Grief Ritual Integration and Resources

The Healing Time   

by Pesha Joyce Gertler

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say    

holy
holy.

The soul is like your favorite teacup,

Just waiting to be broken.

Once filled with safety and comfort now holds lumps of sorrow and regret,

Take the cup,

You have been carrying like a beggar out into the wild and hold it close to your heart,

Allow yourself to speak outloud all the ways your life,

your plans,

your body

your love, have fragmented into tiny pieces 

Turn your cup over onto the soil,

Let it slip from your fingers,

Allow your spirit to  descend,

to burrow down.

For what grows from this dark broken place,

will bring you the closer to tender ancient one,

who has been trying to plant a garden in the center of your chest.

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads

of her life, and weaves them gratefully

into a single cloth —

it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall

and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.

In the softness of evening

it’s you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,

the unspeakable center of her monologues.

With each disclosure you encompass more

and she stretches beyond what limits her,

to hold you.

Bird Wings 

by Rumi

Your grief for what you've lost holds a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief,

turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe,

will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering, the small round coins, thrown by those who wished for something else.

Kindness 

by Noami Shihab Nye


Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

Black Water Woods

by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Love Dogs 

by Rumi

One night a man was crying,
“Allah, Allah!”
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer for that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage,
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.

All of You

by Maya Luna

You.
Yes You.
All of you.
Your chaos and your madness
Your foolish nonsense
Your fearless magic
You are welcome here
Your passion and your eros
Your red fever dreams
Your resistance
Your doubt
Your power, wild and uncontained
You, yes, you
Your fist of rage
Your bottomless grief
Your heart break bursting out at the seams
Spilling out in messy floods of Inconvenient feelings
You.
Yes, you.
Your oceans of confusion
Your terror running deep
Your river of longing
Your precious illusions
Even if it makes you look foolish
Even if it makes you go mad
All of you is welcome here
Your brain tangled with neurons Firing wild impulses
From the dark forest of your unconscious
You are Welcome Here
The twisted vines and purple fog of melancholy in your heart
Your bloody messy crazy love
Your fears
Your Desires, wet with unrequited lust
Pushing and stretching to be expressed
The lies you told yourself
Your deepest regrets
The mess of never getting it exactly as you had planned
You. Yes. You.
Your awkward stumbles
Your shakey knees
Your hunger for some meaning
You are welcome Here
Your flaming hatred
Your tender broken faith
Your need for control
You are welcome here.
Your untainted innocence
Your will to rise again
The pain you try to hide.
You are welcome
Here.
I want every part of me touched and seen
I want to be as big as the universe and
As tiny as an insect
I want every contradiction
Every disproportionate feeling
Every chaotic thought to be met
Right Here.
I want to writhe and howl and groan with the deep root of Life
I want to be held with such soft sweetness that
This fragile ache finally opens and lets go.
I want to be known as a depraved and holy animal
As consciousness, as infinite
As flesh and bone and skin
I want to roll on the ground and slither
I want to scream
I want to kiss where my feet have been
I want to cry and need and feel
Right. Here.
I want to explode and hold
This ancient pulsing groan of ocean that lives in me
Right Here.
Meet me here
Where the paint touches the canvas
Where the past is dead and dangling
Where the future is a vacant space
Right Here
Where this unfolding moment is the refuge of the heart
Right Here
Come with me
You are welcome here

Weight 

by Mikyö Black-Wangmo

Yes the weight is heavy

Yes the subterranean rivers run deep

Yes the mystery of the Unknown lies in darkness

Awakening through embodiment is no light matter

Right relations cannot be found in transcending form, worshipping comfort, and ignoring the impact of interdependence. 

Tear those colonized ways of being from your cells.

Be humbled.

Let the heartbreak bring you to your knees 100,000 times.

Let the utter confusion of the mind discombobulate all you thought you knew to be true.

Bring your womb, heart, and forehead to the cool dark earth. 

Let the weight of it all crush you to oblivion. 

Breathe in the soil with your last breaths and pray to be delivered Home.

Let the magnitude of grief quake your very bones till they rattle your soul awake.

In death you are reborn.

I know how long

you have been waiting

for your story to take

a different turn,

how far

you have gone in search

of what will mend you

and make you whole.

I bear no remedy,

no cure,

no miracle

for the easing

of your pain.

But I know the medicine

that lives in a story

that has been broken open.

I know the healing that comes

in ceasing

to hide ourselves away

with fingers clutched

around the fragments

we think are

none but ours.

See how they fit together,

these shards

we have been carrying—

how in their meeting

they make a way

we could not

find alone.

It is good to use
best china
treasured dishes
the most genuine goblets
or the oldest lace tablecloth
there is a risk of course
every time we use anything
or anyone shares an inmost
mood or moment
or a fragile cup of revelation
but not to touch
not to handle
not to employ the available
artifacts of being
a human being
that is the quiet crash
the deadly catastrophe
where nothing
is enjoyed or broken
or spoken or spilled
or stained or mended
where nothing is ever
lived
loved
pored over
laughed over
wept over
lost
or found.

I cannot say

where it lives,

only that is comes

to the heart

that is open,

to the heart

that asks,

to the heart

that does not turn away.

It can take practice,

days of tugging at

what keeps us bound,

seasons of pushing against

what keeps our dreaming

small.

When it arrives,

it might surprise you

by how quiet it is,

how it moves

with such grace

for possessing

such power.

But you will know it

by the strength

that rises from within you

to meet it,

by the release

of the knot

in the center of

your chest

that suddenly lets go.

You will recognize it

by how still

your fear becomes

as it loosens its grip

perhaps never quite

leaving you,

but calming turning

into joy

as you enter the life

that is finally

your own.

Sapphire, diamond, emerald, quartz:
think of every hard thing
that carries its own brilliance,
shining with the luster that comes
only from uncountable ages
in the earth, in the dark,
buried beneath unimaginable weight,
bearing what seemed impossible,
bearing it still.

And you, shouldering the grief
you had thought so solid, so impermeable,
the terrible anguish
you carried as a burden
now become—
who can say what day it happened?—
a beginning.

See how the sorrow in you
slowly makes its own light,
how it conjures its own fire.

See how radiant
even your despair has become
in the grace of that sun.

Did you think this would happen
by holding the weight of the world,
by giving in to the press of sadness
and time?

I tell you, this blazing in you—
it does not come by choosing
the most difficult way, the most daunting;
it does not come by the sheer force
of your will.
It comes from the helpless place in you
that, despite all, cannot help but hope,
the part of you that does not know
how not to keep turning
toward this world,
to keep turning your face
toward this sky,
to keep turning your heart
toward this unendurable earth,
knowing your heart will break
but turning it still.

I tell you,
this is how the stars
get in your bones.

This is how the brightness
makes a home in you,
as you open to the hope that burnishes
every fractured thing it finds
and sets it shimmering,
a generous light that will not cease,
no matter how deep the darkness grows,
no matter how long the night becomes.

Still, still, still
the secret of secrets
keeps turning in you,
becoming beautiful,
becoming blessed,
kindling the luminous way
by which you will emerge,
carrying your shattered heart
like a constellation within you,
singing to the day
that will not fail to come.

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Cure yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon.
With the sound of the river and the waterfall.
With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.

Heal yourself with mint, with neem and eucalyptus.

Sweeten yourself with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile.

Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a touch of cinnamon.

Put love in tea instead of sugar, and take it looking at the stars.

Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain.

Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it.

Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with the eye of your forehead.

Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.

Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember: you are the medicine.

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.

There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.