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.