Finding Joy In Rituals of Grief
The East Coast Village offers a sacred and safe space to release the loss and separation from someone or something that really matters. Come home. It's time to grieve.
Cooling the Fires of Grief
Malidoma Somé writes in The Healing Wisdom of Africa:
Water is a key element that at the beginning cooled the raging fires and brought stability, reorienting the cosmic energy toward producing continuity and community. Since then, people all over the world have felt the need to return again and again to water for purification, cleansing, reconciling, and making peace in the face of the onslaught of life's challenges
When we think of grief we often associate it with death and dying. At the most fundamental level, grief is about loss and “separation from someone or something that matters.”
Whether it is the loss or separation of a loved one through death, loss of culture and language, loss of unfulfilled dreams, loss of safety and security, loss of community, or any number of losses that hound the human experience - “many people in the Western world walk around like time bombs, loaded with contradictory emotions that are often so hard to articulate that the individual is dangerous to himself and to his surroundings”.
These self-destructive emotions require the cleansing and reconciliation power of water. “The distress of the person drifting toward or into fire is a plea for the radically reconciling introduction of water.”
Water is the element that counteracts the raging fires of grief within us, and water rituals help to release the accumulation of pent up grief. Malidoma also stated:
"In my village emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace. These are crises that water rituals can resolve.”
Entering the Gateways of Grief
“Grief is not only expressed in tears, but also in anger, rage, frustration, and sadness.”
Grieving is part story-telling, part tears, in expressing the pain of separation and loss. It begins with the story we need to release, the gates in which we enter to share the countless ways loss and separation have devastated our physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. These gates allow us to bring the tale of our losses to the feet of the Ancestors.
The Gate of Death & Dying
A loved one dies unexpectedly, be it a child lost in infancy, a spouse or partner from accident or illness, or one who takes their own life. While death comes to us all, we are often unprepared to face the unexpected loss. There may be words left unspoken, broken promises, missed connections or the inability to reconcile the past.
At the gate of death, you may experience waves of intense and very difficult emotions, ranging from profound sadness, emptiness, despair to shock, numbness, guilt, or regret. You might rage at the circumstances of your loved one’s death - your anger focused on yourself, doctors, other loved ones, or even the god of your understanding. You may even find it difficult to accept that the person is really gone, or struggle to see how you can ever recover and move on from your loss.
Grief at the death of a loved one can also trigger physical reactions, including weight and appetite changes, difficulty sleeping, aches and pains, and an impaired immune system leading to illness and other health problems.
What is the story you bring to this gate? Whom have you lost through death? What unfinished business still remains to be completed?
Come home, it’s time to grieve.
The Gate of Unfulfilled Dreams
Some of the most famous words about dreams were uttered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 speech entitled “I Have A Dream”.
Lauded as the “dream that inspired a nation”, Dr. King inspired us to dream big, to dream of what is possible. Dr. King went on to speak about unfulfilled dreams, declaring that “so many of us in life start out building temples: temples of character, temples of justice, temples of peace. And so often we don’t finish them.” These unfinished temples often leave us feeling dehumanized and disappointed in ourselves.
And, while not all of us envision dreams as grandiose as the end to racism in America, equality for all, or world peace - almost all of us dream of simply being in good health, financial independence, more time to spend with our families, doing the things we love, having less stress in our lives, or more joy and personal fulfillment.
What is the story you bring to this gate? Have your dreams been ripped apart by seeming insurmountable challenges, disappointments and failures?
Come home, It’s time to grieve.
The Gate of Disconnection from Ancestors
Elder Malidoma reveals that in his tradition “community is not formed only by the living, community extends to the realm of the dead.” This realm of the dead houses those who’ve preceded us, our lineage, and “as long as our ancestors are still suffering within us, we cannot be truly happy,” adds Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.
Residing within each of us are the embers of our ancestral past, memories inscribed in our bones by those who’ve gone before us. For many of people, those memories inflict a “wounding of the soul” implanted by genocide, colonization, slavery, war, abuse – passing from generation to generation. These suppressed memories often manifest as rage, violence, abuse, addiction, illness, apathy, low self esteem, to name a few.
Researcher, Paula-Noel Macfie, PhD., found healing from addictions and uncontrollable anger by reconnecting with her Celtic ancestral past. She discovered that “the search is over once we acknowledge that we come from Ancestors, we have Ancestors and they are within us, as we come from them. We have a history, lineage and language that is long forgotten, yet within us to remember. We must heal the memory of colonization and genocide within our genealogical tribal bloodlines, so that we can offer this medicine to restore our part of the balance in the world.”
What is the story you bring to this gate? Have you disregarded the connection to your ancestral past? Have you lost connection to your tribe of origin or honored their presence in your life?
Come home, it’s time to grieve.
The Gate of Isolation & Post-traumatic Stress
In a recent study, researchers found that Americans appear to have hundreds, even thousands of friends on social media but have no one to turn to when it really matters. In a sense, says a Washington Times reporter, “if close social relationships support people in the same way that beams hold up buildings, more and more Americans appear to be dependent on a single beam.”
As our modern society moves faster and gets more detached from each other, it becomes more challenging to feel any sense of community, any sense of interdependence or collective bond towards our shared survival. This growing separation escalates loneliness, depression, post traumatic stress, and not to mention, an increase in self harm and addictive behaviors.
Even more, how do we feel any sense of community when our society is riddled with domestic violence, bullying, police brutality and social injustice? At times, it may feel as if tuning to the news of more violence, more death, more injustice is more depressing than ever.
What is the story you bring to this gate? Does it feel as if your being on this earth no longer matters? Does it feel as if nothing will ever change or be “normal” again?
Come home, it’s time to grieve.
Finding Peace In ritualized Grieving
The water of our tears provides the healing force for expression and release of grief. Western culture, however, is uncomfortable with outward expressions of grief. Many of us were taught that it is improper and, perhaps, a sign of weakness, to wail, to cry or in any way show our emotions in front of others.
Yet, the healing effects of our tears and stories of loss and separation will not be fully realized if it’s just a private or internal activity. Grief has an energy of its own, and without expression it can turn against us and become toxic energy that affects our mental, emotional and even physical being.
Many Westerners are beginning to see that there is also danger in remaining stuck with rage, anger and sadness; they are the directionless vehicles of a grief that remains hidden. When these emotions are not allowed a fluid catharsis, one is left in a state of incompleteness. The end of the domination of one's life by such emotions requires an outpouring of liquid. You cannot truly grieve within and remain composed without. Emotion is an extroverted phenomenon, and it cannot find its much-needed release if expressed only internally. Denied an outward expression, grief grows stronger and organizes itself like a hurricane that can rise up and sweep us away. - Malidoma
Malidoma writes:
In my village, emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace.
---The Healing Wisdom of Africa---