SOS 132: The Sacred Work of Grief: Francis Weller & Orland Bishop
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Michael Reiley: Today's episode is a live recording from The Eternal Song seven Day Premier broadcast, and you can find out more about the entire seven days and 40 plus talks on indigenous wisdom with indigenous speakers and other experts over at theeternalsong.org.
And now onto today's recording, which is called The Sacred Work of Grief, with guests Francis Weller and Orland Bishop, hosted by SAND Co-founders and directors of the Eternal Song, Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo.
Maurizio Benazzo: Welcome, we are so grateful to be gathered here with Orlando [00:01:00] Bishop, a spiritual teacher and the founder of Shade Three Foundation, whose work brings together ancestral wisdom, social healing, and sacred intention. Orlando, nice to.
A and with Francis Weller, a psychotherapist and soul activist whose work with grief and ritual as open space for thousands to feel more whole. Thank you. Thank you, Francis. Thank you Lord.
Francis Weller: Good. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure to be
Zaya Benazzo: you both go such a, or carry such a deep medicine for this time. So it's such an honor to sit with you.
Yeah. Thank you. This strange virtual space that bleeds into real life and our bodies and weaves us into this reminders that we're part of. The mystery of life that comes in so many different [00:02:00] vibrations and now it's in this vibration through the screen. I wonder, Orland, would you be open to guide us through in vocation or Francis a prayer, anything to open the space together?
Francis Weller: To you, brother.
Orland Bishop: Thank you. I'm carrying the song that was just offered and also the deep gratitude to what preceded this conversation that we are now to share to that, which is living in all of those streams of expressions, we gather ourselves in deep reverence for. What is alive in our world, in our time and the struggle to stay within the truthfulness of our [00:03:00] own integrity to that wanna invoke the will of each person who has served to make this community a living space for the ancestral work to keep evolving through our efforts and through the love that we are to share for the futures that are to come from the personal and collective sacrifices that have been made.
May this earth confirm that our life mattered in this time and made the trees, the waters, and all life flow from this moment forward actually.
Zaya Benazzo: Francis, do you have any words you want to share before I ask a question? [00:04:00]
Francis Weller: I would just echo the same sentiment of gratitude that decades ago when I began talking about grief, there were very few on the screen or in the room. So it's it's heartening to feel the robust response of people's willingness to talk about loss and sorrow and grief and love for our beloved planet and for each other.
So I'm filled with gratitude just to be here with Orland and with you. Yeah, it's good. It's good.
Zaya Benazzo: Orland, you often speak of history as an initiation process as unfolding the shapes the soul through rupture and remembrance. And Francis, this you speak I similar way in, in what, in that light, what becomes possible when we relate to [00:05:00] history, not as a chronology or as a traumatic events, but as a sacred doorway for transformation, for reshaping.
And when those and when history becomes a living not a fixed identity, but something that we become. If you it's a very radical not radical. It's a deep invitation to sit, especially in the film. We go deep into the impact of colonialism on indigenous communities around the world.
And how do we walk and feel that invitation to see history as initiation and history in that moment as well,
Orland Bishop: please, [00:06:00] Francis?
Francis Weller: There's two threads that I wanna just touch upon. One is the thread that I felt watching the film. I've seen it twice now, and what I was left with was a profound sorrow. Witnessing the tragedies, the traumas, the injuries, the wounds. But I was also simultaneously sensing the eternal song that was available for many of these cultures to reunite with those imaginal realities so that the healing would become possible.
What I felt in my body was a profound grief that people from my ancestry forgot those, forgot the song. So we're living in this time of amnesia, this time of the deep forgetting, and part of our grief is what we [00:07:00] have forgotten. So the history is evidenced, obviously, in the wounding and the damage and the profound impacts of colonization, but what we need to remember is what I call the trail on the ground that.
Even if I come from a German background, if I go deep enough into that history, I find my indigenous roots. And I may not remember the actual expressions of those practices, rituals, languages, intimacies with landscape and ancestors. It's still in my being in some way. Carl Jung talked about the unforgotten wisdom at the core of the psyche, and when we do rituals together, at the end of it, there is this odd feeling of familiarity.
Even though we've never done anything like this before. There's a recognition somehow in the psyche that this is the resonance. This is the cadence that allowed [00:08:00] our people to survive and to not only survive, but to create a rich spiritual heritage. And so part of my grief is to feel that much of that heritage has been forgotten.
We need to grieve into that over and over again. I think the reparations, the repair has to go through the threshold of sorrow and recognizing what I persistently encounter, which is the emptiness of white society, white tradition. We have emptied out, we have lost what would've allowed us to feel connected to one another, to a place to land.
And so maybe when we arrived in this country 500 years ago, we wouldn't have done the same patterns because we would've felt already a kinship to place and an invitation for a relationship. That's not what we came here with. We came here empty [00:09:00] and we responded to the cultures that were here by emptying them.
We're trying to, anyhow, and that's what colonization did. So I'll to stop there in Portland.
Orland Bishop: Yeah. Very insightful. Thank you, Francis. And thanks for the question. Zaya and Mauricio. The history in which we are situated is a bracket in a certain way of the human experience within existence, right?
So we are, we're exploring in our history, our existence with life. Prior to that search or making sense of existence, we had an experience that continued to flow from source. Source was never interrupted to the consciousness field in which the rituals that were held by humanity provided a container for the ongoing [00:10:00] evolution of reality.
For the continuation of the natural forces through human, say, witnessing of its miracles and magic. And so the human being did not have to do anything for what was happening within those spheres, right? The rituals were to actually receive more of what was coming from creation and allowing it to stay within its flow.
Human beings, as you said, forgot some very fundamental relationship to that natural reality and fell into existence as a separate reality, and this is the critical point. What happened in some part of human evolution and consciousness in which existence became a search for self. [00:11:00] Self-interests, self survival, and a certain way parameters between what was the edge of the known reality and the mysteries that continued to be true.
And so different cultures had different edges of what we call reality. And for the western mind that intellectualized the world to the degree in which everything was named based on our experience with it created more of a, for forgetting about its purpose within the larger ecology, through which memory continued to flow.
And so colonization was occurred in the very people who colonized the rest of the world by naming it or renaming it, inconsistent with its nature. Because they had forgotten [00:12:00] the rituals of belonging to their own ancestral memory and locations of culture. This intellectualization in which the mind pursued existence and not the experience of the mysteries is the result of the kind of civilization we are in and the harms that are caused by our forgetting.
And so there is a grief that has been happening in the insti institutionalized cultural memory of those who have colonized the world because what they're searching for is the sacred, but could not recognize it even in their own presence.
And to try to perfect the world to be more like how I think about it. Is actually the colonization process
because [00:13:00] thinking cannot create the reality that it's to be known what the ancients call the mysteries. And it definitely cannot think nature. Nature has to be felt, not we cannot think nature and to think in the western empiricism in consciousness is to forget.
Zaya Benazzo: I heard you speak of an inner space where only the stars can reach. We know that space when we're in the deepest lament, in the deepest undercurrents of grief, when our world was disrupted by some crisis. And Francis in words you speak of, we become alive at the [00:14:00] threshold of grief and loss and revelation.
Could you speak of that portal that grief offers and if we can, and how do we, how? I don't like questions how, but. This is the mind, right? Just to recognize it, say hi and how do we metabolize grief? And
yeah. And let it be a medicine.
Francis Weller: I would imagine the first move is to begin to examine our own mistrust of grief. And part of our fear and mistrust of sorrow is that we have been conditioned to encounter it alone. And in isolation, we can't possibly [00:15:00] open to the full spectrum of sorrows that are around us, so the heart wisely shuts down.
There's a wisdom to our own capacities, to numb, to avoid, to anesthetize. And I don't judge that at all because the conditions that we're asked to live within are fragmented and so isolated. So what I've been working with for the last many decades is to try to reanimate the original matrix within which we can begin to build faith in grief again.
That when it's held communally, when it's held in ritual space, when it's given orland, talked about the containment field. When that's present, the psyche recognizes the resonant signature is there. So this is the proper space for me to open and empty the cup of my sorrow. But without that signal frequency, it's very hard to move the sorrow.
So what happens [00:16:00] typically is that we begin to compact grief. I know people come into my practice and talk about feeling depressed, and as I'm sitting with them, it really is not depression, it's oppression. It's the weight of undigested grief, not just their own but generations of sorrow that is accumulated in the heart, in the soul, and has created this state of weightiness heaviness that we can barely move through our life.
So part of what we need is to, again, build our faith. That grief isn't here to take us hostage. It's actually one of the most evident displays of our aliveness and our love, because grief is so entangled with love and affection. We grieve because something we love has been harmed or lost, or has been dismissed or dishonored, and we grieve that.
So I think partly we begin to need to also give permission [00:17:00] to one another to go there. People often ask how do I do this? How do I begin to engage my grief? I say, invite two or three people into your home and say, tonight the topic is lost, but let's just make some agreements. We're not here to fix a damn thing.
Grief isn't a problem to be solved. It's a presence awaiting, witnessing. And when we witness grief, we warm it. There's an no chemical principle that says that the material in the vessel must be kept warm in order for it to continue to move and evolve. But when we approach our grief with coldness, it congeals and hardens and does not move.
So our first move is to bring warmth to this territory, to bring compassion, to bring kindness, to bring attention, affection. So that this place might begin to often, soften and then be allowed to move and be shared with others. Grief wants a [00:18:00] company. Our grief has always been communal. From the time human beings began to gather, grief has been shared communally, and now under the weight of individualism, colonialism, capitalism, we've been forced to carry it alone.
So I think we need to find our way back into small circles where we can touch the edges of our sorrow and make our discovery that our grief is entangled with one another's grief. But our grief is mutual. It's not my grief. I may have a particular expression of that sorrow, but we share a communal cup of grief.
We need to gather together so our cup can continue to be emptied, not just for personal benefit, so that I might love this world more ardently, so I might be able to bring love into the streets, into the faces of the young ones I meet on the [00:19:00] street. This isn't about, I guess I love what Orland said about, the kind of the what David Hinton calls the relentless industry of self.
That I'm not here just to make myself feel better when I go to a grief virtual. I'm here so my heart can be more spacious, more capable of falling in love with this world. Wow.
Orland Bishop: Yeah. Wow. And I think that's the source of my, my, my reflection would be this point of what, how do we make love more abundant?
Something has to be taken away.
From us in order for the making of love more abundant. It is not a given. We can't be given the love that we have to give to the world. It has to be self-generated. So that's the part of the self [00:20:00] that I think it's worth investing in that the area where our will has to overcome the withholding of love and what can say interest in the future where we may have to include those who have violated our civility, our humanity.
Can we create a world in which in, even if it's an imagination first, in which those people who have done harm can coexist. A different impulse of our creative effort. In most creation stories, the world is given in a way that allows us to receive everything we need. And most creation stories don't include the things that the Gods know will happen, which is the betrayal, [00:21:00] and be left alone to figure out what to do in the space where I can only give something that the gods will not give me a free creative act.
So here's the thing we give, we are given this in the film it beautiful story of this world of nature given to humanity, cultural rituals to hold it. And then a human being shows up from somewhere and take it all away. What is that? What is that reality there? How could a human being take away what the gods have given up
and if so, in most we say wisdom traditions, they start a fire and they [00:22:00] gather around that and ask what parts of the initiation were not given. And then the elders figure out how to design a way for people to forgive the betrayals of the culture, which also includes themselves. The wisdom keepers don't hold all knowing.
They hold the processes of investigating. Something that has to come into the culture as new and help to evolve the ethics of integrity and to the faithful remaking of community to include the harm that was caused as most rituals that we now have, including grief rituals. Because once can say grief is the abundant darkness that was not put into light [00:23:00] when light was given and when love was given and when nature was given, grief stayed at the back and had to come through human interaction with each other.
It's one of the archetypes that never stays. It's too abundant to stay in any form. Of attachments that we've had, and so the critical part of it, if we try to think logically that we will frame grief and we will protect ourselves by how we think about it, it's not going to happen. A betrayal will happen again and again because this reality is what allows us to begin again.
Human beings must become accustomed to beginning again. Inheritances of all kinds that becomes institutionalized or [00:24:00] even ceremonies sets us up for betrayal
because we have to remake a relationship to the sacred. It's just the way of ritual.
And we've accumulated so much grief in the interactive space of our human cultural realities that one can say it is far more, say, potentially resourceful as all the currencies that we interact with. Or, and yet we are still leaving it behind the same way the gods did. We are leaving grief behind because we think if we give it to each other, we will risk losing this inner trust.[00:25:00]
But it's something that we have to give forgive as well in order for it to move. And in our, in a film, by the time we progress through the healing process, it brings us back to the various things that Francis have mentioned, forgiveness, love, and a certain way the freedom because someone actually died and saw what their death means On the other side of love, this body is protecting us from giving and forgiving.
And the feeling is that if I forgive our love, I'm betraying my body. And so I would, there's a tendency to withhold it, but the body has to be healed to be a creator in our physical world. I. To be a healer in our [00:26:00] physical world, to be a giver in our physical world, the body has to keep evolving the power of creation. some.
Zaya Benazzo: Francis, you speak I heard you speak often that we are entering the long, dark, these times are calling us, or it's another cycle of the long dark. It's not the first one. And what does that mean? How, and you also say this is not a time for hope. It's a time to practice and develop faith.
Francis Weller: I might amend that a little bit, but [00:27:00] I'm not opposed to hope
Zaya Benazzo: entering the long
Francis Weller: dark and the long dark.
What I mean by the long dark is that we have been on an ascension run for about three or 4,000 years, trying to rise above to control, to dominate, to master the planet and each other to some degree. My sense is that the soul of the world, the Anna Mundi, is now taking us down.
We are headed down for, I think for a prolonged period of descent. We are heading downward into the underworld. Into the shadowed lands. This is not a time of confidence and rising. It's not a time of ease and growth. We are in the Via negativa. We're in the decline. We're in the what? The negredo, what the alchemist would call the negredo, the blackening, the darkening.
And this is a holy time when things [00:28:00] decay, break down, break apart. And we need to see many things that have been institutionalized. Break down systemic racism must break down. Economic disparities must break down gender judgments and denials must break down. So we're in a period where we're watching things break apart and collapse, and it can terrify us.
The long dark is just that it's long. I'm talking at least two generations. If we make it to the far side of that time, we might see. A emergent sense of living culture again, but it's gonna be a rough ride. It's gonna be difficult. But this is the times that we've been brought into, and I think this is the time when we are being asked to ripen as mature human beings.
'cause I love what Orlan was saying, but part of what is required [00:29:00] of us to respond this way is that we emerge into our adult self trauma and uncertainty can un, can activate very young parts of us. And we can go into survival modes, we can contract, we can deny, we can push you away. We can withhold, we can strategize.
But we are at a threshold time in our collective life where we're being asked through initiation to emerge into our adult self to show up for what is being asked of us at this time. This is not gonna be an easy time. I wrote the preface for a book called Choosing Earth a couple years ago by Dwayne Elgin.
And Dwayne has been working with understanding global dynamics and patterns for many decades. And so he wrote this book looking at the next five decades, and [00:30:00] from what he can gather from all of the research, what those five decades might consist of probabilities, and they were hard. The level of loss, death, and suffering is gonna be strong.
And so I had to write something about for this, what do you say when you're looking at that kind of forecast? And what I came to was that yes, we are, we have entered the long dark. This is a rough initiation. Most initiations when they're held traditionally are what I would call a sustained encounter or a contained encounter with death.
A rough initiation is an uncontained encounter with death, though we don't have the elders, typically, we don't have the rituals, we don't have the community, we don't have the ground that's been sanctified and made sacramental. Most of us don't have access to that, but nature itself [00:31:00] is initiating us.
We've been taking into the exact conditions of initiation where the ordinary world is falling apart, where our sense of identity is being challenged and where the recognition is emerging, that we can never go back to the world. That was, we are being pushed to the edge of transformation. Now, the helicopter going overhead.
I hope that's not too distracting. Anyway long, dark. This is the time where it, yeah, I said about hope. What I meant by that was the naive hope that we could bypass the trouble. But genuine activated hope means I trust that what is happening has intentionality behind it. This has to happen and we can either participate in it or we could be rolled by it.
So that's the invitation I think, for each of us to ripen up enough to say, how do I respond? [00:32:00] I remember giving a talk up in Canada some years ago, and towards the end of it, a young woman asked, stood up and asked the question, so what's the answer? How do we fix this? I said, there is no answer, but there's a response.
And every one of us must decipher our response to the conditions that we're in. 'cause every one of us carries medicine. Every one of us is necessary for these times, and there's not one of you on the screen that is superfluous. We need you, we need your medicine, we need your gifts. But that means being in the adult 'cause only the adult can deliver the blessing.
The child will always be in a position of contraction and potential fear. So I hope I responded to the long, dark adequately there for you.
Zaya Benazzo: And I wonder, Orland, would you use as well do you see that we are [00:33:00] entering a wrong or long dark we've entered already? Is that a way you would describe these times as well?
Orland Bishop: Yeah I would, I agree that the age of I believe that something will save me has ended. The idea that our belief is rooted in an external hope for something to the internal hope that was just articulated, the shadow is the hope.
If we hope to understand our shadow, we'll actually gain more wisdom about what has been accumulating in the collective and personal unconscious of our lives. The human being has been receiving something that nature cannot give us, which is our shadow, but nature doesn't [00:34:00] give us our shadow. Human interaction gives us our shadow.
Our, whether we make our motives transparent or not, that's what gives us our shadow. We've accumulated a lot of self-doubt. We've accumulated a lot of wounds, personal family, societal wounds. This is the inner darkness that will become the resource for a new civilization, a new kind of enlivened and enlightened humanity because we have to agree on sharing something that is becoming far more abundant because it will never end in the way that we think it will end that some other being will save us from ourselves.
We are creating ourselves for the first time we are receiving something from each other that is not given by the divine [00:35:00] ones.
The act of will is really the critical part. Of our humanity now to say, if we are to end to into a shared reality, how transparent do we have to be? How revealing of my intention do I have to be and am I choosing abundance at a level in which I will include you? The challenge of our world is the fact that we are now in the tension between scarcity and abundance, and it's hard getting harder for us to choose abundance because we don't want to include other people in it,
right? This is the darkness, this, it is not even darkness. It's a limitation of our, our will effort to understand that the personal unconscious is [00:36:00] now becoming the collective unconscious we'll have in ourselves. All the trauma, which is a good thing in the end because it is actually a substance that requires to enter into our life to be transformed.
It'll not stop. There will be no psychology for trauma, to the degree in which I can predict behavior and preferences of my own survival. We've already crossed the space in which we are in a shared reality. What we are sharing the shadow first
and means that if the shadow is to become enlivened with purpose, we have to understand the nature of abundance, which is what is beginning, what does beginning mean for us? If we [00:37:00] think the body is only inherited, only a kind of inherited space, we are not understanding our bodies. The body does not only have genetics in it, it have interests in it, and the interest is in diversity of feelings, diversity of relationships.
That is our ecology in consciousness. Just like nature has its ecology with all beings that makes nature. We have to do it with the unconsciousness of our shared lives and develop a discipline of integrating it into consciousness. Bringing our unconscious. Unconscious. So the this is the inner know effort of equating our will in relationship to the crisis in our world.
Because we have to create a governance model [00:38:00] in which abundance is true. The way nature speaks it, the things that we're talking about is not nature. We're talking about our human will in which we are really not willing to be human at a level in which we can express creation in its fullest.
And still, it still is a mystery. I don't know how we'll do that unless we sit down and ask, what do you need from me to come into your fullness of being, I. Because I can figure out what to give of myself rather than trying to take my will unconsciously through manipulations and all kinds of things, putting me to sleep so that you can have my will.
That is not the age of humanity. Consent is the age of human. You have to ask how can [00:39:00] your will change my life? It's a new ritual. We never have done that.
Zaya Benazzo: , I just about the abundance or land, that's one thing we heard again and again, the indigenous people, the way they understood abundance and wealth was when was shared, wealth is only wealth when can be shared.
Those who can share are the most abundant one, the most rich. And we have forgotten and replaced that story with the well that cannot be shared. I, yeah. In the film we speak about ancestors and ancestral wisdom and what we are feeling is like there is that collective longing for all of us to remember the ancestral ways to connect with the ancestors.
Could. Could [00:40:00] you speak about what does that mean? Would that how do we listen to those who have come before us and to those who are ahead of us that are also ancestors? And yesterday we heard from our Maori friends, the ancestor can be also the wind. And it's not only humans. It's not only the human.
It could be also a dream could be an ancestor, but I wonder how you two could speak of that. Yeah.
Francis Weller: I'll just respond briefly. First of all, the challenge frequently is that, particularly in modernity, our focus is on progress. It's always looking towards. The next thing in a sense, we have abandoned the ancestors. Remember one of Young's, Carl [00:41:00] Young's works when he did, when he was working on the Red Book.
He would spend most every night down in his basement writing. And basically what he began to discover what he was writing were the laments of the dead. That what the dead want was to be remembered. What the dead wanted was to not be abandoned and forgotten, but to see and to be included in our day-to-day lives because they certainly are part of this flesh, part of this body.
Part of my imagination, part of how I dream. But for many folks, what I've encountered in my work is that the relationship to the ancestors has been so harsh and difficult that they want to turn away from that. And so one of the things that I, you just mentioned, what I totally agree with is that the ancestors are everything that has gone before us.
Everything that has gone before us as an [00:42:00] ancestor. For me, my so lineage is more potent than my blood lineage. So my soul lineage is, James Hillman and Carl Young, and on down into indigenous mind. That's my ancestral line, and I count on them every day for support, for encouragement, for insight, for dreaming.
The fantasy of individualism oftentimes neglects and negates our relationship to the invisible world. So part of our work, again now in this time is to open up to that the filaments of connection to the invisible world. To the unseen. To the ancestral. I have felt more support from my ancestors now than I ever have in my life, and I'm finding that's they're inval, they're invested in what we're doing when we're gathering for grief ritual, which you can feel [00:43:00] their presence in the room, that we're not just grieving our own grief.
Like I said before, we're grieving generations and generations of un wept tears and the healing. Then I think what I also felt in the film was the healing is going in all directions, past, present, future, above. Below the healing is touching all of that, and as my friend Malidoma Somé would say, we're here to un kink the hose so that the flow from the ancestors into our life is free flowing and not encumbered by past traumas and wounds.
But we're here to help. Amen. Those through our grieving, through our ritual acts, through our acts of repair. We're here to honor the ancestors by living fully in this moment.
Orland Bishop: Yeah, Francis, thank you so much for the inspiration of that. Yeah.
Francis Weller: It's such a pleasure to be with [00:44:00] you, Orland.
I, as we were saying before we got on the talk we've walked very close together apart, and now we can feel a little more of our actual kinship. So thank you. Yes, you're welcome. And thank you Zaya and Maurizio. Thank you beautifully, and thank all of you for being here today. Again, this is all the work that we are being called to do, and I'm delighted to be part of it.
Thank you. Thank you
Zaya Benazzo: for sharing your medicine, Francis. Thank you.
I can't stop myself to feel like the, you are opening a portal and that portal is scaring us to the next conversation That there's no doubt here it's wide open and yes.
To listen to the ancestors. This is it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Orland Bishop: Thank. [00:45:00]
