Maurizio Benazzo: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever in the world you are is so beautiful such a joy. Thank you. My name is Maurizio Benazzo.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya Benazzo and we are speaking today from the unceded ancestral territory of Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people. We want to acknowledge all ancestors that have brought us here today. Seen and seen Born and Born, and made this conversation serve the medicine that we need to carry forward for those that are not born yet.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah, when we enter those dark, [00:01:00] we seem to be heading for. So thank you for being here and thank you Francis for accepting our invitation to share this time with us. I wanna read a brief bio about yourself just to frame it.
Zaya Benazzo: Welcome Francis. So Francis.
Maurizio Benazzo: Francis Weller. NFT is a psychotherapist, writer and sole activist whose work with psychology, ritual, and Indigenous Wisdom is the author of.
The wild edge of Sorrow and founder of Wisdom Bridge, which brings grief, ritual, and depth healing to community worldwide. And then there is your latest book in the Absence of the Ordinary, which now you can read Backward Soul Work for Time of Uncertainty. It's an amazing book you see already a wor out.
It is. So thank you Francis, for everything you do and represent and thank you for being here with us an honor. Thank you.
Francis Weller: An absolute pleasure to be here [00:02:00] with the two of you and all of you.
Zaya Benazzo: Is there any way, Francis, you feel inspired today to open the space for us for this conversation to invite, invoke bring,
Francis Weller: um, I'm just sitting with right now, I can't see across the valley 'cause the fog is so thick here and I imagine it is by you too. Maurizio and Zaya. Beautiful. So if I'm feeling enveloped and held within this blanket of cool, damp weather and, uh, just enjoying this moment of dropping into conversation and soul and connection and belonging here.
And so I'm just opening with gratitude and tenderness. My heart is tender as some of you know, but I'm glad to be in this gathering. Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: Mm-hmm. Thank [00:03:00] you. There's something so beautiful about the fog and the, the winter and the slowing down. And my soul, when you said like, this is my last week of offerings, and, and I felt like the instantaneous longing of like, oh yeah.
And I could feel many of us long for that old rhythm of slower pace of stillness, of rhythm, of stillness, of, of, and in your book you speak a lot about the frenzy, the, the time we've created, the modernity time that is constantly, we are running, chasing never enough, never complete, never, uh, making more producing, growing.
And somehow I feel your work and your presence is, and it's inviting us to remember that we belong to a very different [00:04:00] time.
Francis Weller: Yeah. I think when we attempt to attune to soul rhythm, we sense it's much, much slower. And the soul was shaped in syncopation with the rhythms of nature. So there wasn't a whole lot of frenzy.
There wasn't, um, uh, kind of a mechanical pressure to produce, to do, to achieve, to earn. All the things that modernity has kind of set in place as the foundations for how we behave and how we engage our lives are kind of contrary to soul in many ways. I remember James Hillman once saying that depression was the soul's refusal to live at a manic pace.
Wow. And we have an epidemic of depression in this country, uh, and is that a symptom? Is that the soul's refusal to try to live up to that mania that says, I'm not gonna take another step forward. I'm not gonna race down. I'm gonna stop you right now and bring you down into [00:05:00] that silence, into the emptiness, into the loneliness, into the shame, into the grief.
That's where, where our souls are actually shaped is in the depths. It's like watching someone water ski. It's, it's beautiful. You know, speed is great for staying on the surface of things, but if you wanna drop, you have to slow down. You have to come into a much different rhythm. It's what my mentor, Clark Barry called geologic speed.
I mean, I'm, should I repeat that story? I don't know if many of you know this story, but I was licensed very young. I was, I was licensed at 27 years old. Um, and I knew enough to not think I knew anything about sitting with people. So I contacted the Young Institute in San Francisco and got names of many analysts in the area.
And I called around and when I talked to this one man, I said, this is the man I want to sit with. And I arrived at [00:06:00] Clark's door, this eager young, uh, naive pup. And we sat down and the very first thing he did was reached over and patted this big rock he had by his chair. He said, this is my clock. I operate a geologic speed.
And if you're gonna work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm. 'cause this is how the soul moves. Then he pointed into his clock. He said, it hates this. Now I tell, I have told every single person I've worked with over the last 40 plus years that story, because underneath so much that that urgency, when people arrive in a therapy office or a workshop setting, there's this urgency to change.
And that urgency is often based on self-hatred.
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo: Mm-hmm. I'm not
Francis Weller: enough. I'm not good enough. I'm wrong. I'm defective, I'm flawed. Help me fix myself. So I might be tolerated in the community. Know there's so much anxiety coming in the door around not being enough. [00:07:00] And so there's that frenzy, there's that hurry, there's that, you know, addiction to speed, and the soul says, no, we want you to slow down enough to listen.
To hear what's inside the cries of the soul, the grief, the depression, the anxiety, the addiction. There's intelligibility in those symptoms. Hillman also said that the soul speaks primarily through affliction. And we can take that personally. We can also take that collectively. Mm-hmm. We're looking at collective depression, racism, economic disparities, uh, gender injustices.
All those are symptoms that speak to the soul of the world. They're calling our attention, but we can't register the impact of those symptoms moving at 300 miles an hour. We have to slow down and we're being slowed down. COVID was an attempt and COVID slowed us down for a moment. We still [00:08:00] wanted to get back up on the horse and race away.
My friend Melo, so many once said, you have to be very careful what you associate with. 'cause over time you'll begin to match its rhythm and think about how much time we spend on these machines. You know, the phones, the computers, the. Everything. And we are beginning to match its rhythm. We're speaking clipped language.
Uh, we're, we're not really able to sensually drop into body and to connection and touch. So things have become abstracted and faster. And that's what I think the soul is protesting against saying Uhuh, no, I'm not gonna allow that to persist. Is that making sense?
Zaya Benazzo: Totally. And more superficial, like as we swipe, as this, we speed up through, through moment, through everything every it's,
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo: no, that's enough I [00:09:00] think.
Zaya Benazzo: Let's continue a little bit more with the office, with the therapist's office, because many of us at this time of exhaustion, and of course we reach out for support in the, through the western private psychotherapeutic approach where you're in an office with a therapist with a clock that counts every minute.
And the so is definitely not dropping deeper because it's not necessarily safe in which way the way we have accepted to heal you might be actually part of the, of what's hurting us today. The healing in the privacy of four woes with a human being, we don't necessarily even know or connect on a soul work.
How that way of healing might be hurting us today as well.
Francis Weller: It's definitely very limited in its range. At the same time, I have deep [00:10:00] appreciation for the fact that the primary wound, again, I'm speaking primarily about White Western society, the primary wound here is one of belonging. So there's great anxiety about approval, about, uh, acceptance, about recognition.
So therapy actually becomes this microcosmic containment field for someone to learn to tolerate contact, you know, so just to be able to be willing to risk being seen and known in a deep way and be beyond the strategies, beyond the accommodations and the, um, strategic moves we make to somehow prove ourselves worthy.
So therapy has that value. I tell everybody I've worked with is that this is a good place to learn how to tolerate contact, but the holding space is much too small for your soul. Ultimately, you'll need a much larger holding space to do the work of return, of repair, [00:11:00] of healing. 'cause healing has always been a communal process throughout our long history.
As a species, it's never been private. So the privatization of healing into therapy offices and things is part of the symptom, but it can also be a place where we begin the process of return. And anybody who's worked with me knows that that larger container becomes the place where that work that we're doing in the room is amplified and actually given a chance to be brought into relationship with community, and that's where the healing actually occurs.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. And also the way we have accepted this is our big learning with the films and traveling and asking indigenous communities how they understand wound and how they understand trauma. Again, in the West, we have privatized also the trauma. It's my trauma, it's my wound. And [00:12:00] it's How would you say the soul sees the wound and, um, what are other ways to see the places?
I think in your book you said the wound or the trauma is where the seed of initiation is.
Francis Weller: Seed. That's exactly where I was gonna go with that. Z uh, the, uh, some years ago I, I did a lecture series called Living a Soulful Life and Why It Matters. And the second talk was on wounds because that's how critical wounds are to the soul.
Soul sees the wounds as really a central part of our ripening as a human being, not as commentary on our worthlessness or defectiveness, but as necessary material. So I was going, getting ready for that talk and, uh, thought I had it all set, but I was awakened at five in the morning by a phrase going through my mind is that the, our wounds carry the un ripened seeds of initiation.
So that's an [00:13:00] entirely different way to imagine our wounds, that they're actually necessary to break us open, to drop us into a place where we're susceptible to the dreaming of the soul and not addicted to perfectionism, which is one of the symptoms that we also display as a rejection of the wound. Our wounds have become so associated with shame.
Um, rather than the inevitability
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo: of
Francis Weller: being alive, right? To be alive, you're going to no wounds. You're gonna know suffering. One of the problems is that our, our psychology, again, is so privatized and individualized and, and it lacks a mythic foundation. So people come to therapy feeling so exceptional because of this wound.
I care. I know I did. I mean, my wound was shame, and I thought, I'm the only person on the planet who feels this way. Well, it turns out I'm not. But there are at least two or three others [00:14:00] of you who sometimes feel shame, so when we can begin to approach it, mythologically, the myth says that the wound is archetypal the wound is the way that the soul begins to draw our attention into the depths.
Because what, what does a wound do? It drops us. It takes us downward. Hellman would call them salt licks. You go to the wound and you spend time in a sense, it adds flavor to your life. What I began with around my shame was such contempt and hatred for myself that until I was able to turn and face that shame with compassion, it became my medicine.
I was given a name by the people of DO and the Dogra people in West Africa. Um, the name translates. Um, he who sat straight the bone. So that's what the medicine that came out of. My shame was, was I can go into those very twisted places [00:15:00] with people and find ways to reset the bone so they might actually be able to move back into community, back into their lives, back into their creativity.
So the wound is absolutely essential. If we can get out of the commentary about the wound. Right. Like as the only way I'm allowed to be, uh, to be permitted into the communities if I'm perfectly fixed, you know, if I'm whole, if I'm integrated, I mean, all this language sets up a feeling that I'm never gonna get there, you know?
And to the soul, it doesn't give a shit if you're wounded or not. It's, that's just the material in the vessel. And the soul will work with whatever material we have, and it will cook that into something meaningful, something nutrient dense for the community long term.
Zaya Benazzo: And he's the how grace, how do we begin to connect to our wounds in a different way [00:16:00] or to.
For many of us that are written by shame, by anxiety, by guilt, you also speak beautifully of your book of walking with reverence. How can one bring reverence to shame? Or like, when we are, we are ripped apart by, by anxiety or shame. How is reverence what we want to invite or how do we respond?
Francis Weller: It's hard to generate something privately, internally all the time.
So for me, the, the, the pivotal thing was confession. Not to a priest, but to my friends. I risked telling them how I felt inside. I remember the date, I remember the place, I remember the, the setting. I was at a conference many, many years ago and the late eighties, uh. Three men sat [00:17:00] down at a picnic table, and I been watching them for years to see if that was a safe place to do it.
And I sat down with them and said, I have something I wanna tell you. And I talked about my self-hatred. I talked about the shame because on the surface I was, in graduate school I was called the golden boy. So I, I knew how to polish myself. I knew how to present myself well, but internally it was cold and damp and lonely.
And so the first move was to actually see myself as worthy enough to ask for help. You know, I couldn't get out of this mess alone. I couldn't get out of this shame alone. I tried, I mean, I did many years of therapy. I, I tried to, get rid of it, fix it, improve it, but I never tried to welcome it.
And the way they welcomed me. The way they said, oh, us [00:18:00] too. We also feel that
way.
You know, it kind of broke the illusion of my exceptionalism and their kindness and their warmth was the first entry point into my own, turning towards my own shame with anything other than contempt. It was finally welcomed.
I finally said, I see you brother and I see how much pain you're in. And that was the second part, was that I was able to finally get some separation from the shame. Carl Jung said that we can't heal what we can't separate from, and as long as I was identified with that shamed boy, he was the one who was leading my life.
It wasn't the adult man, it was this wounded boy, and until I could get that separation and begin to see him. And what he was caring for me and my ability to begin to actually care about him [00:19:00] and to grieve for him, and to begin to take the shame off his back and all of the hurt and the loneliness and the rage and all of those feelings that were tangled up in his body to take that off of him and for me as an adult man now to process those feelings, the feelings he could not process the feelings that he was dwarfed by and swamped by.
Uh, I was finally able to, to process those and freed him up to just be alive.
Maurizio Benazzo: [00:20:00] Can you find, you are my little child. It's screaming silence inside me here in your word. You have no idea how deeply you're touching me, I feel. But there is one word that doesn't click, which is shame. Everything else clicks.
But the word shame, I don't feel the little boy shame, but I feel everything else from the anger, the despair, the loneliness, everything is there and I see him. Yeah. I feel it is the word shame. Can you add something to that is not shame, so I can complete with him.
Francis Weller: You just did, you just named the things he's carrying.
The rage, the anger, the loneliness, you know, the despair. That's the [00:21:00] content that, that boy's carrying for you. Yeah. It may not be shame. Okay. Not everyone you know has the same Okay. You know, repository of wounds, they differ. They're, they're, they're different. But the process is similar about being able to separate and find some ground for the adult to actually take the lead in the, in our life, rather than the ways that the child part of us compromises and, and is focused bunch more just on surviving.
Yeah. Not living, so when that part is there and it's always bumping to the front of the bus, I, I feel frustrated. I mean, I spent years trying to change and I couldn't because I never got the separation. So whenever circumstances arose in my life that activated him, he was default. He was the one who took over In that moment, I'd go from whatever, 40 years old to fo four years old, or 60 to six, you know, instantly I'd be [00:22:00] tossed off my position as the adult and now I can feel him there.
And I have a lot of care for that boy, but I don't let him drive 'cause he is not very good. He can't see over the, it's seven. He couldn't drive. Not a good arrangement.
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. Well, thank you. Very
Zaya Benazzo: important. And the shame and the, the guilt, they were companions with the little one and they helped survive the, they help us survive.
They were actually probably quite intelligent for the time being.
Francis Weller: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I, I used to be so angry at this part of me 'cause it would frustrate me because I didn't know what, what to do. Well. Well the skillset for that part is about this big, perfection, withdrawal you know, rage.
There's different strategies, but they're very limited. [00:23:00] But the adult has. This enormous range of capacities. And so I couldn't blame him any longer. It was actually my responsibility to show up and provide a containment field that would allow him to begin to feel safe again.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. I couldn't help, but it keeps coming that metaphor about our collective children being outcast maybe, and they're running the world like we, I think collectively we are waking up that there's no actually adults running the world.
There is a lot of fragmented psyches that have really top over our world, and these are parts of us of course. But how would you like the long dark that you speak of a, a time of anxiety, of disconnect of, pulling apart of everything we thought we knew, [00:24:00] uncertainty, how the outcast parts of our psyche have taken over and created this world that is really consuming our souls and also its own soul.
Um,
do you see as well that way that the way our world is run in so many ways is really by the little ones that
Francis Weller: Yes. There, there are uh, sadly very few real adults walking or in positions of power. You know, when we look back, I was thinking about initiation the kind of like four premises. The first one is that initiation is not optional.
You will be taken to the edge of your ripening somehow in your lifetime, or repeatedly, I should say. Second premise is that human beings are made they're [00:25:00] crafted by community, by culture. The third one is it requires a certain quality of focused intention and intensity to cook the soul. And the fourth premise is you can still miss the bus.
And that's what we're seeing right now, is that even though the conditions are there to promote a certain ripening and ma maturation process, you can still refuse. You can still remain adamantly addicted to an adolescent posture in the world. And that adolescent is not village minded. It is not culturally minded.
It is self minded. It is about me and we're really being kind of inundated by a narcissistic wave. Um. Where, what, what can I get out of this? What's in it for me? Even in psychology, we do that too. Like with dreams, what can I get out of the dream? We still colonize everything that we can, can get our hands on rather than coming into an intimate relationship with [00:26:00] psyche, with soul, with community, with place.
So yes, the outcast parts that we do not reclaim or bring back into some relationship can have a tendency to really regress. Jung said something very frightening. He said, whatever goes into the shadow doesn't just sit there. He said it regresses and becomes more primitive. So if we, if we deny our anger, if we deny our grief, if we deny our our need, those things don't just sit there, they regress and become more primitive.
So when they come out, they're expressed in really, uh. It's a distorted ways, so now we have a consumption level on this, on this continent that is astronomically higher than the rest of the planet. You know, they said that if, if we, if the whole planet, given its level of consumption right now, it would take about 1.5 or [00:27:00] 1.9 planets a year to fulfill it.
But if we all lived according to the consumption patterns of the United States, it would take almost five planets nuts. That's, so we have to ask ourselves, what is it that drives this consumption? What is it that drives our endless hunger for more? Other than that feeling of being empty or being, you know, uh, isolated and disconnected from something that would sustain and feed us
Zaya Benazzo: you.
Which is definitely doesn't come through the screens, through the swiping through. And in that, as part of our modern culture, like numbness has become really a, a way of being for many of us. And we don't have easy access to grief. So there's so much grief accumulated. And you speak of course as grief as a pathway, not as something to [00:28:00] pathologize.
How would you, where do you think what happened to modern human beings? Did we disconnected from our primary emotions, feelings from, from grief? What happened to human beings? Did grief became. Private and shameful and something to outcast. Was it the church? Was it the God in the sky? The religions, the inquisition, the where do you i,
Francis Weller: you know, we can look at all kinds of tributaries to this trouble.
Uh, maybe the first one was the, uh, dislocation of humans from nature when we began agriculture and domination of plant and, and animals. Uh, domestication was the first severance cellist clin. C [00:29:00] Dening, the wonderful ecos psychologist calls this original trauma that human beings, the relationship the humans had with the earth changed radically over those several thousands of years of transition from hunting, gathering to domestication and um, agriculture.
But the speed of what we are feeling right now really increased. Uh, most dramatically probably during the, um, industrial revolution and the enlightenment, we lost a sense. Again, I'm speaking primarily of European culture, but at that wound is spread across the whole planet now. Um, but we lost that felt sense of village mind, of communal mind, and we began to substitute an emphasis on the individual and that rupture.
And I think that that move to the individual was a consequence of the rupture of, of living culture when the [00:30:00] Romans invaded in, late, what was that, around 70 ad into, um, Germany and the whole, that whole northern area. There was a rupture in the continuum of living culture. And that rupture was then further accentuated by the arrival of Christianity.
So the, the traditions, the language, the culture, the rituals, the, the food, uh, things began to be dislodged. And now we don't have any sense of living memory. Part of what I love about those movies you are all making is that somehow the eternal song, the living memory, is still intact to some degree with these indigenous cultures.
That gives them a place to return from, you know, from that, from the isolation and disconnection. That's not what's available to me and to most white folk that plate [00:31:00] feels empty right now. The good news is, uh, as Jung pointed out, he said, we're all. Designed to carry what he called the unforgotten wisdom at the core of the psyche.
So in other words, the unforgotten wisdom is this deep time ancestral memory echo of actually what it looks like to be inside of living culture. So when we do our grief ritual gatherings or our gratitude gatherings, or I've done the initiation work for with Manford many, many years, when we're inside that setting, some part of our psyche quickens and recognizes this is the frequency I've been looking for.
This is the signature I've been waiting for. And our psyches respond as if that language is particular to the ways our psyches were shaped over 300,000 years, and then abandoned and forgotten. But the echo is [00:32:00] still there, the memory is still there. I remember many, many times someone at the, after the end of the ritual saying something like, you know, I've never done anything like that before in my life, but it felt oddly familiar.
So what is that, that in the Sankey recognizes that familiar feeling? It's like when we gather together to sing or to hold one another when there's been a tragedy or a loss. Uh, psyche recognizes that. I remember writing in the, in my book, the Wild Edge of Sorrow, how my son had just moved to New York City, uh, in August of 2001.
And, two weeks later, nine 11 happened. And so my wife and I flew out to see him in October and he took me downtown down to the, as close as we could get to the heart of the, of the damage and everywhere. Shrines everywhere [00:33:00] were circles of people gathering either in silence and praying or, or singing together or weeping together.
It's as if the psyche instinctively knew what it had to do to respond to such a grievous event, right? So that's still in us, that's still available to us if we allow ourselves to be dreamt. That's a whole nother topic, but wow, it's beautiful.
Zaya Benazzo: And how can we begin to, to practice that vulnerability and to even let grief in.
Like I just, in the last week, I had several conversations encounter even with strangers, and I saw tears coming. In their eyes, in whatever exchange we had and I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know how to welcome it or how to. Very quickly I was [00:34:00] like, oh, thi this is a, what would you say?
How we can begin inviting grief or in a non-threatening way, because it also feels like it's a very scary territory for many of us to even recognize the tears in our eyes.
Francis Weller: Well, it's very scary because, you know, in a culture that's really shallow in its ability to welcome people, one of the tenets then that we adhere to is be in control.
Right? Stay in control. Don't show your grief, don't show your weakness, don't show your vulnerability. So you look on social media, and that's all these, you know. I got it together, you know, and everything's good and, but we don't have places for us to take those difficult encounters that are inevitable, right?
I mean, who on the street will you meet that doesn't know sorrow? [00:35:00] No one. No one. But we don't have the holding spaces frequently. I remember Michael Mead talking about the three layers of experience. The first layer is the social layer. It's like, Hey, how's it going? Nice day. Yeah. Yeah. Foggy today. Yeah.
We'll have a good one. See you later. We need that third layer, he says is deep soul contact, the sense of real bondedness and connectivity between you and another, whether it's the trees or your partner or a friend. So that the second layer is anger, rage, grief, envy, violence. They said you can't get from layer one to layer three without going through layer two.
Maurizio Benazzo: Wow.
Francis Weller: But layer two requires ritual containment, and in the absence of ritual containment, all that material floods into the streets, right? There's no place for it to be processed, for it to be ripened, for it to mature, for it to be hell adequately. [00:36:00] So yeah, there's an understanding of fear of getting too close to this material.
So anesthesia becomes a, you know, understandable posture. I don't wanna feel it, I'm not feeling it, it's gone. It's not with me. That's because the solitary confinement, we're forced to carry all of this material in. But given the right context and the right containment field, all of that material has a chance to be cooked.
When I look at cultures that have survived what I call mature cultures that are over 10,000 years old, how did they do it? How did they possibly survive when we're gasping for air here on this continent? The white culture is, we're just gasping. And what they have are the rituals to acknowledge the fact that we're all gonna encounter this material in our lifetimes, whether it's betrayal, [00:37:00] or death, or loss, or, uh, initiation.
All of these things that are inevitable in the makeup of an a human life. They're provided for. There's a containment field for that to be worked with, so it doesn't grow into a, uh, cancerous thing that can poise an entire population. Like right now, the rhetoric is such a, uh, an example of unmetabolized grief and pain and trauma being transmuted into, or not being transmitted.
Just being exported out in terms of violence and, uh, hate speech. And yeah, that's where we are. That's where we are. So mainly what I'm just saying back to UAI is what we're looking for is a, is a containment field strong enough to grant permission to reveal? And that's rare. Like it took me three gr trolls before I shed a tear.
I was, [00:38:00] as I say, a well packed white male and I knew how to hold it. I knew how to carry it and show how competent I was, but I knew I was carrying a boatload
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo: mm-hmm.
Francis Weller: Of sorrow, but I couldn't let go. 'cause I was also trying to be in control. And you can't do both. And it's scary. And I, I really respect that.
How much fear people carry. When people arrive on Friday afternoons for the grief weekend, they're often very quiet. Very much monitoring whether or not they're doing it right. But by Sunday, by the time it's ready to go into the ritual, there's this kind of raucous, uh, eruptive material that's eager to be expressed.
We're just waiting for permission. Yes. You know, we're just waiting for permission.
.
.
Zaya Benazzo: [00:39:00] sadly, the container has become social media and algorithms for our grief, for our pain. And I love how you write also in your book about that. We have, we are forgetting the sensual, erotic, intimate relationship with the living world and modernity that is driven by, by AI is just taking us further away from the living world.
From the and those, [00:40:00] like when we think of ritual, and we will talk about ritual, but ritual can be like being in that intimate connection with the rain or with a bird or with a sound that can open the gates of grief in that moment instantaneously. Ritual could is, could be. Let, let's speak a little bit about how to, I'm going back, I don't like the word how to, but allowing moments of ritual to arise because many of us also, we are so disconnected that we are like, what is ritual?
I don't know. Any ritual. How do we do it? Is overwhelming. I'm gonna get it wrong. Indigenous coaches, they have protocols. They have, uh, living ancestral memory of what ritual is. And ritual is connected to the specific land, to the vibration of that place and water. And, but for many of us in a modern world, [00:41:00] what does ritual mean Can mean or be practiced or be invited.
Francis Weller: I think this is a crucial concern and a crucial topic. The first thing I would just say is that going back to the very first thing we talked about, about slowing down, that in order to become susceptible as j Joseph Campbell called, become transparent to the transcendent, in order for that to happen, we have to be moving very slowly and have our attunement locked into what's, to the geography that we're in.
I believe the earth is a dreaming being, and it has many, many dreams. It's putting out in various forms, in various, just different locations. So like, let's say we need a healing ritual. Well, if you went to the SA people in South Africa, [00:42:00] their healing ritual would look very different than the healing ritual of the Dine people in New Mexico or Arizona.
But the principles are the same. The values are the same. The articulation of it is unique. So what we're trying to do is not to borrow o other people's rituals but to recognize that ritual is the right response in a sense, to the psychic conditions we're in. But what will that ritual look like?
Well, that's, that's the attunement, that's the deep listening. Mm. Rituals in a sense, weren't made up just like myths weren't made up. They were generated by the earth and they were received by the receptor sites within individuals in the community that goes, this is the image I was just given, and this, I think we should try this.
You know, we've done, the rituals we do in our community have all been dreamt up here. You know, they've been dreamt up by the land on this place to teach us about how do we [00:43:00] restore our connection to the living tissue of this planet. To become, in a sense, cosmological beings again, rather than consumers, you know, rather than individuals so much, but really participants in the dreaming process.
And so be becoming receptive. So there are people within any community who have somehow become able to hear the song of the earth the voice of the earth and the gestures that need to be done. So when we do them there is a, a sense of rightness to them. Remember one of the first we did this ritual called the reclaiming.
It's a reclaiming ritual for all those outcast parts of us. It's a gorgeous ritual that came up out of a series of events I went through back in the early nineties. And then when I was working with Malidoma and we were teaching together, we, I said, let's wanna offer this ritual that was given to me.
We did it. And he looked at me and he said, [00:44:00] that's the first indigenous ritual I've encountered on this continent. He said, you would never find it in my village, but it's perfect for your people. You know, so rituals are particular. They belong to a territory. They belong to a, you know, a bio region. Um, and they help us to stay in accord.
That's the purpose of ritual is primarily to keep in accord with the living fabric of the cosmos. Uh, so it covers all manners of things. Initiation, death, grief, uh, gratitude, uh, repair, reconciliation, initiation, ritual has a wide breadth of application. Um, and that's for us to really begin to reanimate back into our, our collective body.
People have been very, very responsive to the rituals that we have been offering. And we tried to do a, a kind of a, a living [00:45:00] cycle of rituals throughout the year as a way of kind of rooting us to place into community. Mm-hmm. I just did this ritual up in Minnesota in October called Renewing the World.
And as I've been studying many, many cultures, uh, I saw particularly in the Northern Hemisphere as we are coming close to it right now, that at this time of year the world began to slow down and the sunlight began to diminish the game got thinner and so many cultures had what they called rituals of renewal to bring the earth back into to life again, and to amplify the life force again.
So I thought, well, we need one of those. We need a, a ritual of renewal. And the image that came was beginning with the funeral. So we build this deep pit. About five feet deep in the ground and we build a funeral pyre in there. [00:46:00] And then throughout the week, men, this was a men's retreat in Minnesota. The men were making offerings that were speaking to all the things that are leaving the planet.
So my brother went on there, my brother-in-law went on there. Um, democracy, you know, languages, cultures, uh, animals glaciers, all these things were going into this little thing called the arc. And on the night of the ritual, the fire was lit, the arc was processed and put on the, on the empire and the flames and the grief was immense.
And the weeping went on for hours as the sun, as the moon was rising up over the fir trees. The first time I did this was in 2000 and. Something spontaneously happened at the end of that ritual, which as I spoke to the group after the ritual seemed to be over, I said, that's it. The [00:47:00] world is gone. The world is over.
There will be no tomorrow morning. You will never kiss your children again. You won't smell the fragrance of roses again. You won't go for a walk with a friend. You won't see the sunrise or the moons. You know it is over. We have lost it all. And first time I did that, that was a spontaneous, you know, thing that came out of me.
But doing it in 2025, those same words carried an entirely different gravity to them that we may not see too many more tomorrows. We might be facing a level of departure that we have never known before. We ended in total silence that night with that, with the gravity of that possibility on our hearts.
And then we were, they were told to be up by the bell at [00:48:00] six o'clock in the morning. So we all gathered at 6:00 AM and proceeded down to the lake there and, uh, and we scooped up the waters of the new life, the place, the placental waters, the waters of our tears, the tea waters, the bath water, the marshlands, the gr, you know, the glaciers.
And we fed all the water back into this big bucket and took it back up to where the ashes are from the night before. And we crawl through this little grotto that we built. And men had also made offerings to feed her body. So we were putting these offerings into her body to both apologize and to say thank you and flowers and, you know, whatever else people brought.
Then we covered up the body, the hole and took that water and we watered the seeds of the new life. And so far it's working. We're still here. We hope it has that potential. So those are the kind of things we can [00:49:00] do just to both acknowledge the great stretch, right, of tremendous loss and sorrow and gratitude.
And as I wrote, this is the mark of the mature human being to carry grief and gratitude simultaneously and to be stretched by them. How much grief can we carry? Well, it's how much gratitude can I hold? You know, both of them are necessary.
Zaya Benazzo: Wow. And thank you for sharing in depth the ritual.
And I couldn't help but that moment of like accepting death, it feels like this is. You're speaking to when you're naming the long dark, that we are entering that time of death, that we are so wired to build, to create, to envision, to re, to renew. And somehow, um, it feels like the world is calling us for something else.
And it's not [00:50:00] about growing at this time. And you speak beautifully about that in your book as well. And I love how you also point to something so much in the culture. We continue to review and share things too soon, really allowing new revelation to mature, to become part of our psyche. So it's revelation, but also allowing food, death for what is no longer serving to unravel.
Is the long dark. Is the, is this part of the medicine for the of the long dark that you speak of?
Francis Weller: Yeah, I think the impulse, when there is uncertainty is to try to remedy the uncertainty. Let's find something that we can, you know, rely upon and gives us stability and certainty. We don't like uncertainty, but that's where we are right now.
We're entering a [00:51:00] time of great uncertainty. We don't know what's gonna happen now. Maybe we never did, but the gravity of what we're facing collectively, uh, is certainly one that can generate a tremendous amount of anxiety and fear. So learning how to trust the dissent 'cause that's what we're in, we're in a, a prolonged.
Time of descent, like, so, when I use the term long dark, the long is very important for us to grab, you know, get a hold of, which is that we're not talking about a weekend, we're talking about generations. Uh, that this the long dark may be at least two generations before we potentially see the other side of this crisis.
That's if we make it. And that is, that guarantee is long, is a long, is uncertain. Right now, we don't know if we're gonna make it, but in some ways it doesn't even matter if we know I'm still required to show [00:52:00] up. I'm still required to bring whatever capacity I can bring to this time. But the long dark is inviting, uh, again, a very different frequency of response.
Darkness is the invitation towards gestation, towards silence. Towards, you know, incubation of sitting with something slow and long is a wonderful term that I learned from my friend, bio Kafe, uh, from the Inuit people. And, uh, the term is uni and the word uni that literally translates into sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth.
That's where we are right now.
That metaphor feels so correct. And these were the wailing people. They couldn't go out to hunt a whale until a song was given to them by the whale people, [00:53:00] so they had to sit, they couldn't push that. That's where the restraint comes in. That's the, that's where you learn how to hold back, not withhold, but learn how to hold back to allow something even bigger than you to have a voice.
So if we're so busy trying to figure out, you know, what, what weapon to use to go hunt the whale, we may not heal the whale song. So we have to get silent. We have to sit quietly together in the darkness. Now what I love about that sentence is that, uh, is to wait expecting hear what you know, something will burst forth.
So there's a certain inclination or maybe even a a hint that this could happen if we got quiet enough. We might hear the Song of the Ren, or the Metal Ark or the Salmon. We might hear their songs again and, and find ways of responding that put us back in relationship and kinship with all these beings.
We might hear [00:54:00] the Song of the Redwood again, you know, or the Doug Furs, or we might just actually become participants again in the long dark, in this time of decay, of breakdown, of disappearance. This is not a season of rising and confidence. It's not a time of ease. And to strength. We've entered it a long period of dropping down into vulnerability, listening, grief.
Um, I wrote the preface for a book called Choosing Earth by Dwayne Elgin a couple years ago. And one of the, and it was a difficult piece to write because Dwayne lays out the next five decades, the next two generations, basically.
Mm-hmm.
And from all of what he studied, he gives a projection as to what each decade will look like.
And it is not pretty. It is hard. What's coming. The losses will [00:55:00] be immense and ongoing and probably increasing. So one of the sentences I wrote in that essay was Grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future. So if we don't know how to speak grief. If we don't know how to respond to that grief, our only option is to turn away.
And the earth can't bear that right now. Earth needs us to be looking into relationship with the earth, with the ground, not away from it. So we have to become skillful. This is a time for us to develop the capacities, to know how to respond to grief and to fear and to uncertainty.
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah.
Be.
Zaya Benazzo: And what would you say in this world of unraveling what remains sacred and how can we, sit by that fire of what's eternal what's always here and what's [00:56:00] will always be how can we be in devotion to that which is eternal. And
Francis Weller: I love that question. And it's so much easier than we think, when the word sacred gets evoked, it has this kind of, um, association with something, esoteric.
Right? Well, for me, the sacred is in what I call the primary satisfactions. Singing together, sharing a meal together, you know, doing ritual together, holding one another while we're grieving laughter starlet nights, uh, telling stories around the fire. That to me is the essence of the sacred. The sacred is really the invitation to glimpse the interiority of any moment.
But underneath the surface, there's another mystery awaiting revelation. If we can again, join in together, whether [00:57:00] in my own interior life or my relationships, my friendships, my village, that opportunity for seeing the sacred is always there. It is not a mystery. What we're struggling with is this separation between the sacred and the profane.
Right? We actually have a feeling for the profane. Profane comes from the Latin pro, which means outside the temple.
Mm.
So what is it that I put outside my temple? Right? That could be parts of me like I did for, for decades. That shame brother outside the temple. You know, my weakness outside the temple, they didn't belong there.
They didn't amplify me as being perfect and good and strong. So we have to look at what it is that we, we push outside of what we consider the sacred. Whether there's other colors of people, other, um, sexes and genders or um, nature itself. We find [00:58:00] ways of pushing out and kind of reifying our little silo of sacred, this is what's sacred.
Only the way I believe is sacred. And then we run into great troubles, right? So for me, the sacred is what I would call ordinary mysticism. No, this conversation right now touches on that. Anytime you get close to soul, you're in the territory of the sacred. So when you saw the tears in that person's eyes, that was a moment of epiphany.
That was a moment of. Intimacy brought about by their willingness to be seen in that, in that moment,
Zaya & Maurizio Benazzo: yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: The time of the stone. I feel your brothers in a, you used load us down in a way that is so profound. It's so beautiful. I feel like [00:59:00] the difference from when we started to now in my personal biological clock of perception of time.
It's so beautiful. Thank you.
Francis Weller: Thank you.
Zaya Benazzo: What does it mean to be an elder in this culture and how do we speak to the young one who are coming into this world of fragmentation and collapse? How do we speak without eding despair, but also not being in denial?
And I, I just gonna read because I love that in your book, what you say, we become elder by accepting life in life's terms, gradually relinquishing the fight to have it fit our expectations.
Francis Weller: Right. And elder, I, I prefer that word be a verb then a [01:00:00] noun. That I elder sometimes when the call is there.
I'm not always an elder. Sometimes I'm just a, you know, guy at home watching, Stephen Colbert. I know. But other times when I am out doing ritual work or something, and there is clearly a call for me to bring my medicine as there is a call for every one of us to bring our medicine. But an elder is a, is gradually shaped by the long walk with sorrow.
In other words, someone who's been willing to accept that long vigil will be ripened into somebody capable of turning back into the community, and particularly to the young ones. Not with so much with answers, but with recognition. I see what you're carrying. I see everything that you're feeling. It is like, I don't [01:01:00] have an answer for when the young ones come to our grief rituals.
I don't have an answer, but I can say what you're feeling is valid and it needs to be held by us, and we are here to help hold you. You know? So the best we can do, I think, is create atmospheres of, of welcome to all that they're carrying, the outrage, the sadness, the bewilderment, you know, the despair, all of it.
We have to become big enough to hold that and be a, a receptor site for that. But that means doing our own work, right? It means our own grief work has to be done, otherwise we can't go there with them. And that's part of the paucity of elders in the community. And the culture is not many have done their grief work.
And so that, that capacity to stay present to that in the others and the young ones it's, it's hinging on that ability to. To process our own [01:02:00] grief.
Zaya Benazzo: What a, it's a common response, I think. I would say it's a common response and it's not about answers. Yes. It's not about having No, because they see further than we do in some way.
Yeah. And what we've been hearing by screening our films, a lot of young people come to us and they keep saying like, I'm remembering this. This is like, I know this Somehow what the elders in the films are sharing, I don't know how I know it, but I'm remembering it and That's right. That's, I feel their longing is
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah, but you were saying, right.
People go, they feel, I don't know what I'm doing, but it's familiar Right. What you were saying. Yeah. It's
Francis Weller: that unforgotten wisdom. Yeah. We're thankfully, we're designed, we were shaped over that long story as a species, so the territory is still there in us. Even if we don't know it. So when the images and the films, I have no doubt that that's gonna evoke a lot of remembrance in these [01:03:00] young ones.
Like, oh, wait a minute. I know that. How do I know that? I don't know, but I know that, and that's a building block right there,
Zaya Benazzo: So deep. Thank you. Thank you, Francis.
Francis Weller: Bless. You're welcome. You're welcome. All. So glad to be here with you, made
Zaya Benazzo: this place to UNF furrow. Continue to unf furrow past this time and the screens. Mm.
Francis Weller: I look forward to the next time we speak.
Zaya Benazzo: Likewise. Mm-hmm. [01:04:00]
