The Gates of Grief

Last week a friend of mine passed away. I got the news early in the morning when I was at the gym.  This is unusual because I never take my phone with me when I am working out but for some reason this particular morning, I slid it unconsciously into the side pocket of my tights, put my headphones on and off I went.  I love listening to music when I exercise, I find it motivating and uplifting.  Normally I turn on my playlist on my phone and leave the phone in the locker; the bluetooth in my headphones is great and picks up the signal from quite a distance.  On this day I did not, I put my phone in my pocket.  

I have known this friend for twenty five years, I met him through my husband.  He was 90 years old, there is no tragedy in the death of a ninety year old but it is sad. He was our friend, we met him in Italy and got married in his town, which is a very beautiful place.  We were looking forward to seeing him next year.  Just a week ago, whilst out for a walk we were talking about him and we admitted to each other that there was a chance he might not be there next year and we talked about our feelings about that, should it eventuate.  Needless to say both of us were very sad when we found out.  I had a few tears at the gym, when I read it, walked home and hugged my husband for an hour.  He was very upset.

It got me thinking about the gates of grief that I learned off Francis Weller who is a psychotherapist who does a lot of work in the grief space.  If you google him you will find many conversations and interviews with him.  I did 12 months of training with him about 5 years ago, more for myself, when I noticed about 6 months out of chemotherapy treatment, I had a lot of grief about my medical experience.

Weller completely reframed the meaning of grief for me in this program.  What he has done is  create a profound contribution to soul-centered psychotherapy because he helps us shift the Western cultural narrative of grief, which often treats grief as private, pathological, and linear, toward one that is relational, ancestral, and integrated.  His map of the five gates of grief help us understand that we can experience grief for many different reasons in our life, beyond the experience of losing someone we love.

So I thought I would take you through them and add my thoughts on it.  I have found in my own experience and in working with clients that there are often many other emotions that get wrapped up with grief, and how it shows up in our lives changes all the time.  There is no unique experience of grief, it changes every time within us and it is different for every individual.

I often talk about grief as a crucible.  A container that can withstand great heat and stress to create something new.  We could see that Weller’s gates create that container by naming different types of loss, we allow others to stop bottling up their grief and sorrow and allow it to flow.  This is what helps us process transitions.

The first gate is, Everything we love we will lose.  Grief is an essential part of being a human.  Weller says one of grief’s most important teachings is everything is a gift, nothing lasts.  To accept this is to live on life’s terms.  This is what the Buddhists called impermanence.  There are no exceptions.  When we acknowledge grief we acknowledge that everything we love we will lose.

I notice lots of people are sad about things that did not happen in their lives or if they didn’t get what they think they deserve.  I think there is a difference here, this is more disappointment and it is totally ok to be disappointed with what has or has not happened in your life and you might experience great sadness with this.  There is a distinction for me between the two, it is nuanced for sure.

People do experience grief in big life transitions like parenthood and menopause and events like a chronic or acute illness like cancer.  These are all very big initiations and initiations take us into places that are unknown.  We wonder will we ever be the same again, who will we be on the other side?  We are not meant to be the same person on the other side, these are times of sheddings and endings and often we are brought face to face with our own mortality.  Often these experiences strip away all our defence strategies we created to adapt as children and we are forced to face our adult world that is much sweeter, riper and vivid.  Many people discover they can actually be with all the emotions we experience as humans and we will not only be okay, we can thrive.

The second gate is; The places that have not known love. This gate is about the parts of ourselves that we have separated from that are untouched by love.  These are the parts of ourselves that have been banished to the basement of our psyche because they are surrounded in shame.  They haven’t experienced kindness, compassion, warmth or a welcoming smile.  What we think or experience as a part of ourselves being defective or wrong is often what we experience grief for.  Weller explains that it is hard to grieve for parts of ourselves that we have banished because we feel they are unworthy of our grief.  Some of you might be familiar with IFS as a therapeutic modality.  It is very helpful to many people to help them bring these banished parts back on line.  When we bring them back it makes sense that we would experience grief having disconnected from them.  Shame separates us from our soul. It is an insidious emotion and I understand why academics like Brene Brown have spent their professional lives trying to understand it.

The third gate is, The sorrows of the world.  We experience this most days just looking at the TV and watching the news.  The grief we experience at lives lost to war, around climate change and natural life being destroyed, cultures being destroyed, people living without a home.  It takes everything that we have within us to walk down a street and not be affected by the sorrows of our world.  This is where being in community, ritual and grieving together is a very powerful process for people to process grief.  Often we do this through art, music, and dance.  Ancient cultures have been doing this for years.  We live in relational fields, in fields of consciousness, indigenous cultures have known this for years.  

The fourth gate is, What we expected we did not receive. This one is a little trickier to explain but I believe it links to belonging.  We are born into families, into communities.  There are certain things we are born to expect.  Weller says we are designed to hear (as babies) soothing sounds, to be comforted, and hear soothing sounds and noises to soothe and comfort us.  Yet some of us don’t experience that.  We are wired to want to belong, it is a very primal need of humans, we are not wired to do life on our own.  Our nervous systems are wired for connection.  Our feelings of not being enough, of feeling like we are lacking are most often not a sign of personal failure but of a community or a society that has failed to offer us what we are designed to expect.  I believe this is where marginalisation and discrimination deeply wounds us.  One of the rituals of Italian life I love is the passigiata.  This is where Italians go out at night before dinner and take a walk with family and friends. There is both communion and spectacle in this event, often dressed in their very best, the passigiata gives rise to a bit of theatre as well as connection with others. As the Italians meet in the community and talk about their day, maybe have a cafe or gelato or aperitivo.  It is a beautiful ritual where people come together at the end of our day.  

The fifth gate is Ancestral Grief.  This is the grief that we carry in our bodies that is handed down by our ancestors.  This can be held for generations and often creates secondary coping strategies of addiction, rage or silence in families.  Things that are never spoken of for generations until they turn up generations later in unexplained maladies like illness or chronic health conditions repeated throughout families. Or ways of being and showing up in the world that we think is personality but actually trauma.  People who lost touch with their cultural  rituals of dance, art, song and moved into survival strategy which is often silence.  I have a few Mexican friends and they all say borrow our Day of the Dead.  This is the 1st of November and it’s the day they all honour and remember their deceased ancestors.  I have started doing this, it's so lovely.

To help grief flow it must be witnessed by another.  Like trauma, grief requires a witness who can acknowledge and witness our experience.  That is why ritual and grieving in community are so important.  This allows us to live more fully as we are opening our heart to our emotions and not repressing them.  We learn to hold what is both bitter and sweet at the same time, what is painful and pleasurable.

I could write pages about grief. I feel like I have barely touched the surface here.  It is such an essential human experience that helps us let go, to keep growing as humans.  I often say to clients, the tears of our grief are like windscreen wipers for our heart.  They help us process our experience of being a human.  

I will finish with a quote from Martin Prechtel, a Mayan Shaman who is also a grief specialist.  “Grieving should never be avoided or postponed; griefing is absolutely necessary.  Without grief the world would never renew itself; the world would cease to exist”.

If you want to read more I highly recommend Francis Weller’s, The Wild Edge of Sorrow and Martin Prechtel’s, The Smell of Rain on Dust.

Healing our abandonment wounds

Many of us have abandonment wounds. They are deeply imprinted in the nervous system, often at a very young age. When our early emotional needs weren’t met—when we lacked attunement, presence, or consistent caregiving—an abandonment wound can take root deep within us.

There are many reasons this happens, sometimes it is a really stressed or depressed parent, a parent who is extremely unwell themselves, and unable to connect and attune to us. Sometimes it is circumstance. I have worked with many people who were premature babies who spent their first few weeks in a humidity crib, so didn’t get the touch from their parents in those first few weeks to soothe their tiny nervous system. Even though one of their parents were most likely there with them all the time, sitting by them, they were separated by a little wall.

This is how deeply wired we are for connection and co-regulation when we are tiny. Our nervous system learns through regulation from our parents and caregivers.

Abandonment wounds are not always obvious. Sometimes they show up not as a gaping wound, but as a subtle hum of anxiety in our relationships. A feeling of being "too much" or "not enough." A belief that love must be earned, not received freely.

To avoid the unbearable terror of disconnection, many of us learned to fawn. We became hyper-attuned to the emotional landscape of others. We learned to appease, to over-function, to say yes when we meant no. We self-abandoned in hopes of staying connected.

Fawning is a survival strategy. It’s what our nervous system chose when fight, flight, or freeze didn’t feel safe or available. While it helped us survive, it often keeps us from truly living—because it asks us to leave ourselves behind.

Healing the abandonment wound isn’t about blaming our caregivers—it’s about reclaiming the parts of us that learned love meant losing ourselves.

Attunement is largely body based; eye contact, mirroring through action and language and most importantly, we attune through touch. These are all essential in establishing secure attachment. When these components are missing our nervous system learns to perceive that we will be left on our own.

Art - Giulia Rosa

For female nervous systems, which are more finely tuned to social engagement because we have lots of estrogen, which creates oxytocin, wiring us for connection and bonding - this perceived abandonment can often be felt more intensely. So we fawn to establish connection.

When we fawn, when we please, appease, over-function, we abandon our own needs. We stop asking for what we want, because we know our needs won’t be met. We hyper-attune or hyper-socialise to stay connected and receive the sense of love, safety and belonging that we all need at a very foundational level just so we can function.

Healing self abandonment begins when we learn not to abandon our selves. When we learn to feel our big sensations and emotions and stay in our body, expanding capacity inside of us to be with what what life throws our way. When we learn to self-soothe and have our little strategies to come back to our zone of resilience. This establishes a sense of safety and trust within ourselves and then we learn to trust others.

It starts with learning how to stay with ourselves. To feel what we couldn’t feel then. To expand our capacity to be with emotion and sensation—including the terror that once overwhelmed our small bodies.

Very slowly, as we learn to stay, something beautiful happens; we begin to trust that we will no longer abandon ourselves and that safety, the safety of self-attunement, becomes the foundation for all our relationships.

Why the feminine are the change makers - part 1

I have been doing a bit of work with a biodynamic cranio osteopath on my pelvis. I have had pelvic issues for years, predominantly starting with a car accident as a kid, and things just go layered upon it. I have worked with different body workers over the years and I have to say it is in a pretty good state now. If you aren’t familiar with this modality it is a lot of neuro-affective touch work, and the body in all its wisdom and intelligence, reorganises, because it knows how to heal. It is very similar to the touch work we do sometimes in somatic experiencing.

My osteopath and I have big chats when I am on the table. Last session she asked me “do you think it is trauma that causes all the autoimmune issues in women”. (if you don’t know the stats, something like 80% of autoimmune condition sufferers are female bodies). I said sometimes, but I think it is because as women we carry so much of the relational field and after a while that takes an enormous toll on a woman’s body if there is not enough sharing of the load going on in the family system or she does not have a good circle of support around her. After a period of time the body screams whether it be relational rupture, physical pain or discomfort, illness. It tells us, things need to change now!

So let’s talk about that because there is a price we pay for holding the relational field.

Why do we hold the relational field and how does it prime us to lead change?

Well some of it is biological, some is cultural and some is archetypal.

Biologically and neurologically we are wired for connection. Our estrogen creates the oxytocin that drives us to connect and attune to our children.

Women’s bodies are literally designed to attune:

• Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is more prevalent in women. It surges during intimacy, birth, breastfeeding—but also during conversation and emotional connection.

• Our mirror neuron systems, which help us sense and empathise with others' emotions, tend to be more active.

• From a nervous system lens, many women are socialised (and biologically primed) to track relational dynamics, often before we even understand we’re doing it.

The social conditioning is strong. From a young age, girls are typically taught to; caretake others’ feelings, keep the peace, maintain connection and be “good,” agreeable, relationally aware. We are socialised to value harmony over truth.

On a deeper level, the feminine principle (not just in women, but especially expressed through them) is associated with; holding, containing, gestating, weaving the web between things

So the relational field—that unseen space between people where emotion, meaning, energy, and nervous system cues travel—is often carried by the feminine. Not because it’s our duty, but because we feel it first, and most acutely.

Women tend to track what's happening in the in-between. This might look like noticing when something feels “off” even if nothing is said, adjusting ourselves to keep harmony, carrying the emotional labour of a relationship or family.

While this conditioning can be limiting, it also hones an early sensitivity to emotional tone, unspoken tensions, and disconnection. We’re trained, often unconsciously, to sense and hold the relational space around us. My neighbour always said to me, ‘if mum is okay the whole family functions well. If she is not the cracks start to occur’. We are the emotional anchor in the family system.

From a more archetypal or somatic-mystic view, the womb is not just a biological organ but a relational centre; a place where life is created, held, and nourished. Even for women who do not have a physical womb, the energetic imprint always remains. The womb and ovaries have a incredibly strong energetic imprint, so even if you have an hysterectomy, the energetic imprint never leaves you.

This womb-space can sense the field like a tuning fork. It picks up resonance and dissonance, and often prompts us to move toward repair, connection, or withdrawal. So even beyond personality, trauma history, or conditioning—there is an embodied deep knowing that many women carry. A sense of what’s happening in the space between.

The big challenge.

Many women hold the relational field at the expense of themselves.

We track everyone else’s nervous systems, needs, moods—and forget our own. We become hyper-attuned, hyper-responsible, and depleted. This is where somatic reclamation, reconnecting with our body, becomes essential. Learning the skills to come back to your body so you can hear it when it is speaking to you. We learn to track ourselves first, then engage from a resourced place. This is what transforms holding the relational field from a burden into a gift.

It is this gift, that tells us when change is needed.

Women don’t hold the relational field because we ‘should’, we hold it because we are tuned to life, to connection, to what moves between. To coherence in the field, to what is working well and what is not working well.

Midlife, when the cost and payment becomes due.

In midlife, the body begins to speak more loudly. Years of holding the field—of tracking, softening, absorbing—can begin to show up as: chronic fatigue, autoimmune conditions, thyroid dysfunction, mystery symptoms, emotional exhaustion and uproar or a sense of grief no one can name.

Many women reach a point where their bodies refuse to keep playing the role. Where the cost of emotional labor has accumulated and the body keeps the score. Not because we are broken. But because we are done.

I often wonder if all of these health issues in midlife or the tough perimenopause journey experienced by some midlife women are the body’s way of saying:

“You’ve spent a lifetime turning against yourself to preserve connection. Now I’m turning inward to get your attention.”

It’s not our fault. But it is our invitation—to begin again, from the inside out

But we’re also being called now to hold it differently; not by abandoning ourselves, but by anchoring into our bodies, our knowing, our rhythm.

That is where true healing begins, not just for us, but for the whole field we’re in.

The healing path isn’t about abandoning our relational gifts. It’s about reclaiming ourselves as part of the field we’re so attuned to.

It’s about learning to: track our own nervous systems first, let others hold space for us, to feel safe saying no, set boundaries without guilt and recognising that we are not here to carry it all alone

This is where deep nervous system healing and somatic work become essential. They help us untangle the pattern of self-abandonment woven into our care.

We were never meant to carry it all.

We are capable of holding so much but we were not meant to hold all of the emotional dysregulation of others, all of the unspoken weight of a relationship. Nor were we meant to hold all of the relational field of a family, the workplace, the world - at the cost and detriment of our own health.

This is a huge price to pay and our midlife transition is the initiation into change we need to let some or all of it go. When this initiation happens it causes change in all the relational fields we are in.

So if you are finding ourself, exhausted or unravelling at midlife, you are not failing, your are awakening. Your body is asking you to step out of the role of ‘holding all the relational energy’ return to yourself.

I work with women who are ready to listen to what their bodies are saying, to come home to their own rhythm, needs, and truth.

Part 2, coming next week…..

The anatomy of life transitions

Transitions are not problems to fix, they are patterns to Inhabit

We often think of change as linear but it is not at all, it is often a spiral, or a network of spirals. Life transitions are the unspoken pulses that shape our lives. Like the changing of seasons, they are natural and inevitable but they often catch us off guard, pulling us into the unknown. Whether it's the end of a relationship, a career shift, menopause or a profound personal awakening, transitions are both a death and a birth — a letting go and a stepping forward.

When big change happens in our life we are taught to treat change like an emergency. Something is really wrong with us. We search for clarity, next steps, and solutions as if something has gone wrong.

But what if transition isn’t something to fix?

What if it’s a pattern to inhabit?

I’ve come to see life transitions not as interruptions to life, but as part of its underlying design. The common model of life transitions is ending, the liminal space in between and then emergence or new beginnings. Whilst I think this is true to an extent, I believe its actually a bit more complex than that. The metaphor that captures this most powerfully for me is the torus: a self-renewing, spiralling field found everywhere in nature—from galaxies to trees, to the electromagnetic field of the human heart.

The Toroidal Field: A Natural Pattern of Change

A torus is a continuous, dynamic flow. It is not linear. It is not chaotic. It is regenerative. If you can’t picture it in your head it is a donut shaped field where energy moves up the middle and around the edges to the bottom and back up again. The heart has a toroidal field. The earth is a toroidal field.

Image source here

In nature, we see it in the vortex of a storm, the flow of sap in trees, the shape of magnetic fields, the inhale and exhale of breath. In us, it shows up in the rhythm of emotions, healing, grief, growth, and yes—transitions.

The torus reminds us that everything alive follows a rhythm of emergence, dissolution, and return. This rhythm can help us reframe how we experience life changes: not as problems to solve, but as intelligent patterns we are invited to move with.

The Four Phases of Transition (Through the Lens of the Torus)

Transitions often unfold in four phases, which mirror the toroidal flow:

1. The Known Self (Center)

This is the phase of structure and identity. You know who you are, what your roles are, and how the world responds to you. There is stability, predictability, and sometimes stagnation.

2. The Stretch (Expansion)

Something begins to shift. A role no longer fits, perimenopause starts, a relationship starts to change, a loss arrives, or a new longing awakens. You begin to spiral outward, away from the known. This phase can bring both fear and discomfort one minute and exhilaration and joy the next. It often triggers urgency—we want to know what’s next. We feel thrown off our centre - which we literally are because we are moving to the edges of the torus shape.

This is the start of what feels like a wild ride, it begins to get tough but this is a necessary unwinding.

Resistance often comes up here. Whilst this is to be expected, our nervous system feels very uncomfortable often at this point, it is bound to constrict and pull in with fear or anger as a defensive strategy if we have no context to make sense of what is happening. Or maybe we collapse into sadness and grief. This is the time to ask for help or support.

3. The Void (Outer Edge)

The old story has fallen away, but the new one hasn’t formed yet. This is the liminal phase—a sacred pause. It can feel like floating in the dark, ungrounded. We can feel like we have completely lost our connection with our north star or our rudder is missing. This is where many people feel most lost, because the inner compass that once guided them is no longer available. It can feel like being on a road less travelled—or in some cases, a road never travelled before.

This inner void is like a composting process. What no longer serves begins to break down and dissolve. Old identities, beliefs, or stories decompose in the darkness. And just like on a forest floor, that breakdown nourishes the ground of becoming. It's slow, it's unseen, and it's absolutely essential. Composting isn’t glamorous—it’s earthy, rich, and full of alchemy. Nothing is wasted here.

This space is deeply fertile. This is where integration, rest, and surrender happen. The soil of transformation is richest here. This is the time we often need the most support, to hold space for us through the via negativa, the road of letting go. This can also be the hardest because most of us have never experienced what it feels like to let go, we are afraid we may never get up if we do completely let go.

Again at this point more resistance can come up.

When we resist, it adds turbulence to the natural movement of the spiral out, and that can create loops of stagnation, denial and reactivity which shows up somatically in our bodies as tiredness, fatigue, over-activation, as our system tries to hold onto what is known but dissolving, or alternatively rush hard into what is emerging without allowing time to fully metabolise the middle.

4. The Return (Integration)

Eventually, something new takes shape. Not as a quick fix, but as a deeper coherence. You begin spiralling back inward, bringing with you what you’ve learned. You emerge changed. Not a return to the old self, but a return to your centre—wiser, more whole.

I always say to my midlife clients, the developmental challenge of midlife is to be radically honest with ourselves. So that means there is a lot of busting up belief systems, reconnecting with parts of ourselves we have pushed into our unconscious. It is time to do your healing work and come back to that very core essence of who you are. Let go of all the ego strategies that have got you here that don’t serve you well anymore in your adult life. Come back to the real you. You can see that by using the metaphor of the Torus, the core isn’t just a psychological concept, it is also physically coming back to your core.

I see this also in somatic experiencing because the toroidal field shows a natural expression of our vitality and coherence. What I learned form Brigit Viksnins, who is a pretty fabulous trauma resolution teacher is this. The core in the toroidal field is our life force, our true selves, our inner sovereignty. This supports boundaries, presence and our capacity to be with our own emotions and the emotions of others. It sets our blueprint of health. Trauma disrupts the flow of energy, we fragment, collapse in, leak outward, get disorganised, freeze and get stuck outside of our true centre. Our trauma leaves an imprint that can make it hard for us to get back to our centre.

These four phases are not steps to rush through. They are invitations to inhabit. They are cyclical, often overlapping. You may revisit them again and again in any given transition.

Inhabiting the Pattern

Most of us are conditioned to resist the stretch and rush through the void. But when we orient to transitions as toroidal patterns, we allow ourselves to stay in the flow of life itself.

In somatic work, I see how the body holds these transitions intimately: the contraction of loss, the expansion of grief, the trembling spaciousness of the void, the grounded return of integration. Nature doesn’t rush its seasons—why should we?

Whether it’s menopause, a relationship ending, a career shift, or a spiritual awakening, each transition carries the same energetic intelligence. We are being stretched, softened, and re-shaped. And the more we honour the pattern, the more we can inhabit the change with greater ease.

A New Orientation

If you’re in the middle of the stretch, or sitting in the void, you are not broken. You are in motion. You are in the field. The torus is holding you.

Transitions are not detours.

They are invitations into deeper coherence.

So the next time change arrives, try asking not "How do I fix this?" but instead:

"Where am I in the pattern?"

And then, with grace, let yourself inhabit the unfolding.

Reflection Questions for you

• Where in your life are you being stretched or dissolved?

• Can you name the phase of the transition you are in?

• What might shift if you trusted this phase as intelligent, necessary, and even sacred?