494: Soul Work For Uncertain Times with Francis Weller

Summary

THERAPY CHAT Podcast, Episode 494:
Soul Work For Uncertain Times with Francis Weller
Released: August 18, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this deeply resonant conversation, host Laura Reagan, LCSW-C, welcomes psychotherapist, author, and ‘soul activist’ Francis Weller for an exploration of grief, ritual, cultural emptiness, and how to reweave our connection with soul and community in today's tumultuous world. Drawing on indigenous wisdom, depth psychology, and his own four decades of clinical experience, Weller speaks to the transformative power of embracing sorrow, the necessity of ritual, and the importance of nurturing collective and individual belonging—especially amidst widespread uncertainty.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Francis Weller: Background and Approach

• Weller recently retired after 43 years as a psychotherapist; his perspective is shaped by decades of “field work” with individuals, tracking not only personal suffering but collective psyche ([04:09]).
• Developed a style termed "Soul Centered Psychotherapy," focused on grief and ritual.
• Inspiration drawn from indigenous cultures, mythology, Jungian psychology, and poetic tradition.

2. The Central Role of Grief

• Grief as a Saturating Force: Weller observes that underlying most symptoms he’s encountered in therapy—addiction, divorce, trauma—is unaddressed grief, “always saturating that territory” ([04:09]).
• Western cultures, particularly white capitalist cultures, “are not taught soul work at all.”
• Need for ritual, connection, and shared practices that keep communities and individuals healthy.

“The language of soul often comes through affliction, you know, suffering... We’re not taught much about grief at all, in our training nor just as a human being, particularly in white, capitalistic culture.” – Francis Weller ([04:09])

3. Expanding the Notion of Soul

• Weller’s concept of soul moves beyond religious dogma toward “our wild entanglement with all things… our ongoing relationship with the anima mundi, the soul of the world” ([10:12]).
• His work, influenced by Jung and James Hillman, places the soul at the center of both suffering and transformation; he describes his psycho-spiritual lineage as “claimed by that tree” ([10:12]).

“Soul is tough. Soul is hard. It takes us into places of great trouble… We don’t ripen as human beings without some encounter with loss.” – Francis Weller ([10:12])

4. Grief, Initiation, and Collective Suffering

• Current times are framed as a “rough collective initiation,” with symptoms of trauma, grief, and loss affecting societies at large ([13:08]).
• Elements of initiation: severance from the known world, radical alteration of identity, realization that “you cannot go back” ([13:08]).
• Modern Western cultures lack traditional containers for initiation—elders, ritual, community—so experiences often shatter rather than transform.

“We are being taught that we have to engage this material. We are being taken into a rough initiation collectively... What is possibly big enough to hold the complexity of that type of reality? To me, the only answer is soul.” – Francis Weller ([13:08])

5. Loss of Community and the Crisis of Belonging

• Laura shares personal grief and notes how the loss of “being held” is both personal and cultural.
• Weller explains the Western hyperfocus on individualism/supposed sovereignty has eclipsed the capacity for intimacy, community, and shared responsibility ([19:37]).
• Unprocessed grief becomes oppression, not “depression”—it accumulates across generations, including ancestral and collective sorrows.

"It's almost impossible to process your grief in isolation. So we learn to become holders of grief, we learn how to compact it... These sorrows are generations old." – Francis Weller ([19:37])

6. Disconnection from Nature and the Need for Initiation

• The severance from land and nature undermines our sense of belonging and responsibility ([22:12]).
• Indigenous perspectives on land are of identification, not ownership or stewardship—a true sense that “I am that delta, I am that river.”
• In the absence of ritual and grief practices, hearts “congest”—Weller connects the prevalence of heart/lung disease in Western societies to unprocessed sorrow ([27:41]).

“There’s a correspondence between those two things—our ability to keep grief moving and our capacity for joy… That’s because I cry a lot.” – Francis Weller relaying a West African woman’s words ([28:14])

7. The Cultural Roots of Emptiness and Consumption

• Weller reflects on “the emptiness in white society” which manifests as “rapid and rabid consumption—more land, more power, more wealth... a cannibalistic psychosis” ([32:49]).
• Contrasting values: Western emphasis on achievement, progress, rank, privilege vs. indigenous values of restraint, reverence, reciprocity.
• Chronic anxiety about belonging drives compulsive striving; since there’s no true sense of homecoming, approval and achievement can never satisfy ([36:11]).

“As long as our belonging is questioned, our anxiety is chronic… Approval never lingers in the pocket as a sustainable coin.” – Francis Weller ([36:11])

8. Longing for Primary Satisfactions and Ritual

• “Primary satisfactions” are what truly nourishes soul: shared meals, song, tears, and presence—not material gain ([39:44]).
• Grief work and ritual can break open our hearts, increasing both personal and communal resilience.

9. The Wisdom of Marginalized Cultures

• Black and indigenous communities, having faced the “long dark” for centuries, hold deep wisdom about cultural survival through art, ritual, song ([43:23]).
• Weller shares the importance of imagination amid uncertainty, using the Inuit word kart saluni: patiently sitting in darkness, awaiting creative vision ([46:00]).

“Through art, through ritual, through song, you can take imagination into places of great suffering.” – Francis Weller ([46:00])

10. Becoming Indigenous to Place

• Jeanette Armstrong’s wisdom: “Become indigenous”—find belonging and responsibility in relation to actual place ([46:00]).
• Rituals must emerge from and speak to “the shape of our psyches here,” not borrowed wholesale from other cultures.

11. Practical Steps for Grief and Ritual

• Weller trains people worldwide to hold grief rituals and encourages experimentation—ritual does not require elaborate structure:
  • Gather with others, light a candle, share in silence or poetry, commit to no advice/fixing—just witnessing ([51:43]).
  • Small daily practices of gratitude and intentionality also count as ritual.
  • Resources for finding trained grief ritual facilitators are available on his website ([59:09]).

“Just experiment. Start simple. Get together with three or four people… Let what we share tonight be held in the atmosphere of no advice, no fixing, no problem solving, but learning to witness what's present in the soul.” – Francis Weller ([52:32])

12. Hope and Agency in Challenging Times

• Weller emphasizes agency, resourcefulness, and soul-fortified community as essential responses to crisis—challenging, but not hopeless ([58:15]).
• Grief work supports not just personal healing but “soul activism”—actively loving and caring for our communities and the world.

“We are not helpless, powerless, empty creatures. We are soul fortified. We're communally fortified. We're ancestrally fortified. We have imagination. We have beauty... Hopeless, no. Challenging, yes.” – Francis Weller ([58:15])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Francis Weller on Soul Work: "Soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy. To know soul is to feel our wild entanglement with all things…" ([07:59], quoting his new book)
• On the Need for Collective Spaces: “We're longing for some felt sense of being inside something sustainable and alive that nourishes the soul on a day by day basis and that I'm allowed to also contribute to.” ([39:44])
• On Appropriation and Ritual: “Appropriation doesn't work. We can't just take somebody else's rituals... They have to speak to the shape of our psyches here and how we are in relationship to the land.” ([46:00])
• On Cultural Emptiness: “We don't have a living culture that teaches us how to feel welcomed here, how to feel like our belonging is unquestioned...” ([36:11])
• On the Impact of Grief: "The skill of grief work is really the skill of keeping something warm... Our grief was never meant to congeal and harden." ([23:39])
• On Survival and the Future: "Sorrow, grief will be the keynote for the next two generations. So we need to become skillful in this territory just to stay present enough..." ([55:23])

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Francis Weller’s Introduction & Philosophy – [03:08]
• On Grief Underlying All Suffering – [04:09]
• Defining Soul Beyond Religion – [10:12]
• Collective Initiation and Its Absence – [13:08]
• Individualism, Disconnection, and Oppression – [19:37]
• Relating to Nature and Land – [22:12]
• Joy as Grief in Motion (West African Ritual) – [28:14]
• Consumerism and Cultural Emptiness – [32:49]
• Longing for Belonging, the Primary Satisfactions – [39:44]
• What Can We Learn from Marginalized Cultures – [43:23]
• Imagination for the Long Dark (Kart Saluni Story) – [46:00]
• Practical Ritual and How to Begin – [51:43]
• Hope and Agency for Challenging Times – [58:15]
• Francis Weller’s Website – [59:09]

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Resources & Next Steps

• Francis Weller’s website (grief ritual facilitators, writings, events): [francesweller.net] ([59:09])
• Books discussed: The Wild Edge of Sorrow, In the Absence of the Ordinary, and The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation
• Film Mentioned: The Eternal Song (explores indigenous cultural endurance; link in show notes)

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Tone and Takeaways

Gentle yet urgent, the conversation fuses poetic depth with practical wisdom. Weller’s stance is not bleak but fiercely committed: “Soul activism” is available to all through honest attention to grief, creatively welcoming ritual, and turning back toward community and land. The episode is an invitation to both soulful introspection and collective restoration—especially for those aware of loss, longing, or cultural brokenness.

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For more, visit francesweller.net or consult the episode’s show notes for further resources and recommended viewing.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

This is the therapy chat podcast with Laura Reagan, LCSWC. The information shared in this podcast is not a substitute for seeking help from a licensed mental health professional. And now, here's your host, Laura Reagan, lcswc.

[C]

Hi welcome back to Therapy Chat. I'm your host Laura Reagan and and.

[A]

Today I'm bringing you a very special.

[C]

Conversation with someone I've admired since I learned about his work and admire much more deeply now that I have spent some time with his work. My guest is Francis Weller, mft, who is a psychotherapist, writer and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. The author of books including the Wild Edge of Sorrow and the Threshold between Loss and Revelation. With Rashani Rea, he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. Francis founded and directs Wisdom Bridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from Western poetic, psychological and spiritual traditions. For more than 40 years, Francis has worked as a psychotherapist and developed a style he calls Soul Centered Psychotherapy. His collection, in the Absence of the Ordinary Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty is available for pre order wherever books are sold and will be released on August 19th alongside an updated Hardcover edition of the Wild Edge of Sorrow. Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat. I'm your host Laura Reagan, and today I'm so honored to be speaking with Frances Weller, who is a recently retired MFT and author of Beautiful Books. Frances, thank you so much for being my guest on Therapy Chat today.

[D]

It's really an honor to be here. I'm delighted to share what we are about to share together, so thank you.

[C]

Laura thank you. I'm so delighted too. I, I told you this already, but your book the Wild Edge of Sorrow was a life changing book for me in a way to really help me embrace the concept of grief being a transformational process and, you know, like a portal to your soul's wisdom and, you know, the larger meaning of everything. I just am looking at loss and grief so differently through the writings that you've shared and so excited about this new book, which I haven't fully had the chance to read. But this is surely an uncertain time that we're living in right now, so it couldn't be more timely. So before we get into that though, will you just tell our audience a little bit more about who you are and all the many things that you do?

[D]

Well, you just referenced a big change in my world. I've recently set down my practice as a psychotherapist after it will be 43 years that I've been in practice. And that's been such a remarkable temenos for understanding where we are collectively as well as what soul is trying to say. So that's been my field work, is sitting with people over four decades and trying to get a feeling for what psyche, not just the individual psyche, but the collective psyche, has been trying to say through symptoms and suffering. And, you know, the language of soul often comes through affliction, you know, suffering. So that's partly what got me moving more and more towards grief work, is that you begin to understand pretty quickly that under, no matter what the symptom is, whether it's addiction or divorce or, you know, childhood wounds or whatever, there's always grief saturating that territory. And we're not taught much about grief at all in our training, nor is just a human being on in, particularly in white, you know, capitalistic culture. That's not on the agenda. That's how do you advance, how do you make yourself stronger, how do you improve, how do you, you know, financially dominate? But we're not taught soul work at all. So I've become fascinated by that and beginning to see that I couldn't look far solely to my own culture for that information. So I began looking at indigenous traditions and cultures that's that have existed for 50 to 100,000 years. How did they do that, you know, how did they survive when we're just gasping for air after 500 years on this continent, you know, so I began to see the wisdom traditions that flow through them around ritual and community and story and song and what I call the primary satisfactions, how they keep people strong and fluid and open by giving them what the soul actually requires. Connection, communion, shared meals, dancing together, singing together. All the things that individualism has basically ripped apart. So my life has been devoted to try to reimagine what the primal matrix might look like. Now, what is the matrix that actually develops living culture? And by being developing living culture, you actually create healthy individual humans, because you can't have healthy culture without healthy individuals. You can't have healthy individuals without healthy culture. So that I've been very interested in, what does that symmetry look like? And how do we begin, in the barest ways possible, begin to reanimate that foundational material for us at this time, at the time of great uncertainty, when all of the ordinary seems to be collapsing quite rapidly. So that's a little bit about what threads have claimed me. I have never been able to get too far away from grief, from shame, from defeat, from emptiness. It's as if my soul has said, well, that's, that's the territory you're going to be spending your entire life in, so get creative about it. And that's what I've been trying to do, is let the imagination, let the dream come through me, through ritual, through writing, through trainings, now teaching people how to hold grief spaces. Yeah, that's enough about me.

[C]

Oh, my gosh. And what invaluable work it is. I keep being struck with how in this time, you know, there's so much going on that so many of us.

[A]

Are like, I don't want this to be happening.

[C]

This is not what should be happening. And yet when things are easier, we're not really looking for, well, how do we come together to solve this? We're just like, hey, I'm doing fine. Everything's great for me. Sorry about the other person. Don't care. Not all of us, but that is sort of what our culture does. And so it's these urgent times that invite us to explore bigger ideas and new paths. And something that you, you are saying about soul, like the way you're speaking about it. For me, I wasn't raised religiously, but the concept that I have learned in my childhood about soul was related to religion. You know, it was like you have a soul and, you know, the Christian dominant idea, your soul goes to heaven if you're good, goes to hell if you're bad. You know, a child's understanding of that. And I always felt really curious, even as a little kid, since I wasn't really as raised to be religious. I never really believed in either Heaven or hell. But the soul part, I was like, what about that? I can't. It feels true that there's something that's always been here, and you're speaking of soul in a much larger way. I just want to read quickly this quote, and then I invite you, please share some wisdom about this. This quote from your new book. In the Absence of the Ordinary, it's right in the beginning, soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy. To know soul is to feel our wild entanglement with all things, revealing our ongoing relationship with the anima mundi, the soul of the world. That's what's been illuminated for me in your writing. I'm like, whoa, this is way bigger than what my little mind is thinking of. But I'm so curious to understand, even, like, what is that? Anima mundi, Soul of the world.

[D]

Yeah. Thank you. It's a very, very old idea. The anima mundi is that this being that we live on this earth is actually a living presence, the anima soul mundi world. So we're talking about that the world itself has a soulful quality to it and that it erupts and displays itself through this extraordinary display of beauty, but also of hardship. You know, the world is difficult, so it's not just, you know, oh, we're going to talk about soul. Isn't that pretty? No, soul is tough. Soul is hard. It takes us into places of great trouble. So, yeah, part of why I chose, or why soul is such an important lens is that it helps me understand the value and necessity of some of these experiences. It's like we don't ripen as human beings without some encounter with loss. You know, it's what deepens us. It's what kind of calls up from our depths our capacities for compassion, for elderhood, for wisdom, for patience. You know, so that territory of soul, which I follow in the tradition of Jung and James Hillman, I share. I don't know if I think I shared the story in the acknowledgments part in the new book about how many, many years ago I had this dream of being at a kitchen table with James Hillman. And we're talking about furniture refinishing, if I remember correctly. And he gets up and walks over to this closet, opens a door, and there's a chest of drawers in there, and the drawers are very narrow. And he opens every one and pulls out a piece of paper from each drawer. And on each piece of paper is the bibliography, starting with Jung and going down to Vico. And Ficino and to Heraclides. We're going back thousands of years. And he looks at me and said, this is your family tree. So I'm claimed by that tree, by that lineage. I can't get away from it. I don't want to get away from it. But it's what's claimed to me. So I speak the language of my lineage. I'm not inventing anything here. I'm just trying to articulate the current expression of soul in our time, you know, in our collapsing ecology, in our collapsing democracies. Soul is still present in all of that, in fact, is the best way for me to actually engage that material, which is why I write what I write. I don't know if we answered your question or not.

[C]

Well, yeah, it's very. It's expansive. The whole. All of what you're writing about, it's so. It just makes my mind curious, you know, it's like it's such a. I can't. I don't have better words than to say. Just the perspective that comes from reading what you share. It's like, oh, this is all so much bigger.

[D]

And so are we, right? I mean, our. Our collective indoctrination, our conditioning fragments us into feeling so small and so disconnected from this wild entanglement with the world. We feel separated and severed in those connections. And that's part of the reasons why we don't know how to respond to grief or to outrage, you know, to see what's happening in our streets. There's a certain part of us because we feel so impotent and so powerless that we actually contract from the world. And if we're not involved in the care of the world, who will be? Right. That's why this is not just a. I'm not writing just to make us feel better. I'm actually writing in a way that's inviting a larger sense of identity to come forward. That's why, you know, in many ways, when you said before about. You write that this is necessary. Yeah. Not pleasant. But we are required to go through a rough initiation at this point. So when I work with the cancer help program in Volinas a couple times a year, and these people come from all over, many dealing with very serious cancer diagnoses. And on the opening night, I talk about that they are going through a rough initiation. Not one of you wish this upon yourself or wanted this to happen in your world. And the moment it happened, you began an alteration in your life. You know that. That three things typically happen in initiation. One, there's, there's a severing from the world that we know. So when that call came in or when you met with a doctor and they said, yes, it is malignant, your world ended. The world you knew of casualness and ease and trust that my body is fine and we'll get through old age, all of that get shattered. And the second thing that happens in any true initiation is there's a radical alteration in your sense of identity. Who I am is no longer familiar. And that's what I've heard almost every time I've been at the cancer program. They say I don't know who I am anymore. The familiar markers just fade. And the third thing that happens in any true initiation is there's a realization that you cannot go back to the world that was, you know, you can't go back to pre cancer, we can't go back to pre climate crisis, we can't go back to pre. Well, there was no pre, you know, racial problem that's, that's been here. So we don't have a pre other than before slavery began. So we're being taught that we have to engage this material. We are being taken into a rough initiation collectively. Now, the problem with rough initiation is that they frequently happen without the containment field of elders, ancestors, ritual, community, the sacred, all of those elements place all of those essential elements that helped make the initiation meaningful and one that you could then elicit a new sense of your expanded identity. That's not happening in rough initiation. It's more like a shattering. And to see it, you know, I think it was the last time I was at the cancer help program. Every single person there began using that imagery of rough initiation as a way beginning to draw something meaningful out of what they're experiencing. That they weren't meant just to endure this, that there was something also being invited. You know, what is the invitation of the times that we are in right now? Well, certainly one of them is to break through our fixations with capitalism, with colonialism, with domination. You know, we're being forced in a way to confront the legacy of what happens when you abandon soul. You know, if you abandon soul, you basically abandon community. If you abandon community, you abandon the commons. If you abandon the commons, there's nothing there that can sustain a people. And we are right at that threshold right now. We might not even make it as a species at this point. I mean, we've never had to really consider that before. We do now. You know, this is where we are and what, what is possibly big enough to hold the complexity of that type of reality. And to me, the only answer is soul.

[C]

It's scary to be living in this time. And it's one thing that your work has been doing for me is beginning for me, beginning to plant seeds of that. There could be possibility, I think, because I have. I realized when I read the Wild Edge of Sorrow. I've been pretty much impacted by grief my whole life because When I was 6, my parents split up and my mom left. And so that loss of my mom, even though she was. She didn't die, she was still around, but it was like that ambiguous loss where I couldn't really be with her. It's like that's. That's the, like, shape of my life is framed by that loss. And so I began to notice how, for myself, something is really slowly shifting to understand that one. I've looked at endings as the end and not as cycles of change, you know, like, so all change feels like, oh, no, no. You know, no, no. It's gotta be like it was. And so it can be really hard to grasp possibility outside of just, like, there's this ending and that's it, and it's all over that. And, you know, like, psychically, it's like nothing's ever gonna be okay, you know? But there's something, too, about the way that, like, what a child needs from their family growing up, that feeling of, I can count on this to be here and hold me, is sort of what's been shattered culturally in. In the Western world. And as you write about in your. And in the Wild Edge of Sorrow, you speak about modernity, and I know it comes into this book as well, that that has taken that. That sense of being held by something beyond the individual that is inherent to indigenous cultures and missing from Western culture.

[D]

Yeah, the passage you read about sovereignty and intimacy that's very much at the heart of what you're saying is that the soul has this simultaneous capacity and necessity of honoring the uniqueness of this incarnation. There's no one like Laura anywhere. There's no one like Francis anywhere. You know, that uniqueness is our job to articulate that and express that. The other side of it is to recognize the soul has an ongoing longing to participate in intimacies with the world, whether it's the human world or the more than human world of animals and trees and sky and moon and cosmos. So simultaneously, the soul has this dance between those two realities. White Western culture in particular, has focused almost 100% on the sovereignty piece of it, but not even Sovereignty, because true sovereignty recognizes it, that it's embedded in community. We're much more self centered, individualistically centered. Not sovereignty, but individualism. That again, is that feeling of being cut off and separated. So one of the things you learn when you're working with grief a lot is that very few of us ever received the conditions under which our grief could stay fluid and keep moving. It's almost impossible to process your grief in isolation. So we learn to become holders of grief. We learn how to compact it. And you know, like I write about in the Wild Edge of Sorrow, people would come into my practice and say, I'm depressed. And I would listen to them and realize that's not depression, that's oppression. That's the weight of untouched sorrows. And then when you sit longer with it, you realize these sorrows are generations old. So not where. It's not like we're only carrying our own current grief. So I'm also carrying ancestral grief. And I'm also a absorbing the grief around me on any given day of what's happening to our watersheds or what's happening to our sense of decency and democracy. How can we not be affected by that? And that's the rub, isn't it? Is that I'm affected by it, but I have no place to take it. And no one who really. Very few people who are really willing to even acknowledge it. So we end up finding elaborate ways to not just cope with it, but to avoid it. And that's what I write about. Anesthesia. You know, how do we. How do we keep ourselves numb and detached from this overwhelming reality that we're facing?

[C]

Yes. And in the way I have understood some of what you wrote about in that book is it's inherent in us that we are connected to nature and everything that is part of nature and were part of it. And I know it's like we're not part of it, we are it. And. And that severing of our connection to the land, the ways that indigenous peoples revere the land and they respect it and they see it as a friend. And, you know, when you and I were talking before we started recording, you named living in the trees, living in the redwoods, you said these old friends. And I mean, when I see trees, I'm like, hey, buddy. You know, like, I feel like they are my friends. And then it's also kind of weird to say that in, you know, our culture and on the east coast, maybe a little bit more so than on the west coast. But if you're in the U.S. but they feel, you know, you can hear them and you can feel them and they can feel each other. And we are beginning to learn more about that in science. But that just resonated so deeply. It felt so true that yes, this is what if we cared. If we treated the land as if it were part of us, climate change wouldn't be happening.

[D]

That's climate destruction. Yeah. When you talk about initiation, we talked about briefly just that initiation was never intended for you as an individual. It wasn't there to be a self help process. It wasn't to make you a better you. Initiation's intention was to prepare you to take your place in the community of things, to know what your responsibilities were. I once wrote that what initiation does is it helps us recognize our responsibilities more than rights and our entanglements, more than entitlements. Right now you hear a lot about entitlement and you hear a lot about rights, but we rarely talk about responsibilities or entanglements, you know, so you were initiated not just to your own self, but you were initiated to place, to community, to ancestors. So when you hear about an indigenous people protecting their land, they're not doing it out of altruism, they're doing it out of identification. This is my body you're assaulting. I am that delta, I am that river, I am that hillside. There is no severance. There's no separation. And to us in the west, that is such an abstraction. It's hard for us to get our minds around that, that I am actually part of this watershed, that what happens to, and ultimately we, how could it not be right? What happens to the watershed is going to affect me. If I can't drink the water, if the fish are toxic and poison, you know, if the air becomes unbreathable, am I somehow, because I have a lot of money stay in my bank or have a position of power that's somehow going to immunize me against that. That's absurd. But we've convinced ourselves that that is true, that there's a way in which we can stay separate from all of what's happening and gear it much more towards economics rather than the sense that this is, you know, these are our kin, you know, and we have a sole responsibility. I think that's part of what happens when a culture is able to have a sustaining relationship to sorrow, is that it keeps the heart soft, keeps the heart responsive to the world. And it's our spiritual obligation and responsibility to register what is happening to the body of this world. Again, if we don't. Who will? And if no one recognizes this, we can just go on willy nilly, just destroying clear cut topsoil depletion, overfishing, mountaintop removal for copper. Nothing would stop us. But as Wendell Berry, that wonderful farmer poet, said, it all turns on affection. So the core of our work is to keep the heart open right now, to keep our love flowing out into the streets and into our communities. And that requires that the skill set around grief work is learned. Otherwise we can't keep the heart soft and open. The skill of grief work is really the skill of keeping something warm. You know, in the old alchemical traditions, they talk about whatever's in the vessel. We could say whatever in the heart, that's our vessel. We have to keep it warm by our attention, by our efforts, like writing or drawing or dancing or singing, by our communications with other friends, by ritual, by silence. Those are practices that help keep that material warm. And if we keep it warm, it will keep moving. Our grief was never meant to congeal and harden. We talk about the number one cause of death in this country. Yeah, it's congestive heart failure. Right? Well, it's not just smoking. It's not just trans fats. It's all the undigested sorrows that compile and encrust themselves in our hearts when we have to keep it moving.

[C]

That's so poignant that you said that about congestive heart failure too, because it's, you know, when one has congestive heart failure, for people who are listening and don't know, it's the lungs fill with fluid and the lungs in Eastern medicine are representative of grief.

[D]

Grief.

[C]

So it's like love and grief and, you know, something's backed up and it's not flowing the way it's supposed to. And that's a most common cause of death and.

[D]

Right, right. Not a coincidence, is it? Again, if we track symptoms as a way of understanding soul, our hearts are congested and we lack the collective means by which to address that. We don't have typically grief rituals in our communities. And again, if we were sane. When I was, I spent some time in West Africa, there was a grief ritual almost every single day someplace in the village. And they were the most joyful people I ever met. Well, there's a correspondence between those two things. Our ability to keep grief moving and our capacity to deny joy. There's one woman I walked up to in the village, I said, you have so much joy. And she said, that's because I cry a lot now. We would not make that association here. We would say, oh, that's because I shop a lot or I stay busy or I, you know, whatever. You know, whatever the distraction. But not because I cry a lot. Wow, that's staying current, isn't it? Again, that's part of what I love about grief work, is that it gives us the opportunity to get current, you know, in all the sense of that word. Most of the time, we spend our life facing our past. Rarely do we ever get to be present, much less look ahead to our own disappearance. And so we're always dragging behind us this long boat, this long canoe, this long trunk of undigested sorrows. Again, not just mine, but ancestral and so forth. So to duke grief enough times actually gets you current, but also in the sense of that word of electricity, to feel alive. I remember coming home from a men's retreat once, many years ago, and my friend Richard said, so, Francis, are you happy? I said, well, I have moments of being happy. But I said, I've stopped trying to be happy because every time I wasn't, I thought I was failing. Because this is a big happiness culture right now. And even in our psychological systems, happiness, nothing wrong with happiness. It's lovely. So what I want is to be alive. And all of these other feelings, sadness, grief, anger, even loneliness, they all have vitality in them. And what I want to be is a good host of the vitality of what my soul is experiencing. So I've stopped trying to be happy, and I really trying to be alive in that current, in that electricity. They're all vital, they're all alive. And that's our job. And the last sense of that sense of the word current is to be in the current of life, to be in the flow of life. You know, we often feel like we're spectators, you know, barely tangibly touching that current of life.

[A]

Today's episode is sponsored by Psychotherapy Networker and Pesi. If you're a therapist, be sure to check out the Partner page, which is linked in the show Notes, where you can get discounted trainings with previous therapy chat guests like Courtney Armstrong, Dr. Leslie Korn, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, Dr. Tammy Nelson, Dr. Janina Fisher, Rebecca Case, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Lindsay Gibson, Deb Dana, Lori Gottlieb and many, many others. You'll find the link in the Show Notes to my Partner page with Pesi and Psychotherapy Networker, where you can find all these discounted training.

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[C]

Yeah, and it is by design with colonization that we are literally preoccupied with survival through work. You know, we're preoccupied with trying to be productive for survival. And it takes us away from our connection to self and others to serve the, you know, machine of capitalism.

[D]

Yeah, it's a deadly machine. It's a deadly machine. Yeah. I'm working on a piece right now called at the Heart of All Our Sorrows and Excursion into Emptiness. And I'm trying to look at something that just has troubled me for decades, which is the emptiness in white society. And the symptoms that come out of that emptiness are rapid and rabid consumption. We want more. All the time. All the time, more and more and more. Well, why colonization? What is that a symptom of? You know, how we want more land, more power, more wealth, more control, more domination? What is this incessant desire for more? In the traditions on this continent, they have a term which means kind of a cannibalistic psychosis that white folk have. This need to consume everything, take the most, consume the most. And this is at the heart of our grief. And we don't know how to address that. And it's the hardest piece of writing I've ever tried to do. It's just like exposing something that's so, you know, entwined in our being that we don't even know it. It's like fish and water. You know, how do you explain this? But if you walk through a mall or you go online, 99.9% of what's there, we don't need, but it's there for a reason to fill the hole or at least temporarily assuage the feeling of being empty, you know, all of the. Again, Going back to that idea of what were the traditional cultures. How did they do that? Well, I look at not so much the shapes of their rituals, but the values. Restraint, reverence, gratitude, reciprocity, mutuality, patience. These. These values are transcultural. When you look at traditional cultures, those values are everywhere. Those are not the values of white culture. Achievement, progress, rank, privilege. These are the values. They're the man of the year. That's. The person of the year is the one who's made the most money or has had the most power. We don't look at humility as a value in this culture. We don't look at restraint. Are you crazy? In the have all you want 247 shopping, there's no restraint. So we don't even know how to practice that as a value. So I wrote a whole chapter in the new book about restraint. You know, the. The necessity of restraint, the value of repetition. All these things that are not the dominant values of. Of white culture. And those are the things that I'm hoping that the rough initiation, the long dark will necessitate that we become familiar with those values. Otherwise, we will not survive.

[C]

And if you think about the people who have the most, we're talking about individual people. But when you look at the wealthiest people, like, do they seem satisfied? Like, did it, you know, having billions, does it give the. When you have so much money that you could never, ever spend it all in your home lifetime, nor could your children ever spend it. You know, look at royal families around the world, like, is that providing joy or even a sense of security? And it doesn't seem like it is.

[D]

No, no. And. And, you know, it doesn't. I mean, I've worked with a lot of wealthy people, and there's never that sense of enoughness. There's always that anxiety of needing more, needing more, needing more. And part of what, again, what that's predicated on, around this emptiness is that we've lost culture. So we don't have a living culture that teaches us how to feel welcomed here, how to feel like our belonging is unquestioned. Because as long as our belonging is questioned, our anxiety is chronic. And the chronic. How do I shape a self that will be at least approvable? Well, when economics is your baseline, well, then I'll try to become an achieving economic person. Then I'll get respect, Then I'll get. Maybe I'll even get that, you know, some facsimile of love. But it's all based on performance and achievement. When the moment you can't, you feel Like a failure. And there's no safety net to catch you for failing, you know, so we're anxious. We spend much of our lifetime anxious about whether I'm in or I'm out. I remember talking to a friend of mine who's from West Africa, and he said, yeah, in our culture, the whole premise is how do we imprint onto every child that they are someone utterly welcomed and wanted and waited for, that they're needed, that they're loved, that they belong. And he said, you've changed at 180 degrees, where it's up to you to convince the community that you're somebody tolerable. Not assured of homecoming, but just some sense that will, if you perform adequately, we'll let you hang out on the edges. And I'm sure you've seen that in your practice as a therapist. The anxiety around belonging is chronic, very much so. We focus so much on achievement and performance to somehow shape a self that we think will be worthy of belonging. But we never trust it because it's based on approval. And approval never lingers in the. In the pocket as a sustainable coin. So I might get praised today for doing a good job. And so I did a good interview, you know, okay, so. But tomorrow I wake up with the same anxiety. Well, what about today? Where am I going to get that next fix of approval? And we're. We're off. And that's. So. One last thing I'll say about that, Laura, is that as long as you're anxious about that, we forget the world, that my. My attention is drawn chronically, inwardly, to self survival, to, you know, self soothing, to coping, to shaping myself adequately. And in that absorption, I lose the world. The world loses us, you know, as psychic participants, as kin. We're lost in a very different world. Yeah. Did that make sense?

[C]

Yeah. And I. And I'm thinking too, like, I do work with a number of people who have, you know, impressive achievements on paper, no question. They have advanced education. They have jobs that are, you know, well paying and prestigious. They have the traditional, often, you know, some kind of structure of a traditional family life where they have a partner that they're, you know, committed to and children potentially. And they'll say, I have everything I've ever wanted. People think I'm amazing. Why do I feel so empty inside?

[D]

There it is. There it is. You know, when I write about the primary satisfactions and. And like, when we're in ritual weekends, whether it's for gratitude gatherings or the initiation work or the grief work for a few hours, for Three days, you're inside of what we call primary satisfactions. We're eating together, we're singing together, we're crying together, we're telling our stories together. We wake up and we share dreams for three days or so. Our psyches are in a field that resonates to what it is we expected and some part of us calms down. This was what I expected and did not receive. You know, that fourth gate of grief that I write about. And again, that's part of what I think we're all longing for. We're not longing for the next billion. We're longing for some felt sense of being inside something sustainable and alive that nourishes the soul on a day by day basis and that I'm allowed to also contribute to. So we can't just be the ones always looking for a place to belong. We also have to become a house of belonging at some point. And again, that's part of what grief work does, is that it keeps breaking my heart open to layers and layers of connection to the world. And the more I feel that, the more it's incumbent upon me to become a place that welcomes others, not always looking for the next place I might belong. But you're welcome here. You know, your tears are welcome here, your heart is welcome here. That's also part of what I feel like we can learn from traditional people. I just saw a movie about a month or so ago called the Eternal Song, and it's Maurizio and Zaya Bonazo, and they're just wonderful people. But they went to all These cultures, like 13 different cultures around the planet, and interviewed them about the legacy of colonialism and how that legacy has lived on and how did they survive that? You know what? How did they stay in touch with that eternal song that went underground? When I talk about the Long Dark and this new collection of essays, it's kind of a shock for us white folk. But native cultures have been in the long dark for 500 years. And black folk have been under, you know, in this country have been in the long dark for 400 years since slavery. So they actually have much more wisdom but how to face what's happening right now than we do? So I'm listening. I'm listening to you. How did you do that? How did you keep your dances and songs and stories and values? Because we lost them. And again, that's part of our emptiness as white folk is that those traditions got severed completely. I don't know what those rituals were. I don't know what the language was. I don't know what the myths were or the stories or the ancestral grounds of, you know, caves and wells. And all of that wisdom got silenced both by the Roman invasion and then by the Christian invasion. Those traditions got silenced. And so we came to this continent empty. What was the first thing we tried to do is eviscerate a living culture. I think out of envy that they were alive and vital and we were under, you know, the auspices of puritanism and other rules of control of body and soul. And. But there's so much wisdom that I find in the, in the traditions of indigenous cultures that may give us some clue how to face this long, dark, you know, how do you stay connected to soil and soul?

[C]

Yes. Thank you for sharing about that film too. I need to watch it. And I'll put a link to the film in our show notes for this episode too, so people can go and watch it. But you know, what you said about how indigenous cultures and African peoples who came here involuntarily to North America, kidnapped for enslavement. Actually thinking about how those peoples have held on to their culture under those circumstances has actually been very helpful and inspiring to me in thinking about, like, I understand as a white person, I have so much privilege and, and this fear about the shattering of the fabric of the society that we've been living in, this Western culture here is, well, this can't happen here. This can't happen to us. This isn't you. Sure, I heard about that on the news my whole life happening in other places. But that doesn't happen here. Like, we're exceptional. And so when thinking about. So how do you know the black people. I know. How do they hold on to what their roots are through this and keep not just this, but what's happened in their lifetimes, in their ancestors, lifetimes, generations back. Because, you know, the being a white person and my people who came here were European, white Europeans. So they're. They were already stripped of their. Of any culture before they came. And then assimilation. Well, some, most of their culture and then through assimilation here in the US I didn't even know. I didn't even know my ancestors were Irish. I found that out like 20 years ago. I'm 53, even with red hair should be obvious, but I didn't know that on both sides of my family, my ancestors were Irish because my parents had no connection to that lineage at all and my grandparents did, but they didn't talk about it at all. So at least not that I know. So I remember. I mean, it explains a lot when you realize it, it's like, oh, you know, how people behaved. You can see the culture right there when you. When you know that it was there. But it's almost like willfully stripped. Not almost. It is willfully stripped through the process of assimilation for survival.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

So.

[D]

Oh, yeah, I don't blame anybody, but it's. It's. But there is this lingering consequence of this great forgetting. I was going to say. I remember hearing Cornel west, that brilliant thinker, writer, teacher of black history, and he was speaking out here, and someone asked him the question. I said, how did. How did you do that? How did you. How did your culture survive? And he said, well, we learned to sing the blues. So what they. What he's saying in that simple statement is through art, through ritual, through song, you can take imagination into places of great suffering. And in this essay I just wrote for this new collection called Medicine for the Long Dark, Imagination, feat is featured as one of the most important things that we can cultivate in our response to what is happening in our society and also for the planet. Because we're not going to think our way through the Laland Ark. We're not going to somehow magically solve the problems, but we can become receptive to imagination and be dreamt back from the earth itself to dream us into how to be here again as. As good human beings. And I share this idea of kart saloony, which is a Inuit word from north of the Arctic Circle. And kart saluni translates quite literally as sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. And what they're talking about is that these are the whalers. They can't go out hunting for the whales until a song has been given to them by one of the whale people. So they sit in the absolute darkness of the longhouse and wait until a song has come to them. So that's reverence, that's patience, that's restraint. They're not just saying, hey, we're hungry. Let's go kill something. No. There's etiquettes, there's responsibilities, there's protocols, there's manners about how to best do this. So that's what I. You know, that's part of what we're being asked to do right now is just to slow down enough to actually become receptive to the song, to the dream, to the image, to the ritual. I've had quite a few rituals come through me in response to where we are collectively right now, because I've Been trying to do that, and the dreams have been, the images have been coming and rituals have been coming. And when we do those rituals, there is a sense of, oh, this feels right. This, this is reparative. And I shared one of these rituals with my friend from Africa, and he looked at me after it was over. He said, that's the first indigenous ritual I've experienced on this continent. And you would never see this in my village because it wouldn't speak to their psyches. That's why appropriation doesn't work. We can't just take somebody else's rituals and applique them on us because they look right. They have to speak to the shape of our psyches here and how we are in relationship to one another and how we are in relationship to the land. Those rituals have to become, you know, reparative for now, for us, so that we can remember. Remember. Jeanette Armstrong, an Okanagan elder from British Columbia, was once asked, what do white folk need to do? She said, become indigenous. You have to find your way into becoming part of this land. And you can't keep just, you know, impersonating native folk here or African or. That is not going to work. You have to return to your own connection to place. And I don't know how long that takes, but that's certainly been what I've been trying to dream into. And we have this 200 year vision that we began in 1997, that in 200 years, the young people standing here will know from the beginning that they belong to this place. They won't have to, you know, scrape and crawl and scratch and try to convince other people to let them in. They will know it from birth that I am part of this creek, part of this woodchuck watershed, part of this land. And consequently, I have obligations and responsibilities to sustain it. Now, that's a whole different premise than getting an education to see how much money I can make judging that. But I am saying we're missing a whole other education, you know, education of the soul, education of the heart, our communal bond. You know, Jung once said that if you go down deep enough into psyche, at root, at bottom, what you touch is carbon. He said, in other words, psyche is world. So if we really live that, I'm as much world as I am self, I'm as much communal as I am private. That's a truth. But we don't go that deep into our psychic field that often unless we're forced to by trial, by trouble. And that's where we are.

[C]

Yeah, that is where we are. And so as we come to a close, reluctantly on my part, will you share. You've sort of woven it in, but will you share a little bit about some of the ways that you are helping people experience ritual and, you know, ways that you, what you do to present those spaces where people can feel that belonging to, so that people can, in addition to reading your books, they can get into these spaces.

[D]

Well, of late, I've spent most of my energy on trying to train people to do that, to lead grief rituals. So we've, we've trained over a thousand people now around the world to hold grief ritual spaces for their families, for their friends, for their communities. And that's been like one of the most important things of my adult life, is passing on what I've gathered. But I often just feel like we have to begin to experiment with ritual. It's like, I remember my friend Maladoma Somme was speaking out here in California once, and someone asked him the question, like, well, I've got this situation and what ritual should I do? And he looked at them and said, do you think I have a manual that tells you, like on page 272.

[C]

He said, you have to remember protocol.

[D]

For he said, you have to remember you are page 272. So we are all wired. Our, our deep time ancestry, no matter where we came from, had ritual as its primary language. So when we're in ritual spaces, some, again, some part of our psyche lines up and goes, oh, yes, I know this space, even if I've never done it before. Some part of the archaic psyche recognizes this rhythm, this cadence, these movements, these gestures, these sounds. It is familiar. So I just encourage people and I put a few rituals in the back of the book is just, just, just experiment, you know, start simple. Get together with three or four people, gather in your home, light a candle, go silent for a minute, or share a poem, or if you're bold enough, say a prayer. And this. Let what we share tonight be held in the atmosphere of no advice, no fixing, no problem solving, but learning to witness what's present in the soul. My grief, my sadness, my outrage, my heartbreak, my fear, my anxiety, my feeling lost. Those things just need to be heard and witnessed and held. And to know that we're not holding it alone is remarkably helpful. Remarkably helpful. So as far as ritual goes, start very simple. You can get up in the morning, walk outside and say thank you, Bring a little, you know, handful of seed out and just lay it on the ground and say thank you. I Didn't. I didn't have to have this day, but it's been gifted to me and I want to use it well. I want to be in this day and I want to begin with gratitude and maybe end your day with gratitude. Now. There's ways in which we can simply bring ritual in without a lot of complication. You don't have to go to a three day grief ritual. It's wonderful if you can find one. And we've list. I'm not leading any directly myself at this point. Like I said, I've been focusing on training but on my website there's a listing of many rituals being offered by people who've studied with me and that's, I'm very, very grateful that they're offering these rituals and passing on the good work.

[C]

Beautiful. That is so valuable because I think for those who are kind of awake to the idea that they need more of this in their lives, finding how to do it, especially through all the noise, you know, on, when you search on the Internet, there's, you know, it's like all these things and you're like, wait, where's something that's going to really resonate and it can feel, you know, confusing to, to find that.

[D]

Oh, absolutely. The good news is I also think Laura is like, when I first started doing this grief work around ritual work back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there are very few people turning up, showing up for these rituals. I had to convince people to come. But now you can't go on any social media without seeing a reference to somebody offering a grief ritual somewhere. And I, I'm very grateful because that's the, as I say in this, I wrote an essay for, for Dwayne Elgin's book called Choosing Earth. It was the forward for his book and it was the one of the hardest pieces to write because I had to read his book, which was very difficult. He's looking at the next five decades and he's been a social forecaster and he's looking at all of the data and all of the information and what could possibly most likely happen over these next five decades is pretty scary. So I had to write a forward for that. You know, how do you, what do you say? So I talk about rough initiations and long dark and the apprenticeship with sorrow. And the one thing I say in there is that, that sorrow, grief will be the keynote for the next two generations. So we need to become skillful in this territory just to stay present enough, you know, and to be cooked and worked enough. So that when we turn and see the young ones on the street, we don't turn away because we don't know what to say, or we turn away because we don't know how to hold the enormity of sorrow that they're carrying around their futures. So this work is what I call soul activism. We're doing this again, not just so I feel less heavy. At the end of the ritual, I'll often say something like, we did this not only for ourselves, but we did this so that our hearts might be more open to loving our world ardently, to fall into the streets, to fall into the watersheds, to fall into our communities. So our affection is being tangibly present to what is happening around us. That's really the work of our time, you know. And then thank you for doing all that you're doing to keep. Keep that current moving in the collective field.

[C]

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate what you're doing and how, you know, teaching a thousand people, more than a thousand people, how to lead grief rituals. This, the impact is so, so meaningful. And I hope that this, this conversation will be impactful too, to so many people who listen. And it's not a. It's not like a hopeless story. It's important to realize that we do have agency, just have to realize how things really are and what are we going to do about it? How do we come together?

[D]

Yeah, that's where that last second to last essay in the new collection of Medicine for the Long Dark. I wrote that in particularly to remind us that we're not without agency, that we have resource, that we can call upon these aspects of our own being to respond to these times. We are not helpless, powerless, empty creatures. We are soul fortified. We're communally fortified. We're ancestrally fortified. We have imagination. We have beauty. There are so many things that we have that will help us respond to these times. So hopeless. No. Challenging, yes. But hard times help at times to generate response.

[C]

Well, Frances, I've loved being with you and can you tell us your website where people can find this list of grief rituals that are being offered?

[D]

Sure, sure. It's Frances Weller with an I. Francesweller.net that's it.

[C]

Great. I'll be sure to put that in the show notes so people can find it. And just thank you again so much for spending your time with me and our listeners today. This has been a really beautiful conversation.

[D]

And such an honor for me and for me. Thank you, Laura. Glad to be here.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

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[B]

Thank you for listening to Therapy Chat with your host, Laura Reagan, LCSWC. For more information, please visit therapychatpodcast.com.