THE WILD EDGE OF SORROW

Atlanta Grief and Loss Center Posted on by
The Five Gates of Grief

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The Five Gates of Grief

Facing grief is hard work…it takes outrageous courage to face outrageous loss. Yet, this is precisely what we are called to do. For the first time in my life, I’m beginning to see more health/wellness and mainstream people speak and write about wellness, healthy living, death and dying. We are beginning to appreciate that dying, death and loss are part of the natural cycle of life…for all living beings.


I know these are difficult topics to talk about, but having open conversations about grief are part of the transformational conscious change that is occurring on the planet. One of the authors who has helped me to open my heart more fully to loss and grief is psychologist and soul worker Francis Weller, author of a beautifully written book The Wild Edge of Sorrow. He has been one of my mentors for my own soul work and an extraordinary teacher for helping me guide others through their dark waters of grief and sorrow.


In his book, Francis says “Every one of us must undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. We much learn the art and craft of grief; discover the profound ways it ripens and deepens us. While grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill we develop through a profound walk with loss.”


One of Weller’s most important contributions in this book is his delineation of the “five gates of grief.” Several of the gates will be familiar to you, while others will not be so well known to many of us.

  1. The first gate is known to all of us. It is that we will eventually lose everything we love. In the end, we take nothing with us but who we truly are and the purpose we came to earth to live and learn from.
  2. The second gate has to do with those things we have not known. These are the places in us that have been ignored and banished to the depths of our unconscious. We cannot grieve what we have not experienced in our lives.
  3. The third gate is the sorrows of the world. This sorrow is one that is becoming more familiar every day – destruction of the earth, extinction of animals, deforestation, unclean water, fires, floods and on and on. The cumulative grief of the world is overwhelming.
  4. The fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive. No child expects to come into the world to experience fear, abuse and lack of love. We never expect that we won’t be able to reach our full potential, to live on purpose, or to share our true gifts in the world.
  5. The fifth gate is our ancestral grief. This is the grief we carry in our bodies from our ancestors. Grief of mental illness, slavery, leaving our family, denying past family history, violence, alcoholism and other woes

Many of these unmet needs turn into sorrow and grief that we don’t recognize as loss. Therefore, we aren’t aware of what is making us feel sad, depressed and alone. Grief is part of life. Looking at and sharing our losses can awaken serenity.

The Wild Edge of SorrowIf you are walking through loss, I highly recommend you read this book – The Wild Edge of Sorrow – or any book that helps you find more peace and joy in your life.


I will be offering several opportunities for Loss and Grief support:
Grieving Through the Holidays: A Circle of Compassion and
Caring;
Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church, Louisville, KY;
Nov 20, Dec 4, 11, 18; 404-824-7332.

Dealing With Loss and Grief During the Holidays;
Rainbow Blossom – Highlands, Louisville, KY; Dec 7, 14 at 2:00pm; 404-
824-7332

***Article originally posted at The Natural Living Journal.***

Cultivating Anima Mundi with The Land on which You Live

Atlanta Grief and Loss Center Posted on by

Photo by Francois Olwage on Unsplash

Does your body ever feel tired or sluggish by the end of the day? Do you ever feel flat or depressed? If so, perhaps you are missing out on a vital source of life-force.

Our indigenous brothers and sisters believe that without an active reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth, our bodies and minds and—eventually—our communities sicken and die. Ancient alchemists used the term Anima Mundi (which literally means the soul of the earth) to describe the deep intimate connection we must all have with Mother Earth in order to thrive.

Anima Mundi means to experience the earth—and every living thing on the earth—as part of ourselves, to experience ourselves as part of the earth, beings who would not exist without her sustenance.

What would it be like for each of us to have a deeply rooted sense of belonging to the land and each other?

This is the inquiry in which I live. This inquiry took me on a spiritual pilgrimage to Ireland, the land of my ancestors, where I experienced the healing power available to my body, mind, and spirit at the ancient sacred sites. This inquiry led to my Celtic Shaman training, where I learned how easy it is to develop a relationship with the land on which we live.

If we want to experience Anima Mundi, we can start with the belief that the land we live on “is never just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences.“ (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous) After years of experimenting with this belief, I’ve concluded that nature has its own intelligence, which is aware of us and longs to partner with us.

Acknowledging the history of the land on which we live is also vital: settler Americans live on land torn from its native people, a violent loss which is held in the DNA of the land as well as the posterity of our indigenous. On my altar and in my rituals, I celebrate the Cherokee as the ancient beloved guardians of the land on which I live. And when I do a Space Clearing for myself or my clients, I always ask if any integration and clearing is needed for that primal loss.

For our ancestors, the yearly calendar wasn’t a mental construct, it was an embodied reality. The ancients were never further than a days’ walk from a sacred space like a stone circle, in which the community celebrated the solstices and equinoxes and “cross-quarter days,” the turning of the wheel of the year.

Since my Celtic Shaman training, I’ve laid out the Wheel of the Year on my land twice. The first time, on our large lot in Roswell, trees anchored the eight holy days of the wheel of the year. We recently downsized to a small cottage in the mountains, and now rocks placed just outside of our home anchor the sacred timings.

Laying out the wheel of the year creates an energetic blessing grid around your home, and allows you to interact with the land to celebrate the natural rhythms of the seasons.

  • Samhain or Halloween: Northwest
  • Winter Solstice: North
  • Imbolc or Brigid’s Day: Northeast
  • Spring Equinox: East
  • Beltane or May Day: Southeast
  • Summer Solstice: South
  • Lughnasadh or Lammas: Southwest
  • Autumn Equinox: West

You can use rocks or trees to denote the holy days, or birdhouses, flags, ribbons, crystals, whatever works for you. The important thing is your intention to deepen your relationship with the land on which you live. When we give our love and attention to our land, when we appreciate the soil and trees and birds, when we listen to its stories and attend to its needs, we also receive. Each morning when I connect to the soul of the Earth, a subtle but steady power rises, filling and fueling my body with strength and courage for the day ahead.

I promise you that if you will focus your grateful attention on the land where you live, the land will rise up to meet you. Anima Mundi will fuel and transform you, preparing you for the legacy work that only you can do in the world.

Melody LeBaron is a Space Clearing and Feng Shui practitioner who facilitates Shamanic Priestess and High Priestess circles in Atlanta and western NC. www.TransformingSpace.com

Heart-Broken Open: Grief as a Sacred Path to Renewal and Rebirth

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Endings, Begins and Transitions In Your Life

One of the most important things you will ever do in your life is to clear, heal, or transform loss and grief, old wounds, memories and trauma that lie dormant in your mind and body.

There are all kinds of sudden endings that cause us to be in transition and change, such as the death of a loved one—family, friend, colleague or beloved animal.

We can be traumatized by divorce, separation, war, betrayal, assault and or abuse.

We can find ourselves abruptly impacted by a personal loss of our home, job, environmental disaster or crisis in another city or country.

In our world today, we find ourselves confronting head-on life’s most difficult moments.

Frequently, there is lack of closure or resolution around a wound or loss that we have carried with us for years. Often, the memory or beliefs we bear keep us sad, empty, disconnected and not fully living our precious life.

I find that in our western culture we do not allow ourselves to fully grieve or to experience loss. We are told to “get over it,” “move on,” or “it has been long enough.”

We bury our pain and sorrow and we suffer privately.

Five years ago I experienced a traumatic car accident that precipitated the loss of function in my hands and arms, loss of my home, and car. During that same week my beloved cat passed away.

I was in a daze; frozen in space and time. I was overwhelmed with sadness, grief and loss. It took some time to feel that I had found my way back home to my true self.

Here are the four things I did that supported and helped me heal my mind, body and spirit:

  1. Spiritual Path: Find a spiritual path that resonates with you. Reach out and ask for support. Ask for prayer from Unity or Spiritual Living Center or any other church.
  2. Grief Guides: Find someone or several friends you can speak with daily or weekly. Go to a grief and loss support group in your city. Do not grieve by yourself.
  3. Self-care: Take care of yourself, rest, find a good massage therapist, energy healer, body-worker, and meditate daily.
  4. Grief and Loss Resource: Find a therapist if you need it and attend a good grief and loss retreat where you have a community of like-minded souls who support your healing.

I hope you have found this article helpful. Let me know.

Please check out the Grief and Loss Retreat that Melody LaBaron and I are presenting in the Fall of 2017. This is an opportunity to experience one of the most powerful ways I know to transform your stuck emotions, sadness, anger, shame and loss.

Recommend Book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals OF Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller

Grief, Transformed

Atlanta Grief and Loss Center Posted on by

Written by Melody LeBaron

If someone were to ask you “Do you believe that grief and loss are part of the human condition?” you would probably answer “Yes.”

But when it happens to you–the accident or diagnosis, the death of a loved one, the betrayal and divorce, or the loss of a job or home–that Loss feels personal. Loss often descends suddenly, suspending your momentum, demanding your resources and attention..

When faced with a loss, our first desire is to recover, to get over it, to recreate the balance and stability we had before.

But after some losses, recovery is not possible. We’ll never “get over” the loss of a limb or a child. We’ll never again be that person we were before the betrayal or diagnosis.

And maybe, we’re not meant to be.

Loss has been one of my greatest teachers. I’ve experienced betrayal and devastation during two divorces. Death has taken 10 of my closest loved ones, including my 17-year old son Logan.

After the accident that took Logan’s life, as the merciful shock/numbness wore off during that first year and the searing pain set in, I attended the Compassionate Friends support group for grieving parents. There, I learned to understand the symptoms and time-line of grief, and its power to change us–for good or ill.

At the meetings, I met parents whose grief had made them better, more compassionate people. I also met parents who had delayed or gotten stuck in their grief, who 10 or 20 years after their loss were still angry and blaming or depressed.

I learned from all of them, determined to find a way through my own grief journey, a way that allows me to honor my son’s life.

On that grief journey, I prayed to receive the support necessary and my teachers appeared:

  • A Course in Miracles teacher Carol Howe
  • My Rollins professor Dr. Barbara Carson
  • Biofeedback therapist Marylou Gantner
  • Rebirthing breath-work coach Michael Stone
  • Reiki teacher and therapist Chris Rosenthal
  • Kundalini yoga teacher Sampuran Singh Khalsa
  • Space and Personal Clearing teacher Eric Dowsett
  • Feng Shui, 9 Star Ki and Chinese Face Reading teacher Jean Haner

With their mentoring and modeling, I managed to integrate Logan’s death and create a whole new life for myself—filled with more joy than I’d ever experienced before—in which the love I share with Logan informs all my relationships

So I thought I understood the power of healthy grieving.

But in the last five years of my shamanic training, I’ve learned that there is so much more to healthy grieving than our western paradigm allows us to comprehend. In ancient times when any member of the tribe experienced a loss, that loss was believed to be a loss to the entire tribe. A loss which would need to be experienced and integrated by the entire community. A ritual was created that allowed the entire tribe to come out of denial, to stop resisting and fully feel the loss, integrating the loss into the shared history of the tribe.

In April, a dear friend and colleague Joyce Dillon and I traveled to San Francisco to participate in a shamanic grief ritual and learn how to facilitate one. During that training with Francis Weller, grief facilitators from all over the world created a “sudden community” and learned to facilitate collective and individual grief in a way that allowed each of us to access and embody more:

  • personal power and integrity
  • life-force vitality
  • compassion for ourselves and others
  • peaceful wisdom and courage

I returned home feeling younger, more vital and alive.

There is joy on the other side of sorrow, especially when our grief has been transformed into sacred medicine by a community of grievers.

About Melody LeBaron

Melody LeBaron Grief yoga teacher, International Feng Shui consultant, Shamanic teacher, and author of her upcoming book Creating Sacred Space for Death: How to Prepare Yourself and the Environment when a Loved One is Dying, based on her experience as a midwife for the deaths of 10 of her closest loved ones including her 17-year old son, mother, and sister.

Since her Space and Personal Clearing practitioner training with Australian author and teacher Eric Dowsett in 2000, Melody has worked with clients all over the world to up-level the flow of chi (life-force, opportunity) through the land they live on, the homes they live in, as well as their bodies, lives and relationships.
Melody believes that loss puts us all on a sacred path, which gives us the opportunity to transform our grief into the sacred medicine we offer the world.

 

Entering The Healing Fields: The Spiritual Work of Grief

Atlanta Grief and Loss Center Posted on by

“Grief does not necessarily come on demand. It is something that must be evoked through stories and images…to help pluck out that which causes tension, paralysis and distress. Every grief story has similar elements. This is why one story invites another.”
~Malidoma Patrice Somé~

Recently, I attended a 2-day grief intensive with Dr. Malidoma Some, an Africian Shaman of the Dagara community as part of my own personal grief work and to better learn how to work with the loss and grief of my clients and the community I live within.

During this 2-day intensive, we journeyed into and through Dagara wisdom- remembering that we are, each of us, going through a transformative process so we can live our life purpose. Through the healing interaction of ritual within community~ we opened ourselves to the release and reconciliation of those thoughts, emotions and energies- related to grieving- that have created a numbness, tension, or paralysis for us. Through this process, we allowed the life force to, once again, flow through us- unobstructed.

It was a powerful experience to be part of a community of like-minded people who were willing to open themselves to deeply grief and to be willing to hold the space for other’s to grieve. We built a container for a healing village on the land outside of Asheville into which we released our grief, sorrow and loss. We honored and grieved our ancestors that had transitioned so we could heal and release any old, unresolved issues.

This ritual was open to anyone who had experienced loss, transition or grief: from the death of loved ones; the loss of a job or friendship; deep feelings re: the state of affairs in one’s personal life, culture or planetary grief; honoring beginnings and ending within one’s stations of life: marriage, birth, divorce, illness, family situations, issues with children.

This level of grieving is unheard of in our Western world. We grieve our loss, primarily by ourselves, feeling that most people do not want to experience this process with us and that we should not burden our family and friends with our prolonged grief and personal loss.

Malidoma, says in indigenous Africa, one cannot conceive of a community that does not grieve. In his village, people cry every day. He says, “grief must be approached as a release of the tension created by separation and disconnection from someone or something that matters.”

The average person I see in my practice may be grieving the loss of a loved one years later after the original loss. I am not talking about having a memory of your beloved family member, friend or animal. I am talking about still holding on to deep, toxic emotions that lives in the tissues and cells of your body and mind and keep you stuck from moving forward to live your life.

Malidoma, says Western men in particular do not grieve fully the death/loss of others because they are told that men do not cry. Most of us have learned to tough it out and move on. To be too emotional is weakness.

He says, grief is not only expressed in tears, but in anger, rage, frustration, and sadness. Sadness and the feeling of heaviness within are symptomatic of a deep well of grief in the psychic underground.

Many people are beginning to see that there is danger in remaining stuck with rage, anger and sadness. They are the directionless vehicles of a grief that remains hidden. When these emotions are not allowed catharsis, they are left in a state of incompleteness.

To release deep emotions requires an outpouring of emotion and tears. You can not truly grieve within and remain composed without. Emotion is an outward phenomenon, and it cannot find its much –needed release if expressed only internally. Denied an outward express, grief grows stronger and organizes itself like a hurricane that can rise up and sweep us away.

It can and does become toxic in your body and manifest as illness, depression, addictions and suicide.

In Maldrone’s village, emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotion of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. At the time the feeling of loss arises there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace.

Grief takes us to the top of the hill and lets us walk back down slowly, peacefully. It helps release the person who is in sorrow and leads him or her toward acceptance of the phenomenon of death, separation and love. Malidrone Some author, Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community.