When we think of grief … or well, when we think of much of anything … we might not consider the grief that we inherit along our ancestral lines, that’s in our cells and bones.
Nor might we consider what saturates the very places we live in, or visit.
It’s not an either/or, but an and/both … personal direct experience, ancestral-experience we inherit, and the energies and spirits of place.
These are perspectives once well known, considered, and part of the very care taken by the wise women and men in our ancestral and indigenous cultures and communities.
Though such lines of wisdom and knowing were severed in many ancestral lines — rolled over by the march and conquest of Empire — we’re remembering and resurrecting them now.
Such wisdom is needed now. The forgetting has left a trail of wreckage, and that has visible, tangible, palpable consequences and effects.
Here’s what Martin Prechtel shares on this issue:
“If you have two centuries of people who haven’t grieved the things that they loved and they left properly, where does that grief go. It’s gotta be transferred to energy and mass somewhere. It becomes ghosts. It inhabits the grandchildren.”
“The Mystery is you can’t deal with it yourself. And in the land of individualism they say, “I’m gonna pull myself up by my bootstraps. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
“Well a guy talking like that is already infested with grief. That’s a person that’s talking grief-stricken, with like five generations of man sitting on grief.”
~ Martin Prechtel, Grief and Praise (a talk in Minnesota)
What we recognize, remember, honor, can begin to heal.
In ancestral-indigenous cultures this is one key to restoring a harmony or balance required for the health and wellbeing of the community and individuals in it — called Ayni in the Andean-Peruvian tradition, Haelu in the Northern European ancestral-indigenous tradition, and by other words in other traditions.
You’ll find a couple of other unusual, inspired perspectives on grief in the Sophia’s Children archives.
Here’s another perspective from an ancestral-indigenous wisdom ambassador, Malidoma Patrice Somé, here: Chiron and a Shaman’s View of Sensitivity and “Mental Illness.”
And since very often, those Epically Transformative Experiences we have involve a fair share of loss and thus grief, so you might feel moved to explore the emerging S.C. Transformative Experiences series.
Big Love,
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