. It's as if we were wired for the whole human experience that our Deep Time ancestors knew by heart, just by experience. They would gather to share rituals of grief and gratitude. They would sing together. They would share meals together. They would share dreams. They would hunt together. They would gather the food, the firewood. They would tell stories at night. They knew the myths. They knew the intimacies of the land base that they were on. This is what shaped us over millions of years and most precisely the last 300,000 years, when we became Homo sapiens. And now, literally in the blink of an eye, we've abandoned almost every one of those coordinates. So we feel lost and emptied in this world, and we lack a sense of place and direction and belonging, but it's still wired inside of us. Now the tragedy is we end up kind of blaming ourselves for this feeling of emptiness. What did I do wrong that I feel so empty? Well, what if this emptiness isn't a lack in my own personal part, but an absence where culture failed to materialize the things that we require to stay healthy and alive and exuberant. We could spend a thousand years on that one, any of them. And then the last one is what I call ancestral grief. And the more I sit with this one, the more complex it becomes, because I began to really understand that almost none of the grief I'm carrying is mine alone. And most of the grief I carry began, as Rumi would say, in some other tavern. It began a long time ago when certain severances began to occur among my own lineage, my own ancestors. When there was a breakage in the connection to a place, to a culture, to a language, to traditions, to foods, to plant based, to myth. When all of those began to be eroded and corroded by a departure, we began to live a kind of a life of sorrow. So that's one thread of that grief. Another thread is what happened particularly for you and I, you know, talking right now from our European ancestors, when they arrived here come as humble, they came to dominate. And the destruction of the native cultures and the landscape is something that's still 500 years later, a deep wound in the psyche of this culture. And then the importation of slavery is another grievous mark on the. On the soul of this culture that we have failed to honor. And we can still hear it every week in the acts and gestures of racism and violence towards people of color. We have not addressed this to any degree at all in any satisfactory manner. So those are what we walk around with every single day. Those five gates of grief impact us. And so again, another plug for numbness and denial. Unless we're given the container large enough for us to be courageous enough to turn towards them and really acknowledge them and face them.
- [23:31]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
So I'm imagining somebody listening to this who was thinking, like, how do we create that container? Or I need that container, or how can I do that in my community? You know, I know you're in high demand. Your grief ritual weekend in November in Salt Lake City sold out so quickly. And I know that happens whenever you offer them. And I know we got to attend a training with you to be able to offer this work also. But just whatever you want to say about ways to create that container or sort of. I love the phrase from the work that reconnects about building the new in the shell of the old. You know, there's this sense of we've lost that there's a gap in our cultural connection with ritual, but that we can maybe create that container for ourselves or each other.
- [24:26]
Francis Weller
I think that's absolutely right. We are ritual creatures. You watch children, and they're constantly generating rituals, some sort or another. So we're wired for it. So it doesn't have to be so grand as going to a grief ritual with somebody leading the way. It can be very modest and humble. We can call our neighbors over to the house and we can say, you know, we're going to try something pretty radical. We're going to try to talk about loss and sorrow tonight. You may not give me any takers, but if you offer good soft drinks or something, maybe they'll come. Guacamole always helps. It can be two or three or four people. And what I've noticed over and over again is people are just longing for the permission to speak about it. There's this kind of terror and longing side by side. We're afraid to talk about it because it's become so private. And whatever becomes private carries a certain mantle of shame around it. And it's also a secret longing because you walk down the street and if you look carefully, you can see it in everybody's eyes. Oh, yeah. There is a tremendous sadness in the eyes of most of the people that are walking down the streets with us. And if we stopped anybody and said, are you okay? And if they could really trust the question, they would say, no. My heart is breaking. I'm utterly lost. I don't know what to do, but thank you for asking. We need a place. And the container can, like I say, can be very simple and small. Light a candle, say a poem or a prayer, ask for some support and help to face what is at times feeling overwhelming and dense and impossible to carry on our own. But I have seen this literally thousands of times, and people have come to these gatherings. There is just this sense of spaciousness that begins to open around the heart Once we can begin to acknowledge fully the depth of sorrows that we carry.
- [27:04]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Do you think that people doing. I don't even know if this language is correct or accurate, but, like, personal grief work makes. Makes one more available to meeting these times, you know, the grief in the world.
- [27:22]
Francis Weller
Tell me what personal grief work looks like.
- [27:24]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Well, just what you're talking about, you know, like, you know, for example, the places that have not known love is huge.
- [27:38]
Francis Weller
Yeah. I mean, if you go to talk to somebody like, you know, my profession, you go to talk to a therapist. That's the majority of what's happening in that room? You're talking about the places of not known love, or you're talking about the ending of a relationship or something like that. So it is grief work. Absolutely, yeah. And even name it as such, helps just to identify that what you're talking about is sorrow. You're talking about. Because we tend to pathologize these things, like, what's wrong with me? And if we can help at all, we can just say, you know, what you're experiencing is loss. You're feeling a profound sense of grief. Now, I'll often say to most of the people I sit with that our work here is learning to tolerate contact in the places where your sorrow lives. But ultimately, you're going to need a larger holding space. Because what psyche wants, I think, and what psyche expects in order to really put the grief down is a larger vessel with more bodies, more sound, more hands, more engagement, side by side, weeping. You know, even if you've never done it in your lifetime, when you have the experience of it, some part of your psyche goes, that felt right. I was not alone in my room crying. I was side by side with another one of my kin doing the same thing, expressing their own version of the sorrows. But we all have sorrows. We have people coming from Australia and England. And I say, you know, it's wonderful that you're here. It's great that you've traveled so far. But your presence here itself is a symptom of the sorrows at the core of our grief. You know, that this is not happening in every community, that you have to travel literally 10,000 miles for the privilege of being able to cry next to somebody else openly without embarrassment. So personal grief work. Yeah, do it by all means, but as a means to build your courage to step into a larger space with others and become bold enough to say the truth of your own experience.
- [30:18]
Carl Rabke
Yeah, I know you've used this line before, and I forget who you were quoting, but that this is the solitary work that you cannot do alone.
- [30:25]
Francis Weller
Right. That was Ira Progoff, who back in the 70s, I think into the 80s, too, was kind of one of the forerunners of the whole journal movement. And I remember him saying that one of the workshops I was at with him. The solitary journey we cannot do alone. And no one can empty your cup of grief. After a while, you begin to recognize that it's actually a communal cup. You know, it's the shared cup of grief that we are. That we're holding. It's not mine alone.
- [30:58]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yeah.
- [30:59]
Francis Weller
So it is really important. Like when I'm sitting with the cancer patients at the cancer help program at Commonweal, that phrase resonates so strongly with people there that, yeah, this heroic fiction that I can somehow muscle my way through life alone, not needing anybody, is abruptly confronted when you get cancer. So that diagnosis has a strange grace to it. It shatters the illusion of being able to do this alone. And if we are honest with anything, any degree of our own suffering, we. We are confronted with that same reality that, no, I cannot do this alone. I need others, I need companionship, I need support, I need people to walk this with me.
- [31:52]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
So I'm just thinking as you're saying that it's so beautiful of, you know, that shattering the illusion of the sort of heroic way in relation to the times we're in right now. Because my God, that's so clear, right? Like I can't. No one of us can fix or help or, you know, meet these times. And I'm thinking about that phrase and I think there's that both Jung has said it and also there's a version that Rumi has said about the genius hiding behind the wound. And it's just beautiful to hear you speak about that at Commonweal, like in the way, what did you call it? The shattering of the illusion. But the grace in it that it.
- [32:36]
Francis Weller
Yeah, the strange grace that comes with that kind of confrontation.
- [32:41]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
I'm just extrapolating that to our collective times right now. And maybe, you know, the part of me that wants to paint it as a kind of grace that's inviting something different. You know.
- [32:57]
Francis Weller
I don't think any of us know what's going to happen. But I am. The thread of hope that I carry, thin as it is, is that grief will save our asses. That it will be the broken heart that has the ability to remind us of what it is we love. And rather than closing down and going paralytic or into passivity, that it stirs something that Pema children call the outrageous courage of the Bodhi heart, that somehow the shattering of denial and the illusion of heroic responses actually generates a truer version of courage than that which we take the word back to. Its origin comes from the French cool courage, full hearted. So that's what's really being asked of us now, is a full hearted response which includes the suffering. It includes the wounding and the damage. There was that old. It was an ancient Greek phrase that in your wound is your genius.
- [34:17]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yeah.
- [34:18]
Francis Weller
So what's the collective wound? Right now, not so much my personal Wound. But what is the collective wound? Well, it certainly is the shattering of the fantasy that we lived in a democracy and that we lived in civilization. Both of those are really being stripped bare. And hopefully what is generated is a heartfelt response, first of grief. And maybe out of our grieving, there will be gestures of affection. We begin to build something small and humble and intimate and close to the soil that isn't quite so arrogant and quite so presumptuous of authority. Not sure I answered your question at all there, but that's where it took us.
- [35:16]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
I like it. I have. Is it okay if I ask her? I have another question that I'm probably going to fumble through trying to articulate this and weave a few things together, but I think we'll get there. So I just so appreciate what you just shared about the collective wound and that sort of out of the courage to grieve, these gestures of affection can happen. And it seems like a very organic process to me. So I'm thinking about. Over the weekend, I had shared a few days with some wonderful beings in a workshop I taught around the work that reconnects. I know you're familiar with that body of work which, you know, really honors grief and honors our pain for the world, and that's one part of what we do. And one of the participants who was there for the weekend, we did some writing practice about grief and our pain for the world. And a refrain that kept coming for her was, my tears are not enough. Your tears are not enough. And then she would write into her pain for the world and say, you know, it was almost like this. I just. It stuck with me because she said it so many times. It was such a refrain in her writing. And. And the. What do I want to ask about this? It's almost like the ritual for the whales that you participated in that came out of grief. And there's this sort of. You know, I can feel it in myself. I see it in us collectively, this, like, impatient, modern mind that wants to either get to the bright side or, like, do something, you know, so. And I know you've used the phrase before, I don't remember exactly what. But that grief is sort of like the. I don't remember what the adjective is, but the stepchild that's sort of ignored or devalued in our culture. So I just. I guess I'm asking again, and. And maybe we just keep needing the reminder about tears. And I both want to ask again about the importance of making time for grief. And also, do you trust that Those gestures come out of grief. Or could we end up just circling the drain and crying together about how it's all going to shit? Let's cry.
- [37:59]
Francis Weller
You know what I mean?
- [38:00]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Like, how do we make that transition into the affectionate gestures without bypassing the necessary descent? Something like that.
- [38:11]
Francis Weller
Yeah. I don't think we can. Action void of affection is partly where we got into this trouble in the first place.
- [38:23]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yeah.
- [38:24]
Francis Weller
Wendell Berry, who said it all turns on affection, you know, what do we love? And so grief, if we really listen to what grief is about, it's almost invariably tangled up with what we love.
- [38:40]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yes.
- [38:42]
Francis Weller
So another thing I wanted to add before I forget is let's not reduce grief to tears.
- [38:50]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Same word.
- [38:52]
Francis Weller
Well, grief is also. Outrage is Protestant. It is an adamant refusal to allow the things to proceed as they are. James Hellman, one of my finest and most beloved teachers, said, you know, the sure sign of a soul awake is that it's outraged. So, you know, when we do the grief work, we make a lot of room during the week and for that outrage, for bellowing and, you know, sounds that he come up out of the viscera that what has happened to my body, whether it's been raped or molested or what's happening to the forest by strip clear cuts or, you know, whatever is happening is not okay. And there's a protest in us, and I can feel it right now. I want to do something, but I have to first acknowledge it. I have to first feel it. I have to get on my knees and scream it. And there is something that happens. And even in the invocation to the prayer that we say before we start the ritual, which is not by rote, but by the moment that's there, I'll often say we're doing this not only for ourselves, but so that our hearts might open wider, that we might love this world more fully, that we might commit ourselves more completely to the repair, to the mending, to the healing of our rivers, that we might bring the salmon back. Then we might do one small gesture that helps to breathe life back into the anima mundi, to the soul of the world. So our grief is a gateway into a deeper affection and a more robust commitment, I think, to showing up. It's also, you know, paradoxically, the gateway into a hell of a lot more joy. Yeah. The heart that's oppressed by untouched sorrow is not a very happy heart.
- [41:18]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yeah.
- [41:18]
Francis Weller
You know, it's a very sullen heart. It's a weary heart. But I have seen so much joy, infectious joy erupt towards the last few moments of the grief ritual, there is a, there is a joy that comes in the room that is unmistakable. And it's not pretend, it's not game show joy. Right. It is truly heartfelt, oh my God, I am alive kind of joy. So that's also part of the education, is that grief is not just an emotion, but it's a human faculty and that we need to be skillful in it so that we can keep it moving and keep it being metabolized into some form of medicine that we can take back into the community. I think on Friday night in Utah, in Salt Lake City, I'm giving a talk on the apprenticeship of sorrow. And this is a big part of the apprenticeship. And I love that word because it speaks to a long term engagement.
- [42:29]
Carl Rabke
Yeah, right. And taking it as a teacher and guide.
- [42:34]
Francis Weller
What's that?
- [42:35]
Carl Rabke
Oh, that apprenticeship also is taking sorrow as a, as a teacher and guide.
- [42:41]
Francis Weller
And like, yes, you are really giving it its due and it has the capacity to reshape you. And a long apprenticeship in the old language, let's say you apprenticeship as a carpenter, you'd be a, you know, be sweeping shavings in the corner for the first year or two, then you might be able to, you know, cut a board for your teacher, your master. But over time, you would go through the whole process and in the end you would be declared a master craftsman, a master carpenter. In soul work, the long lineage of apprenticeship with sorrow doesn't lead to mastery, it leads to elderhood. And an elder is someone who has digested the bitter tinctures of life and has metabolized them into something medicinal for the community. It's another grief that we carry right now is that there are so few of those people walking the streets who have really digested their sorrows into something meaningful and something that can really address the bewilderment in the eyes of the young ones.
- [44:01]
Carl Rabke
Francis, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, you referred to it in the fifth gate of the ancestral grief. And I know that working with ancestors is a pretty central part of the grief ritual. And for someone maybe raised in a culture where not much attention is brought to any kind of living relationship with ancestors. Can you talk a little bit about the value of that and maybe some entrance ways of doing some work around and with ancestors.
- [44:38]
Francis Weller
That'S a big topic. Let's see. We live in a culture that perpetually idealizes progress, so we're always moving forward. We're obsessed with progress. Even in therapy, people want to progress, they want to get better. However, that means that we basically abandon history. We, in a sense, we abandon the dead, but the dead are still with us. Part of what I said earlier in that talking about the ancestral grief, is that much of the sorrow that's in your body, my body, the bodies of those I'm sitting with, is inherited. We, you know, there's this new term, the transgenerational transmission of trauma. You've heard that term? Yes, well, that's absolutely true. We are the current curators of the sorrow. It didn't necessarily begin in my lifetime, it began generations ago. It could have began as a consequence of a rupture of connection to a homeland. Maybe they began to drink, Maybe alcoholism began to be a way of coping. Well, that alcoholism didn't stop, the wounding of that didn't stop in that person's lifetime. It affected their children and they maybe became alcoholic or they became the ones who learned how to cope with alcoholism by basically abandoning their own lives. And that gets passed on generation to generation. So why is it useful to talk about the ancestors? Well, in part because we want to understand the depth and breadth of what it is we are being asked to deal with, to face. The other part of it, I would say, is that. And do you remember I'm speaking to two of you, both of you, the ritual we did on Thursday night at the training when I asked you, we asked you to go down to the shrine to the ancestors shrine and to both acknowledge the grief that you're caring for them, but also asking them for help now to have the courage to face this. Do you remember that?
- [47:10]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Oh my God. Unforgettable.
- [47:12]
Francis Weller
And how profoundly poignant that was. So we need their help, they need our help. In the ancient ecologies, this was understood very clearly that the dead are not gone, they are still living in our dreams and in our bodies and in our moods, in our feelings, in the places that we struggle. So asking them to participate in this is part of re establishing that deep ecology of the sacred. We're one of the only cultures that has a thin to non existing relationship to the dead. And I think it's become such a vital part of my personal work. Well, I'm not going to go there, but I've also seen it become a very meaningful part of the work that we do around grief. It's part of the repair. And I also then sense that the healing that comes out of the grief work goes in all directions.
- [48:24]
Carl Rabke
Right, right.
- [48:25]
Francis Weller
You know, it's not just I feel better, it seems to somehow mend griefs and losses that were not addressed, and including deaths. As Martin Proctel would say, there's so many unwept ancestors that are crowding the streets, and can we finally let that help them get to a place of ease? And then they might be able to become more active as beneficial ancestors? Yeah. Thank you.
- [49:01]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
I, in our last minutes of our time together, want to circle back to what you were saying about a heart that is oppressed by sort of ungrieved sorrows of a lifetime is also not very joyful. Yes, I want to talk about joy in these times, and maybe I'll just leave it there. What about joy? Is it okay to feel joy? Is it our obligation to feel joy? Is that part of an offering? Is it a betrayal of the travesty of what's happening in the world to really be joyful? Just love you to talk.
- [49:40]
Francis Weller
No, no, I would not say it's an obligation. I think it's an outcome.
- [49:46]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
An outcome.
- [49:47]
Francis Weller
I think it is an inevitable outcome from living fully into this moment. I mean, part of the beauty of grief work, I'll often say, is that the intention of the grief work is to get us current, and I like that word current in multiple ways. Current in the sense of. In the present moment. So most of our lives is actually spent chewing old bones, you know, old hurts, old wounds, old grievances. So we rarely, in a sense, pivot and get into our current life. But another part of that word is to get into the current, the electricity, the vitality of life, and to get into the current like a river, the flow of life. So that word is very rich in its syntax, meanings, multiple meanings. And when we're really honoring our grief, it's inevitable that you will feel joy. I think I remember saying in the book, walking up to this woman, this African woman in Africa, and saying to her, you have so much joy. And her immediate response was, well, that's because I cry a lot.
- [51:09]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
I think of that so often these days.
- [51:11]
Francis Weller
Yeah. And so it's not our obligation to be joyful. It is a consequence of fully accepting our human nature and not forgetting the exquisite beauty that is still abundantly around us and the sweet gestures that come from our children and our friends, the acts of kindness from strangers. There's plenty of reason to be sad. But there's also a parallel number of things to be exceedingly grateful for and to have that erupt into moments of joy, I think is part of what, in turn inspires us to love this world much more completely. Why Save anything to the end.
- [52:12]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Yes.
- [52:16]
Francis Weller
Yeah. Yeah.
- [52:22]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
It's too bad we always have these lacking conversations.
- [52:25]
Carl Rabke
I know we'll find something to talk about next time.
- [52:29]
Francis Weller
Yeah, well, think about it.
- [52:31]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
We're just both sitting here with glistening eyes. I don't even know what to say after that. I'm so moved. Except just thank you. So grateful for you and our connection and your work and. Yes.
- [52:47]
Francis Weller
Yeah.
- [52:47]
Carl Rabke
Thank you, Francis.
- [52:49]
Francis Weller
It is really a pleasure to have the two of you in our lives. So we're very grateful and very much looking forward to having been in Utah since 1978.
- [53:01]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Wow.
- [53:02]
Francis Weller
So it's been a few few years, so I'll look forward to that. I know the workshop is full, but I'm hoping we can entice a few more souls into the pride in that conversation.
- [53:14]
Carl Rabke
Yeah, I think we will. Just to bring this into our larger community, we're so honored to have you come and join us.
- [53:24]
Francis Weller
Well, thank you for the invitation. I'm looking forward to being with you all.
- [53:29]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Me, too. Thank you. Thank you. All right, till next time.
- [53:35]
Francis Weller
Till next time.
- [53:37]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
Okay.
- [53:37]
Carl Rabke
See?
- [53:38]
Francis Weller
Well, you too.
- [53:39]
Erin Gieseman Rabke
You too.
- [53:40]
Carl Rabke
Thank you so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, it's great if you want to share it with friends or post about it on social media. Also, you could make a donation to support the podcast or find out more information about our classes and offerings at our website, embodiment matters.com sa.