There is a grief ritual that I can heartily recommend at this time of profound distress and dread and even doom. But also potential grace. 

I received it as a gift years ago from a shaman friend when I was going through a profound grief experience. Remember that grief has three layers to it: First is anger. (Just yesterday someone asked in the Comments section: “What do I do with my rage?”) This practice gives rage and anger its due in a way that does not hurt anyone.

“Grieving Woman.” Photo by x1klima on Flickr.

The second—and deeper—layer of grief is sorrow. This practice empties the soul and takes you there also.

And the third layer of grief is letting go and moving on. 

Here is the practice. Get a hand drum and beat it daily for fifteen minutes while letting whatever sounds want to come out from your third chakra, your gut, which is where we keep our grief and anger and also where compassion begins. Do not edit these sounds. 

The genius in this is that you can beat the drum as hard as you want and you are hurting no one. You are “riding the horse (the drum’s hide) into the land of grief.”

 

Shamanic drumming, Spain. Photo by Viktor Vito Tomić on Unsplash

Once when I was employing this practice, I ended up in a circle of Native American women who were grieving. I said to them, “you have more to grieve about than I do” and one spoke up and said to me, “if your heart is broken, stay. You only have one heart.”

This taught me two things: 
1) Grieving is not a competition. It is not about “mirror, mirror on the wall, who is suffering the most of all.” 
2) Grieving is utterly and universally human. It is one of the dimensions of our common humanity. We need to honor it.

This practice works. It is wise. And ancient. Fifteen minutes a day. You will know when your grieving time is enough so that you can move beyond. 

Good action follows good grieving. Go to work to do what you can to interfere with the forces of fascism and defenders and disseminators of fascism in the media and other places of power in our time and culture.

I also recommend art as meditation to get your anger out and to grieve. Dance, paint, do clay, garden, sing, do breath work, do poetry. All this is prayer, a radical response to life. All of it honors your deepest truth and deepest feelings which must be acknowledged in order to prepare you to go into the deep work of interfering and serving others.

Recently, this wonderful poem came my way written by Leon Wieseltier, from his book Kaddish, scanned by Meg Wheatley to read as a poem. It speaks to the practice of Letting Go that Meister Eckhart is so fond of advising, the Via Negativa. He tells us, “we sink eternally from letting go to letting go into the One.”

“Kaddish,” an ancient Aramaic prayer proclaiming the greatness of God even in the midst of loss. Sung by the late Israeli singer/songwriter Ofra Haza.

 

Sink, So As To Rise

There are circumstances that must shatter you; 
And if you are not shattered, then you have not understood your circumstances.
In such circumstances, it is a failure for your heart not to break. 
And it is pointless to put up a fight, for a fight will blind you to the opportunity that has been presented by your misfortune. 
Do you wish to persevere pridefully in the old life? 
Of course you do: the old life was a good life. 
But it is no longer available to you. It has been carried away, irreversibly. 
So there is only one thing to be done. 
Transformation must be met with transformation. 
Where there was the old life, let there be the new life. 
Do not persevere. 
Dignify the shock. 
Sink, so as to rise. 

 

Visit Matthew Fox’s Website Here

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See Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest, pp. 128f., 369-371.

And Fox, “Path Two: Letting Go and Letting Be,” in Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, pp. 166-292.

And Fox, “Path II: Letting Go and Letting Be, Via Negativa,” in Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-64.

And Fox, Prayer: A Radical Response to Life.

Banner Image: “Praying Hands.” Photo by WSilver on Flickr.