In addition to his practice, Weller is a staff member at the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, which supports cancer patients who have a life-threatening diagnosis. In 2002 he founded WisdomBridge, which seeks to combine the wisdom of traditional cultures with insights from Western spiritual, poetic, and psychological perspectives. He leads rituals designed to help participants release their grief through writing, singing, and movement. For the last seventeen years he has led the year-long Men of Spirit initiation program through WisdomBridge. Weller has also taught at Sonoma State University, the Sophia Center in Oakland, California, and the Minnesota Men’s Conference. In The Wild Edge of SorrowFrancisWeller offers his readers a breath-taking and dramatic journey of inner discovery into personal pain resolution,planetary healing, and soul development. It is an essential publication—one that offers precious guidance and insight for those who are strong enough,as well as mature enough, to probe and challenge the darkness.” Think about how much energy we expend trying to deny and avoid these parts of ourselves. What if all that energy were available to us again? We would laugh more. We’d know more joy. Life is asking us to meet it on its terms, not ours. We try to control every minute detail, but life is too rambunctious, too wild. We simply can’t avoid the losses, wounds, and failures that come into our lives. What we can do is bring compassion to what arrives at our door and meet it with kindness and affection. We can become a good host. We register in our psyches, consciously or not, the fact of our shared sorrows. Learning to welcome, hold, and metabolize these sorrows is the work of a lifetime and the focus of this book.” Weller: We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not b

Books - Francis Weller Books - Francis Weller

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” My daily practice is to wake and immediately bring my attention to this thought: “I am one day closer to my death. So how will I live this day? How will I greet those I meet? How will I bring soul to each moment? I do not want to waste this day.” In traditional cultures people were often given at least a year to digest a major loss. In ancient Scandinavia it was common to spend a prolonged period “living in the ashes.” Not much was expected of you while you did the essential work of transforming sorrow into something of value to the community. The Jewish tradition observes a year of mourning filled with observances and rituals to help the grieving stay connected to their sorrow and not let it drift away. Most people today might get a week of bereavement leave, at best, and then everything should be fine. The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them.

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This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.” Resilience is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities. The warmth of Francis’s voice and his beautiful language, will speak directly to your soul, in a way your soul has longed to feel embraced. His words will open your heart to receive your own most tender and vulnerable feelings as a gift to be cherished as they may bring forth a new depth of connection to the soul of the world." - Dr. Risa Kaparo, author of Awakening Somatic Intelligence Many of the great myths begin in a time such as this. The land has become barren, the king, corrupted, the ways of peace, lost. It is in these conditions, that a ripeness arises for radical change. It is a call to courage (from the French for full heart) and humility. Every one of us will be affected by the changes wrought by this difficult visitation. It is time to become immense.

Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun The Geography Of Sorrow | By Tim McKee | Issue 478 | The Sun

Silence and solitude allow us to move beyond thought and into our embodied experience. Grief is felt, sensed in the viscera of our bellies, the inner walls of our chests, the curve of our shoulders, the heaviness in our thighs. Grief is registered in our sinews and muscles. It feels laboured, as though a great weight has settled on our chest or a heaviness has entered our bones. We know grief by its felt experience; it is tangible. It is here, in our sighing and sensing body, that we encounter the terrain of sorrow.” Whereas our culture assumes that public grieving is somewhat childish, Francis Weller passionately asserts that “Grief is the work of mature men and women.” Moreover, it is not a private matter that we should isolate within the four walls of our home or conceal by wearing sunglasses in public. Many indigenous cultures and generations of our ancestors understood that grief is a communal event. It is, says Weller, “…an intensely interior process that can only be navigated in the presence of community.” (116) For many tribes, community grieving was a way of maintaining “soul hygiene” because the community knew that when people do not grieve, they become toxic to the rest of the community. Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it. Teacher and grief specialist Stephen Jenkinson says, “Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.”11 Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community.”No one enjoys feeling sad. We do everything in our power to evade, avoid, distract, delay, bypass, bargain with, deny, dismiss, and repress sorrow. Yet one man has the courage to ask us to consider signing up for “an apprenticeship with sorrow.” That man is psychotherapist and author, Francis Weller, in his new book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and The Sacred Work of Grief. (North Atlantic Books, 2015) This book is an instruction manual for those who understand that as the author writes, “Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.” (xviii) This collection of fifteen essays and reflections were written over the years, often in response to local or cultural experiences. They form a primer on ways to hold this wild terrain through practices rooted in soul. May they offer you some ground upon which to find solace in these unsettled times.