As long as the complex remains outside of awareness, we will find ourselves acting out of compulsion, reacting to scenes in our life with the same consciousness that was traumatized in the first place. What we seek is the ability to encounter life openly, freely and with soul. We cannot control what comes to us, what moods arise, what circumstances befall us. What we can do is work to maintain our adult presence, keeping it anchored and firmly rooted. This enables us to meet our life with compassion and to receive our suffering without judgments. This is a core piece in our apprenticeship with sorrow.” Paradigm shift means creating uplifting alternatives to capitalism and the consumer culture in every way possible. Those individuals and groups who are leading the charge are called upon to share what they are learning. This is not a time to be shy.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Penguin Random House

Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with psychotherapist, writer, & soul activist Francis Weller, talking about the saturation of sorrow we’re faced with in these times - & how we might trust, befriend, & accompany our grief with slow encounters, to return with medicine for our community, as we more wholly & fully renter LIFE.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.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sac…

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author of Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypseand Collapsing Consciously . One of Jung’s discoveries was that at the heart of every complex is a jewel of great price. When the complex was formed and splintered off from consciousness, it took a piece of something precious along with it to keep it safe.”

This book is for you if you're interested in "soul activism" and changing habits and beliefs around numbing, avoiding, or burying pain and grief so that you might heal, grow, and live a richer, fuller, and truer life. I think that this book spent more time trying to convince people that grief work is important (which I already believe and therefore did not need a book to convince me of) and on nebulous arguments about why it is good for the soul that, even though I agree, I wasn’t able to relate to, than on useful pedagogy for how to approach it. Francis Weller is the ultimate grief sage of our time. The Wild Edge of Sorrow marries uncommon compassion with clear-eyed discernment in its invitation to the reader to become a soul activist in a soul-devouring culture. It is a comprehensive manual for conscious grieving and opening to the unprecedented joy and passion that results from embracing our sorrow." - Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author of Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypseand Collapsing Consciously .

The Wild Edge of Sorrow - WisdomBridge The Wild Edge of Sorrow - WisdomBridge

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The warmth of Weller’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.” While we have much to learn from indigenous cultures about forms of rituals and how ritual works, we cannot simply adopt their rituals and settle them neatly onto our psyches. It is important that we listen deeply, once again, to the dreaming earth and craft rituals that are indigenous to us, that reflect our unique patterns of wounding and disconnection from the land. These rituals will have the potency to mend what has been torn, heal what has been neglected. This is one way that we may return to the land and offer our deepest amends to those we have harmed.”

The Wild Edge of Sorrow) Francis Weller Quotes (Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow)

The basic premise and basic assertion that grief is important and necessary to human and planetary health and well-being is one that I agree with wholeheartedly and I was hoping I might find more tools to engage with the healing and transformational experience of grief both individually and collectively. We will, in truth, spend many of our hours alone with our grief. In the cover of our solitude, we encounter another layer in our apprenticeship with sorrow. Here we are asked to hold an extended vigil with loss in the well of silence, slowly ripening our sorrow into something dense and gifting to the world. Our ability to drop into this interior world and do the difficult work of metabolizing sorrow is dependent on the community that surrounds us. Even when we are alone, it is necessary to feel the tethers of concern and kindness holding us as we step off into the unknown and encounter the wild edge of sorrow.” Much of our grief comes from having to crouch and live hidden from the gaze of others, and in that posture we confirm our exile. I hear these outcast brothers and sisters every day in my practice. Their numbers are many, and their grief encompasses every aspect of human life. For some, these outcast pieces are connected to their sexuality and bodies; for others, it is their anger or sadness—or their joy and exuberance—that has been banished. For many, it is their needs that were ignored. These outcast portions of soul do not quietly languish at the edges of our awareness; they appear as addictions, depression, or anxiety, calling for our attention. They appear in our dreams as waifs and orphans, in images of ghettos and prison cells. One man, struggling with alcoholism, had a dream that he was walking into a bar, oblivious to a beautiful woman standing there. As he entered, she shouted, “Hey, when are you going to pay attention to me?” Here was his soul calling to him, demanding that he turn and attend to his neglected life.”Francis Weller's lyrical and moving book offers us a way to remember and embrace these practices and, by so doing, renew our lives and restore the soul of the world. The Wild Edge of Sorrow reads like poetry and isboth a prayer and an invitation: a prayer of soul healing and an invitation tothe mystery of becoming fully human. May it find its way to those who need it(most of us).”- Larry Robinson, poet, former mayor Sebastopol, CA. I also appreciate Weller’s focus on grief rituals and practices. This gives his book a practical angle that goes beyond merely trying to “think” or “feel” a certain way about grief. There’s plenty of helpful suggestions about what we can “do” about it as well, but not in the diminishing sense of “solving” or “getting rid” of our grief. Weller is drawing on thirty years of experience in the therapy room, concisely summarizing Jung and Freud, relaying many stories that arise from clients. But he also peppers us with quotes from poets like Rilke and Rumi, Mary Oliver and David Whyte. The icing on the cake is the way he draws on indigenous wisdom and soul-tenders like Pema Chodron and John O’Donohue. Ritual is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again. It has the strength and elasticity to contain what we cannot contain on our own, what we cannot face in solitude.”