5 Gates Of Grief Blog Post
“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”--
Imagine grief is like a waterfall. The spilling over of losses, pain, and endings. The healing waters fall, like our tears, into a pool below representative of connection, validation, aliveness, gratitude, and love. Then water flows onward towards a stream, lake, or ocean.
Yet when we take a closer look above the waterfall, there is a convergence of many rivers all carrying us to our grief. Each river is an access point to our grief.
Now imagine that some of the rivers are flowing fully and others may be dammed up, unable to flow freely over the falls. In some, the potent water is stuck swirling around in circles, waiting to be released. With this lack of flow, we miss out on the full expression of the waterfall's beauty and power.
As I myself have been exploring my own journey with grief (really since my dad’s death as a small child), I was relieved to discover that there are so many more “reasons to grieve” besides and alongside the loss of a loved one. That the loss of my Dad, and so many others dear to me, was one of SO MANY endings and pain that I felt. I also held the sadness of much, much more.
Reading about Francis Weller’s Gates of Grief in the early days of COVID, I experienced a huge exhale…these other, less culturally acceptable sorrows, that I hadn’t quite put words to or didn’t even know existed from my mind’s perspective were validated. I’ll share them here in hopes that you, too, may connect with and give permission to your wide range of feelings.
Gate 1: Everything we love, we will lose:
This is people, relationships, identity, our health, our roles, life chapters, hopes and dreams. We typically give permission to grieve the loss of a loved one, but how often do we allow ourselves to pause for these other very real sorrows? How often do we allow ourselves to grieve the reality that all we love will come to an end?
Gate 2: Places which have not known love:
These are aspects of ourselves that we deny in order to fit into family, social groups, society. They are places in ourselves that have been shamed and deemed not acceptable. How can we grieve them if we won’t even bring them out into the light? They deserve this light.
Gate 3: The sorrows of the world:
This is the harm done to our planet; the depletion of species, habitats, cultures, and collective sorrows as in racial, gender, economic inequalities. The pain from war, pandemics, genocides, misuse of power, misaligned social constructs… the collective grief for this is huge, especially in the current state of the world.
Gate 4: What we expected on arrival and did not receive:
This is one we may not even realize is lost because we may never have had it. This is the Village. Deep in our bodies, we know we were meant to grow up in a community of people and practices to guide and nourish us and where we are shown the ways of living and loving, respecting natural rhythms of life and the earth. Many of us carry this deep longing that our modern society fails to meet.
Gate 5: Ancestral grief:
This is the grief of our ancestors, unhealed sadness and pain from leaving the old ways, the communities, these cultural wounds of oppression, forced to leave cultures and practices that guided and grounded them, feeling lost in a new land. Without these guidelines and tools, they suffered and this suffering can continue on in the generations that follow.
It is so easy to deny grief because we compare and determine our grief is not as bad as someone else's. Often our preconceived notion is that grief is reserved for the loss of a loved one, but from the perspective of the top of a waterfall, we realize that each type of grief is a necessary tool in unlocking our flow and thus our full capacity. When we are stuck swirling around in circles of grief, waiting to be released, our capacity for aliveness is also dampened. Whether we are feeling all or some of the Gates of Grief above, it is worthy of our time to honor it and allow our waterfall to flow freely and reach its maximum potential.