[SPEAKER_01]: Therapy chat podcasts episode four ninety four.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the therapy chat podcast with Laura Regan LCSWC.
[SPEAKER_00]: The information shared in this podcast is not a substitute for seeking help from a licensed mental health professional.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now, here's your host Laura Regan LCSWC.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Laura Reagan, and today I'm bringing you a very special 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: My guest is Francis Weller, MFT, who is a psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist.
[SPEAKER_01]: He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures, and poetic traditions.
[SPEAKER_01]: The author of books, including The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and The Threshold Between Laws and Revelation, with Rashani Rhea, he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis founded and directs Wisdom Bridge, an organization that offers educational programs seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from Western poetic, psychological and spiritual traditions.
[SPEAKER_01]: For more than forty years Francis has worked as a psychotherapist and developed a style he calls soul centered psychotherapy.
[SPEAKER_01]: His collection in the absence of the ordinary soulwork for times of uncertainty is available for pre-order-wren, wherever books are sold, and will be released on August XII alongside an updated hardcover edition of the wild edge of sorrow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Laura Ragan, and today I'm so honored to be speaking with Francis Weller, who is a recently retired MFT and author of beautiful books.
[SPEAKER_01]: Francis, thank you so much for being my guest on Therapy Chat today.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really an honor to be here and delighted to share what we're about to share together, so thank you, Laura.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so delighted to, I, I told you this already, but your book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow was a really 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 souls was dumb and, you know, the larger
[SPEAKER_01]: meaning of everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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 it's surely an uncertain time that we're living in right now, so it's couldn't be more timely.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, you just referenced a big change in my world.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've recently set down my practice as a psychotherapist after it will be forty-three years that I've been in practice.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's been such a remarkable terminus for understanding where we are collectively as well as what soul is trying to say.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's been my field work as sitting with people over.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 the language of soul often comes through a fliction you know suffering so that's partly what got me moving more and more towards grief workers that you begin to understand pretty quickly that no matter what the symptom is whether it's addiction or divorce or
[SPEAKER_03]: childhood wounds or whatever, there's always grief saturating that territory.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're not taught much about grief at all in our training.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nor is just a human being and particularly in the white, you know, capitalistic culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not on the agenda.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's how do you advance?
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you make yourself stronger?
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you improve?
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you, you know, financially dominate?
[SPEAKER_03]: But we're not taught soul work at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've become fascinated by that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And beginning to see that I couldn't look solely to my own culture for that information.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I began looking at indigenous traditions and cultures that have existed for fifty to a hundred thousand years.
[SPEAKER_03]: How do they do that?
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, how did they survive when we're just gasping for air?
[SPEAKER_03]: after five hundred years on this continent.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_03]: How they keep people
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: So my life has been devoted to try to reimagine
[SPEAKER_03]: What the primal matrix might look like now?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is the matrix that actually develops living culture?
[SPEAKER_03]: And by being developing living culture, you actually create healthy individual humans.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because you can't have healthy culture without healthy individuals.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't have healthy individuals without healthy culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've been very interested in what is that symmetry look like?
[SPEAKER_03]: And how do we begin in the barest ways possible begin to re-animate 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?
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's a little bit about what threads have claimed to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I haven't never been able to get too far away from grief, from shame, from defeat, from emptiness.
[SPEAKER_03]: It says, if my soul is so, well, that's the territory you're going to be spending your entire life in.
[SPEAKER_03]: So get creative about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I've been trying to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: that the imagination, that the dream come through me through ritual, through writing, through trainings now, teaching people how to hold grief spaces.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's enough about me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what invaluable work it is, like being struck with how
[SPEAKER_01]: In this time, you know, there's so much going on that so many of us are like, I don't want this to be happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not what it should be happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet when things are easier, we're not really looking for, well, how do we come together to solve this?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're just like, hey, I'm doing fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything's great for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry about the other person.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't care.
[SPEAKER_01]: not all of us, but that it's sort of what our culture does.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's these urgent times that invite us to explore bigger ideas and new paths.
[SPEAKER_01]: And something that you
[SPEAKER_01]: You are saying about soul.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the way you're speaking about it for me, I wasn't raised religiously.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the concept that I have learned in my childhood about soul was related to religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it was like you have a soul.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, the Christian dominant idea, your soul goes to heaven if your good goes to hell if you're bad.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a child's understanding of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I always felt really curious, even as a little kid, since I wasn't really raised to be religious, I never really believed in either heaven or hell.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the soul part, I was like, what about that?
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't.
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels true that there's something that's always been here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're speaking of soul in a much larger way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just want to read quickly this quote.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I invite you, please share some wisdom about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: This quote from your new book in the absence of the ordinary.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's right in the beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: To know soul is to feel our wild entanglement.
[SPEAKER_01]: with all things revealing our ongoing relationship with the anima muni, the soul of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's been illuminated for me and you're writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, oh, this is way bigger than what my little mind is thinking of, but so curious to understand even like, what is that anima Mundi soul of the world?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think it's a very, very old idea.
[SPEAKER_03]: The anima Mundi is that this being that we live on, this earth is actually a living presence.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's not just, you know, oh, we're gonna talk about soul isn't that pretty.
[SPEAKER_03]: No soul is tough, so it's hard.
[SPEAKER_03]: It takes us into places of great trouble.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, part of what I, why I chose or why I sold a such an important lens is that it helps me understand the value and necessity of some of these experiences.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like we don't ripen as human beings without some encounter with loss.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's what deepens us.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's what kind of calls up from our depths, our capacities for compassion, for elderhood, for wisdom, for patience,
[SPEAKER_03]: So that territory of Seoul, 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 of the new book about
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he gets up and walks over to this closet.
[SPEAKER_03]: It opens the door and there's a chest of drawers in there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the drawers are very narrow.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he opens every one and pulls out a piece of paper from each drawer.
[SPEAKER_03]: And on each piece of paper is the bibliography.
[SPEAKER_03]: starting with you and going down to a vehicle and Fichino and to Heraclides, we're going back thousands of years and it looks at me and said, this is your family tree.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm claimed by that tree.
[SPEAKER_03]: By that lineage, I can't get away from it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to get away from it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's what's claimed to me, so I speak the language of my lineage.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not inventing anything here.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just trying to articulate the current expression of soul in our time, in our collapsing ecology, in our collapsing democracies, soul is still present in all of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, is the best way for me to actually engage that material, which is why I write what I write.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know if we answered your question or not,
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, it's very, it's expansive.
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole, all of what you're writing about, it's so, it just makes my mind curious.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like it's such a, I can't, I don't have better words in to say, just a perspective that comes from reading what you share.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, this is all so much bigger.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so are we, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, our collective indoctrination, our conditioning fragments us into feeling so small and so disconnected from this wild entanglement with the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: We feel separated and severed in those connections.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's part of the reason why we don't know how to respond to grief.
[SPEAKER_03]: or to outrage, you know, to see what's happening in our streets.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a certain part of us because we feel so impudent and so powerless that we actually contract from the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if we're not involved in the care of the world, who will be, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's why this is not just a, I'm not writing just to make us feel better.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm actually writing in a way that's inviting a larger sense of identity to come forward.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's why, you know,
[SPEAKER_03]: In many ways, when you said before about, you write that this is necessary.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, not pleasant, but we are required to go through a rough initiation at this point.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when I work with the Cancer Health Program in Valena, a couple of times a year, and these people come from all over, many dealing with a very serious cancer diagnosis.
[SPEAKER_03]: And on the opening night, I talked about that they are going through a rough initiation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not one of you wished to support yourself, or wanted this to happen in your world.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the moment it happened, you began an alteration in your life.
[SPEAKER_03]: That three things typically happened in initiation.
[SPEAKER_03]: One, there's a severing from the world that we know.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in that call came in, or when you met with a doctor, and they said, yes, it is malignant.
[SPEAKER_03]: Your world ended.
[SPEAKER_03]: The world you knew of casualness and ease and trust that my body is fine and what I will get through our old age.
[SPEAKER_03]: All of that gets shattered.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the second thing that happens in any true initiation is a radical alteration in your sense of identity.
[SPEAKER_03]: who I am is no longer familiar.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: The familiar markers just fade.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the third thing that happens in any true initiation is this a realization that you cannot go back to the world that was.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you can't go back to pre-cancer.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't go back to pre-climate crisis.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't go back to pre, well, there was no pre, you know, racial problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's, that's been here.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if we don't have a pre, other than before slavery began.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're being taught that we have to engage this material.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are being taken into a rough and issue, you should collectively.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now the problem with rough initiation is that they frequently happen without the containment field of elders, ancestors, ritual, community, the sacred.
[SPEAKER_03]: All of those elements, place, all of those essential elements.
[SPEAKER_03]: that helped make the initiation meaningful, and one that you could then elicit a new sense of your expanded identity.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not happening in rough initiation.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's more like a shattering.
[SPEAKER_03]: And to see it, I think it was the last time I was at the Cancer Health Program.
[SPEAKER_03]: Every single person there began using that imagery of rough initiation.
[SPEAKER_03]: as a way begin 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, what is the invitation of the times that we are in right now?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, certainly one of them is to break through our fixations with capitalism, with colonialism, with domination.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we're being forced in a way to confront the legacy of what happens when you abandon soul.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, if you abandon soul, you basically abandon community.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you abandon community, you buy none of the comments.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you abandon the comments, there's nothing there that can sustain a people.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we are right at that threshold right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: We might not even make it as a species at this point.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, we've never had to really consider that before.
[SPEAKER_03]: We do now.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, this is where we are.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what is possibly big enough to hold the complexity of that type of reality?
[SPEAKER_03]: And to me, the only answer is soul.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's scary to be living in this time and it's one thing that your work has been doing for me is gaining for me, gaining to plant seeds of that there could be possibility.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think because I realized when I read the wild edge of sorrow, I've been pretty much impacted by grief
[SPEAKER_01]: my whole life because when I was six 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 but 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
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, no, no, it's got to be like it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it can be really hard to grasp a possibility outside of just like there's this ending and that's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's all over.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, like psychically, it's like nothing's ever going to be okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, but there's something to 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's sort of what's been shattered culturally in the Western world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as you write about 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 sense of being held by something beyond the individual that is inherent to indigenous cultures and missing from Western culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the passage you read about sovereignty to the sea.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's very much at the heart of what you're saying is that the soul has the simultaneous capacity and necessity of honoring the uniqueness of this incarnation.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no one like Laura anywhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no one like Francis anywhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, that uniqueness is our job to articulate that and express that.
[SPEAKER_03]: The other side of it is to recognize the soul hasn't 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, moon and cosmos.
[SPEAKER_03]: So simultaneously, the soul has this dance between those two realities.
[SPEAKER_03]: Western, white Western culture in particular has focused almost a hundred percent on the sovereignty piece of it, but not even sovereignty because true sovereignty recognizes it that it's embedded in community.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're much more self-centered, individualistically centered, not sovereignty, but individualism.
[SPEAKER_03]: That, again, is that feeling of being cut off and separated
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's almost impossible to process your grief in isolation.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we learn to become holders of grief.
[SPEAKER_03]: We learn how to compact it and, you know, I can write about it in the wild, I just sorrow people who come into my practice and say, I'm depressed and I listen to them and realize, let's not depression, let's all pressure.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the weight of untouched sorrows.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then when you sit longer with it, you realize these sorrows are generations old.
[SPEAKER_03]: So not where it's not where we're only carrying our own current grief.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm also carrying ancestral grief and I'm also 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: How can we not be affected by that?
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the role, isn't it, is that I'm affected by it, but I have no place to take it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And no one who really, very few people who are really willing to even acknowledge it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we end up finding elaborate ways to not just cope with it, but to avoid it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I write about anesthesia.
[SPEAKER_03]: How do we, how do we keep ourselves numb and detached from this overwhelming reality that we're facing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And 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 we're part of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know it's like we're not part of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are it.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, when you and I were talking, before we started recording, you named, living in the trees, living in the red woods, you said, these old friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, when I see trees, I'm like,
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, buddy, you know, like, I feel like they are my friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it's also kind of weird to say that in, you know, our culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: And on the East Coast, maybe a little bit more so than on the West Coast, but if you're in the US, but they feel, you know, you can hear them and you can feel them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they can feel each other.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are beginning to learn more about that in science, but
[SPEAKER_01]: That just resonated so deeply.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, when you talk about initiation, and we talk about briefly just that initiation was never intended for you as an individual.
[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't there to be a self-help process.
[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't to make you a better you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Initiation's intention was to prepare you to take your place in the community of things.
[SPEAKER_03]: to know what your responsibilities were.
[SPEAKER_03]: I once wrote that what initiation does is it helps us recognize our responsibilities more than rights and our entanglements more than entitlements.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right now you hear a lot about entitlement and you hear a lot about rights but we really talk about responsibilities or entanglements.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you were initiated not just to your own self but you were initiated to place, to community, to ancestors
[SPEAKER_03]: So when you hear about an indigenous people protecting their land, they're not doing it out of altruism.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're doing it out of identification.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is my body, you're assaulting.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am that delta.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am that river.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am that hillside.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's 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, how could it not be, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: What happens to the water shed is going to affect me.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I can't drink the water, if the fish are toxic and poison, you know, if the air becomes ungrateful, I might smell it because I have a lot of money in my bank or I have a position of power that's somehow going to immune and I immune as
[SPEAKER_03]: immunize me against that?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's absurd.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 these are our kin.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we have a sole responsibility.
[SPEAKER_03]: And 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: to the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's our spiritual obligation and responsibility to register what is happening to the body of this world.
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, if we don't, who will?
[SPEAKER_03]: And if no one recognizes this, we can just go on wheeling nearly, just destroying clear cut, top-solid depletion, overfishing, mountaintop removal for copper,
[SPEAKER_03]: Nothing would stop us, but as windowberry that wonderful farmer Poet said, it all turns on affection.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the core of our work is to keep the heart open right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: To keep our love flowing out into the streets and into our communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that requires that the skill set around grief work is learned, otherwise we can't keep the heart soft and open.
[SPEAKER_03]: The skill of grief work
[SPEAKER_03]: is really this skill of keeping something warm in the old alchemical traditions they talk about whatever's in the vessel we could say what's ever 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
[SPEAKER_03]: by our communications with other friends, by a ritual, by silence.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are practices that help keep that material warm.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if we keep it warm, it will keep moving.
[SPEAKER_03]: Our grief was not meant to congeal and hardened.
[SPEAKER_03]: We talk about the number one cause of death in this country.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's congestive heart failure, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's not just smoking.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not just trans fats.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all the undi-justed sorrows that compile and increase themselves in our hearts.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we have to keep it moving.
[SPEAKER_01]: It'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
[SPEAKER_01]: Great.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a coincidence.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't have typically grief rituals.
[SPEAKER_03]: in our communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, if we were sane when I was spent some time in West Africa, there was a grief ritual almost every single day someplace in the village.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they were the most joyful people I ever met.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, there's a correspondence between those two things.
[SPEAKER_03]: Our ability to keep grief moving in our capacity to enjoy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, there's one woman I walked up to in the village that said, you have so much joy.
[SPEAKER_03]: She said, that's because I cry a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, we would not make that a solicitation here.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's staying current, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, that's part of what I love about grief work is that it gives us the opportunity to get current.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: So to do grief enough times actually get you current, but also in the sense of that word of electricity.
[SPEAKER_03]: to feel alive.
[SPEAKER_03]: I remember coming home from a men's retreat once, many years ago, and my friend Richard said, so Francis, are you happy with well?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like moments of being happy.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And even in our psychological systems, happiness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nothing wrong with happiness.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's lovely.
[SPEAKER_03]: So what I want is to be alive.
[SPEAKER_03]: And all of these other feelings, sadness, grief, anger,
[SPEAKER_03]: Even loneliness, they all have vitality in them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what I want to be is a good host of the vitality of what my soul is experiencing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've stopped trying to be happy and I really tried to be alive in that current, in that electricity, they're all vital, they're all alive, and that's our job.
[SPEAKER_03]: On the last sense of the word current is to be in the current of life, to be in the flow of life.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we often feel like we're spectators.
[SPEAKER_03]: We know barely tangibly touching that current of life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it is by design with colonization that we are literally preoccupied with survival through work.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's a good machine.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a deadly machine.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'm working on a piece right now called that the heart of all our sorrows and exclusion into emptiness.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm trying to look at something that just has troubled me for decades, which is the emptiness of white society.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the symptoms that come out of that emptiness are rapid and rabid consumption.
[SPEAKER_03]: We want more all the time, all the time, more and more will why.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, what colonization?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is that a symptom of?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, how we want more land, more power, more wealth, more control, more domination.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is this insistent desire for more in the traditions on this continent that they have a term, what tickle, which means kind of a cannibalistic psychosis that white folk have this need to consume everything, take the most.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like exposing something that's so, you know, entwined in our being that we don't even know it's like fish and water, you know, how do you explain this?
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you walk through a mall or you go online,
[SPEAKER_03]: ninety nine point nine percent of what's there it we don't need but it's there for a reason to fill the whole or at least temporarily a swage the feeling of being empty you know
[SPEAKER_03]: All of the, again, going back to that idea of what were the traditional cultures?
[SPEAKER_03]: How do they do that?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I look at not so much the shapes of their rituals, but the values, restraint, reverence, gratitude, reciprocity, mutuality, patience.
[SPEAKER_03]: These values are transcultural when you look at traditional cultures.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those values are everywhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are not the values of white culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: achievement, progress, rank, privilege.
[SPEAKER_03]: These are the values.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're the man of the year.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the person of the year as the one who's made the most money or has had the most power.
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't look at humility as a value in this culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't look at restory strength.
[SPEAKER_03]: You crazy in that have all you want, twenty-four-seven shopping.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no restraint.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we don't even know how to practice that as a value.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I wrote a whole chapter in the new book about restraint.
[SPEAKER_03]: The necessity of restraint, the value of repetition, all these things that are not the dominant values of white culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you think about the people who have the most, we're talking about an individual people, but when you look at the wealthiest people, like, do they seem satisfied?
[SPEAKER_01]: 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 whole lifetime, nor could your children ever spend it, you know, look at royal families around the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, is that providing joy?
[SPEAKER_01]: or even a sense of security and it doesn't seem like it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, and you know it doesn't.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I've worked with a lot of wealthy people and there's never that sense of enoughness.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's always that anxiety of needing more, needing more, needing more.
[SPEAKER_03]: And part of what again, what's that's predicate on around this emptiness is that we've lost culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we don't have a living culture that teaches us how to feel welcomed here.
[SPEAKER_03]: How do I feel like our belonging is unquestioned?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because as long as our belonging is questioned, our anxiety is chronic.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the chronic sack, how do I shape itself that will be at least approvalable?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, when economics is your baseline, well, then I'll try to become an achieving economic person.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then I'll get respect.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'll get maybe I'll even get that some facsimile of love.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's all based on performance and achievement.
[SPEAKER_03]: When the moment you can't, you feel like a failure.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's no safety net to catch you for failing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're anxious.
[SPEAKER_03]: We spend much of our lifetime anxious about whether I'm in or I'm out.
[SPEAKER_03]: Remember talking to a friend of mine that's from West Africa.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he said, yeah, in our culture, the whole premise is, how do we imprint on to every child
[SPEAKER_03]: that there are somewhat utterly welcomed and wanted and waited for, that they're needed, that they're loved, that they belong.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he said, you've changed at a hundred and eighty degrees, where it's up to you to convince the community that you're somebody tolerable.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not sure of homecoming, but just some sense that, well, if you perform adequately, we'll let you hang out on the edges.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure you've seen that in your practice as a therapist, the anxiety around belonging is chronic and so we focus so much on achievement and performance to somehow shape itself that we think will be worthy of belonging.
[SPEAKER_03]: But we never trust it because it's based on approval and approval never lingers in the pocket as a sustainable coin.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I might get praised today for doing a good job and so I did a good interview and I okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: But tomorrow I'll wake up with the same anxiety.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, what about today?
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to get that next fix of approval.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're off.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 attention is drawn chronically inwardly.
[SPEAKER_03]: to self-survival, self-soothing, to coping, to shaping myself adequately, and in that absorption, I lose the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: The world loses us.
[SPEAKER_03]: As psychic participants, as kin, we're lost in a very different world.
[SPEAKER_03]: Did that make sense?
[SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm thinking too, like, I do work with a number of people who have, you know, impressive achievements on paper.
[SPEAKER_01]: No question.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have advanced education.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have jobs that are, you know, well-paying and prestigious.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have the traditional often, you know, some kind of structure of a traditional family life where they have a partner that they're
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, committed to and children potentially and they'll say, I have everything I've ever wanted.
[SPEAKER_01]: People think I'm amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do I feel so empty inside?
[SPEAKER_03]: There it is, there it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when I write about the primary satisfaction and like 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 satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're eating together, we're singing together, we're crying together, we're telling our stories together.
[SPEAKER_03]: We wake up and we share dreams for three days or so.
[SPEAKER_03]: Our psyche's are in a field that resonates to what it is we expect it and some part of us calms down.
[SPEAKER_03]: This was what I expected and did not receive, you know, that fourth gate of grief that I write about.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, that's part of what I think we're all longing for.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're not longing for the next billion.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're longing for some felt sense of being inside something sustainable and alive.
[SPEAKER_03]: that nourishes the soul on a day by day basis, and that I'm allowed to also contribute to.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we can't just be the ones always looking for a place to belong.
[SPEAKER_03]: We also have to become a house of belonging at some point.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, that's part of what grief work does, is that it keeps breaking my heart open.
[SPEAKER_03]: to the layers and layers of connection to the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the more I feel that, the more it's incumbent upon me to become a place that welcomes others.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not always looking for the next place I might belong, but you're welcome here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Your tears are welcome here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Your heart is welcome here.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's also part of what I feel like we can learn from traditional people.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just saw a movie about a month or so ago called The Eternal Song, and it's Murritsio and Zaya, but not so, and there are just wonderful people.
[SPEAKER_03]: But they went to all these cultures, like thirteen different cultures around the planet, and interviewed them about the legacy of colonialism.
[SPEAKER_03]: and how that legacy is lived on, and how did they survive that?
[SPEAKER_03]: How did they stay in touch with that eternal song that went underground?
[SPEAKER_03]: When I talked about the long dark in this new collection of essays,
[SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of a shock for us, white folk.
[SPEAKER_03]: But native cultures have been in the long dark for five hundred years.
[SPEAKER_03]: And black folk have been in this country, have been in the long dark for four hundred years since slavery.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they actually have much more wisdom.
[SPEAKER_03]: But how to face what's happening right now?
[SPEAKER_03]: Then we do.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm listening.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm listening to you.
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you do that?
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you keep your dances and songs and stories and values?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because we lost them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, that's part of our emptiness as white folk is that those traditions got severed completely.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what those rituals were.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what the language was.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what the myths were or the stories or the ancestral grounds of, you know,
[SPEAKER_03]: caves and wells and all of that wisdom got silenced both by the Roman invasion and then by the Christian invasion.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those traditions got silenced and so we came to this continent empty.
[SPEAKER_03]: What was the first thing we tried to do is eviscerate a living culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think out of envy that they were alive and vital and we were under the auspices of puritanism and other rules of control of body and soul and
[SPEAKER_03]: But there's so much wisdom that I find in the traditions of indigenous cultures that may give us some clue how to face this long dark.
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you stay connected to soil and soil?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, thank you for sharing about that film too.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, what you said about how indigenous cultures and African peoples who came here involuntarily to North America, kidnapped for enslavement,
[SPEAKER_01]: 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 this beer about the shattering of the fabric of the society that we've been living in.
[SPEAKER_01]: This Western culture here is, well, this can't happen here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This can't happen to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: This isn't, you sure I heard about that on the news.
[SPEAKER_01]: My whole life happening in other places, but that doesn't happen here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we're exceptional.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when thinking about, so how do, you know, the black people I know, how do they hold onto what their roots are?
[SPEAKER_01]: through this and keep not just this but what's happened in their lifetimes and their ancestors lifetimes generations back because you know the being a white person and my people who came here were European white Europeans so there they were already stripped of their of any culture before they came and then assimilation well some most of their culture and then a through assimilation here in the US I didn't even know
[SPEAKER_01]: I even know my ancestors were Irish.
[SPEAKER_01]: I found that out like twenty years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm fifty-three.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even with bread here, 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my grandparents did, but they didn't talk about it at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: So at least not that I know.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I remember when you realize it's like, oh, yeah, you know how people behaved.
[SPEAKER_01]: You could see the culture right there when you when you know that it was there, but it's almost like willfully stripped.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not almost.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is willfully stripped through the process of assimilation for survival.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know why anybody, but it's it's
[SPEAKER_03]: But there is this lingering consequence of this great forgetting.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was going to say I remember hearing Cornell West that brilliant thinker writer, teacher, black history.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he was speaking out here and someone asked him the question, how did you do that?
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you culture survive?
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, well, we learn to sing the blues.
[SPEAKER_03]: So what he's saying in that simple statement is through art, through ritual, through song, you can take imagination into places of great suffering.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in this essay, I just wrote for this new collection called Medicine for the Long Dark.
[SPEAKER_03]: Imagination 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're not going to think our way through the Longland Arch.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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
[SPEAKER_03]: to dream us into how to be here again is as good human beings.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I share this idea of Kartsaluni, which is an inewit word from north of the Europe, and Kartsaluni translates quite literally as sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what they're talking about is that these are the wailers.
[SPEAKER_03]: They can't go out hunting for the whales until a song has been given to them by one of the whale people.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they sit in the absolute darkness of the long house and wait until a song has come to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's reverence.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's patience.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's restraint.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're not just saying, hey, we're hungry.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's go kill something.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now there's etiquettes.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's responsibilities.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's protocols.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's manners.
[SPEAKER_03]: about how to best do this.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's part of what we're being asked to do right now is just slow down enough to actually become receptive to the song, to the dream, to the image, to the ritual.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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 the rituals have been coming and
[SPEAKER_03]: When we do those rituals, there is a sense of, oh, this feels right.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is reparative.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I shared one of these rituals with my friend from Africa, and he looked at me after his overset.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the first indigenous ritual I've experienced on this continent, and you would never see this in my village.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it wouldn't speak to their psyches.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's why appropriation doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't just take somebody else's rituals and applique them on us because they look right.
[SPEAKER_03]: They have to speak to the shape of our psyche's here and how we are in relationship to one another and how we are in relationship to the land.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those rituals have to become reparative for now for us so that we can remember.
[SPEAKER_03]: Remember, Jeanette Armstrong and Alcanagan, elder from British Columbia, was once asked what the white folk mean to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: She said, become indigenous.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to find your way into becoming part of this land.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you can't keep just, you know, in preceding native folk here or African or
[SPEAKER_03]: That is not going to work.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to return to your own connection to place, not on a whole long that takes.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's certainly been what I've been trying to dream into.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we have this two hundred year vision that we began in nineteen ninety seven.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in two hundred years the young people standing here will know from the beginning that they belong to this place.
[SPEAKER_03]: They won't have to scrape and crawl and scratch and try to convince other people to let them in.
[SPEAKER_03]: They will know it from birth.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am part of this creek, part of this water ship, part of this land, and consequently I have obligations and responsibilities.
[SPEAKER_03]: to sustain it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not that's a whole different premise than getting an education to see how much money I can make judging that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I am saying we're missing a whole other education.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the education of the soul, education of the heart, our communal bond.
[SPEAKER_03]: Young one said that if you go down deep enough into psyche at root, at bottom, what you touch is carbon.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said in other words, psyche is world.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if we really live that, I'm as much world as I am self.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm as much communal as I am private.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a truth.
[SPEAKER_03]: But we don't go that deep into our psychic field that often, unless we're forced to, by trial, by trouble.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's where we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that is where we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, ways that you would you do to present those spaces where people can feel that belonging so that people can in addition to rating your books, they can get into these spaces.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, of late, I've spent most of my energy on trying to train people to do that, to lead grief ritual.
[SPEAKER_03]: So 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's been one of the most important things of my adult life, is passing on what I've gathered.
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, Alvin's just feel like we have to begin to experiment with ritual.
[SPEAKER_03]: I remember my friend, Melodoma Somai was speaking out here in California once, and someone asked on the question, like, well, I've got this situation and what ritual should I do?
[SPEAKER_03]: And he looked at them and said, do you think I have a manual that tells you what, you know, I got on page two, seventy two, he said, you have to remember.
[SPEAKER_03]: What the protocol for?
[SPEAKER_03]: You should remember, you are page two seventy two.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we are all wired at our deep time ancestry, no matter where we came from, had ritual as its primary language.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when we're in ritual spaces, some, again, some part of our psyche lines up and goes, oh yes, I know this space.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I just encourage people, I put a few rituals in the back of the book, it's just just experiment, you know, start simple, get together with three or four people, gather in your home, light a candle,
[SPEAKER_03]: Go silent for a minute or share a poem or if you're bold enough, say a prayer.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this let's let what we share tonight be held in the atmosphere of no advice, no fixing, no problem solving.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: So as far as ritual goes, start very simple.
[SPEAKER_03]: Get up in the morning, walk outside and say thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Bring a little handful of seed out and just lay it on the ground and say thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't have to have this day, but it's been gifted to me and I want to use it well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to be in this day and I want to begin with gratitude.
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe end your day with gratitude.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, there's ways in which we can simply bring ritual in with that a lot of complication.
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't have to go to a three-day grief ritual.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's wonderful if you can find one.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we've list, I'm not leading any directly myself at this point.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I said, I've been focusing on training.
[SPEAKER_03]: But on my website, there's a listing of many rituals being offered by people who've studied with me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's, I'm very, very grateful that they're offering these rituals.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's something on the good work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beautiful.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you search on the internet, there's like, I can't do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like all these things you're like, wait, where is something that's going to really resonate and it can feel
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, confusing to find that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: The good news is I also think the Laura's like, when I first started doing this grief work around ritual work back in the late nineties, early two thousand, there are very few people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Turning up, showing up for these rituals, I had to convince people to come.
[SPEAKER_03]: But now you can't go on any social media without seeing a reference to somebody offering a free virtual somewhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm very grateful because that's it.
[SPEAKER_03]: As I say in this, I wrote an essay for, for Dwayne Elgin's book called Choosing Earth.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was the forward for his book.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was one of the hardest pieces to write because I had to read his book, which was very difficult.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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
[SPEAKER_03]: What could possibly most likely happen over these next five decades is pretty scary.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I had to write a forward for that, you know, what do you say?
[SPEAKER_03]: So I talk about rough initiations along dark and the apprenticeship was sorrow.
[SPEAKER_03]: But one thing I say in there is that sorrow grief will be the key note for the next two generations.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we need to become skillful in this territory.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just to stay present enough, 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, but we turn away because we don't know how to hold the enormity of sorrow that they're carrying around their futures.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this work is what it calls sole activism.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're doing this again not just so I feel less heavy.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: To fall into the streets, to fall into the watersheds, to fall into our communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: So our affection is being tangibly present to what is happening around us.
[SPEAKER_03]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I appreciate what you're doing and how, you know, teaching a thousand people more than a thousand people how to lead great rituals of this the impact
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we come together?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's where that last second, the 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.
[SPEAKER_03]: To respond to these times, we are not helpless, powerless, empty creatures.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are soul fortified.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are continually fortified.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are ancestral fortified.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have imagination, we have beauty.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are so many things that we have that will help us respond to these times.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, hopeless now, challenging us, but our times help at times to generate response.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Francis, I've loved being with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And can you tell us your website where people can find this list of great rituals that are being offered?
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's Francis Weller with an eye for answers weller.net.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Great.
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been a really beautiful conversation and such an honor for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for me, thank you, Laura.
[SPEAKER_03]: Glad to be here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to Therapy Chat with your host, Laura Reagan, LCSWC.
[SPEAKER_00]: For more information, please visit Therapy Chat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Podcast.com.