Grief Ceremony: The Power of Meeting Grief With Praise
The concept of grief feels like a poignant topic given the climate as of late. With the seemingly unending violence and threats to our earth and basic human rights, I am seeing many clients come to me with intense feelings of grief. I, myself, have recently begun my own work around grief earlier this year and personally feel a lot of earth grief and collective grief about what is happening to our planet - and I know I am not alone.
Above all else, this blog is a reminder to you that you are not alone in your feelings of grief. Grief is a natural and healthy response to the suffering and pain that happens on our earth all too often.
Understanding Grief
One of the biggest learnings in my own grief work has been that grief needs to be felt and metabolized. Grief is not something you should push down and avoid, however, our culture does not allow for many opportunities to express grief effectively, nor does it provide communities or spaces where grief is welcome. Often, grief is viewed as something that needs to be fixed or something we need to get over quickly and push away.
Giving Ourselves Permission: Grieving Without Guilt
It’s impossible to avoid grief when it comes knocking. Either you will push it down and it will come out sideways or you will feel it and you will let it out. Whatever your way, grief is here to stay and it is part of your human experience.
Oftentimes, when people are experiencing grief they are told to stop; stop crying, stop feeling, or stop bringing other people down. Nobody wants to be a downer and they certainly don’t want their sadness and grief to affect others. However, it is impossible to avoid the fact that we all feel grief whether that be in regards to humanity, the environment, or any type of loss.
To fully embrace grief, we need to give ourselves permission to grieve, cry, wail, and rage. Rage or anger is also an aspect of grief, and we must not forget that. There is nothing wrong with feeling rage or anger. When we give ourselves permission to feel the emotions associated with grief, true healing can start and we can begin to look at our grief through a different lens.
The Relationship Between Grief and Praise
A book that I really love called The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martín Prechtel, talks about grief and its brother, praise. In his book, Prechtel discusses the relationship between grief and praise in our culture and suggests that grief is actually praise in disguise. This is due to the fact that we are honoring something that we have lost; something that we miss.
One way to engage in praise is through ceremonies. This doesn’t have to be with anything other than a cup of water and a moment to yourself. Praise is a way for us to honor what we do have in front of us and to honor the life force and the life energy that we feel within our bodies. The kind of energy that wakes you up in the morning; the life that flows through you. And we can honor that with ceremony.
Acknowledging Grief Through Ceremony
A ceremony is considered a ritualistic event that holds a purpose or intention. Ceremony can help us to hold our grief. In Francis Weller and Michael Lerner’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, they discuss the concept of grief ceremonies and the permission one must grant themselves to become enveloped in their emotions.
The Importance of Ceremony
In truth, we need more grief ceremonies. At this time, we need more opportunities to hold and contain our grief together, as a community so that we may express it safely and openly with people who are willing and ready to support us in that space. Without that sacred space, our grief can come out in harmful ways. We tend to lash out at our partners or those who are closest to us or we cope by using substances that only serve as temporary band-aids for our lost feelings. Other times, we just end up staying angry without really knowing why.
Because of the heaviness of grief, we often need to ask permission from the safe people in our lives before we unleash our grief upon them. We must also understand that others may not be in a place to hold on to our grief and may not be able to support us in our time of need. This is why a grief ceremony is important. In a grief ceremony, people have already given their consent to hold grief simply by just being there.
Conducting Grief Ceremonies
When conducting a grief ceremony, it is encouraged that you verbalize your need for support to a trusted friend either to join you in your ceremony or to connect with when you are finished. While this method may not be necessary for everyone, involving loved ones in your personal journey helps to add a sense of accountability and support in your personal growth. Along with this, bringing an element such as water or soil along with you during your ceremony can help you to feel more connected to the earth and the world around you.
It is important to note, that pets or other animals should not be present during grief ceremonies. While pets are wonderful creatures to connect with afterward, it is not fair to ask them to hold onto our grief as they cannot give their consent. It is not their responsibility to take on our grief.
When conducting your ceremony, you can be as formal or as informal as you like. You can conduct your ceremony outside with the elements or you can simply shut the door to your room and verbalize your intention out loud. Your grief should be acknowledged in your own way that feels safe and sacred to you.
My Grief Ceremony: Mourning Our Earth
As I stated earlier, I have been holding on to a lot of grief about our earth. I’ve been connecting with the work of Johana Macy and learning about the impacts of ecological loss to support my struggle and sadness surrounding the current state of our planet. The learnings I have taken from this work encouraged me to create my own grief ceremony.
I chose to conduct my grief ceremony with a friend. We sent an invocation by simply naming that we were holding a ceremony for grief and that we gave ourselves permission to release it. We sat outside with a bowl of water - a good element to use in grief work because water flows like our emotions; like our tears. We chose to place rose petals, leaves, dandelions, and some of our menstrual blood in the water. We called in our guides and our power animals because these are things that we identify with. I brought out some crystals and we just sat together and processed our grief.
We started by sharing verbally what we were feeling inside. At first, I struggled. I tried to connect with sadness but I didn't feel much emotion - I was really blocked. But then I started to express my anger, my disappointment, my rage. It was only through the connection to those feelings that I was able to connect with my pain - to connect with my grief. I sobbed. My friend sat there and held space for my grief. She didn’t ask me to stop or indicate that she was uncomfortable. Remember, she had agreed to this. Then, it was her turn. When we felt that we released our anger and pain, we took the water mixed with all the things and we poured it into an open field facing the West. We hugged. Then, we went and got ice cream.
Final Thoughts
Again, I feel that recent events lent appropriateness to this blog. I feel that it was important to share my story and how I’ve begun to explore grief and the release and relief that I have felt from doing this work. I hope one day when I learn from the teachers who I have yet to find, I will be able to support our community by providing grief ceremonies. But, until then, I encourage you to feel your grief - to cry, to rage. Not at someone, but to yourself. Let the earth hold it, let a tree hold it, let the ground hold it. We are not alone, we have each other. And so many of us feel this way.
If you or someone you know is feeling alone in their grief, encourage them to seek help. Whether it be through therapy, some of the resources listed above, or through conducting their own grief ceremony.
To learn more about understanding your emotions, particularly grief, sign up for the Reflective Healing newsletter or request a free consultation for more information on how you can acknowledge your grief and reframe your thinking in order to heal.