Grief Rituals and Ceremonies

Hi, my name is Liana Gerdov, Holistic psychologist and Hypnotherapist at Lotus Wellness Center.

I have a special invitation for you today, if you feel called to dive into the soul work of grief and loss in a gentle, communal and ceremonial way…

Grief work is holy ground…in the depth of the soul… it is not something clinical – to fix, to run from, to avoid…it by no means mean that we are broken or feel too much or are too sensitive…it’s also not something to compare… one’s grief is not bigger than another’s… we experience different petals of grief…and so …who are these communal ceremonies for…those who have:

• Lost loved ones – losing family, friends…those who have physically departed; living grief of loved ones who are alive but no longer in our lives…. Our pets – our soul filling companions that guide and support us in life…. Pregnancy loss of little souls that did not make it earthbound…

• Grief of unfulfilled desires and situations…the expectations and trajectories of life that fall through the cracks…perhaps unveiling a different path for us

• Grief of illness/chronic pain creating a shift in being

• Grief for exiled..shamed..dismissed parts of us – filled w regret, or shame or guilt

• Our disconnect w nature, w oneness, the soul of the planet…we often forget how intertwined and woven we are with our planet…that our bodies feel the effects

• Grief over the state of the world – our collective struggles and pain

• Ancestral grief and transgenerational trauma

what is true though, is that we all experience grief and it is something that is perpetual and annual…we live within the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth…

When grief arrives we enter unfamiliar land Were entering the underworld…by slowing the world down during deep grief… we recognize that at times we do not know “what” to do and so we enter the unknown…the descent…the belly of the underworld…answering the call of rough initiations – for profound transformation

Grief is truly the work of the soul to experience, have tea with, and grow from grief, pain and sorrow. If we experience grief (and all of us do!) it means we have also experienced joy, love, happiness… it reminds us that we are alive and have come here for the full experience of life.

Grief can bring us down… it comes from the word gravis which means “heavy” and when grief comes, we can certainly feel it’s heaviness…we can feel vulnerable, down, weakened… and in a success oriented, ascension culture – we might feel bad, shamed…as if we failed when we experience grief. In our individualistic culture, we need to be the hero/heroine – never ask for help, don’t show vulnerability…never cry in public…rise above it all!)

In our hearts and souls, we feel the emptiness, loneliness within grief…we often feel shame, guilt, and blame for feeling this.. Paul Shepard reminds us that what we attribute to a failure in our personality is a feeling of emptiness where beautiful and strange otherness should have been… we often forget our place amongst the collective… the cosmos.. we are stuck on an island by ourselves, thinking we alone can or need to carry our grief.. we’ve exchanged the cosmology of connection for an ideology of separation…

We forget that grief is a collective experience and the sorrows we feel are completely entangled with the sorrows of the world…the sorrows we are all experiencing…

Remembering that the opposite of emptiness is not fullness, but emededness..embodiment…entanglement…re-membering…

-John Donahue reminds us that –  “Life is a growth in the art of loss” 

Together, we must recognize the skillful nature of working with grief – that we can expand our capacity to stretch and hold space for moments of happiness and joy..even if they are punctuated with moments of grief and sadness..

Grief is not what we endure (or try to get through) grief asks us to engage it – dance it, talk about, move it through, bring ritual and ceremony to it, to slow down to its rhythm and let it guide us and show us the way through… – this is how we begin to develop depth.

We also embrace the wings of grief and sorrow through the language of soul:

• Through gentle compassionate witnessing, without fixing or avoiding, but tending to…tuning into…and understanding

• Through creating a sacred container with ritual and ceremony to hold the ground beneath so that we do not freefall when grief sweeps in

• Through creative expression and written word that helps reclaim our Voice

• Through the body’s wisdom and intuitive movement and flow

• Through self-compassion to breath into the crevasses of our hearts

• Through soul food of song, warm and medicinal spices (herbal tea blend), finding our way into a poem or a share

So I extend this invitation to you…to all of us…to sit together in circle…to hold one palm open for the sorrows and pain and the other for our joy and happiness…to learn the language of the soul…to slow the world down in a sweet and gentle surrender… these ceremonies will be held monthly and you are welcome to come to all of them…each one takes on a life of its own and unfolds in its mysteries…

 Please join us: https://soulfulritual.com/events