If you’re struggling with grief and you need some tools to explore, this grief maxxing series is exactly what you need. We’re talking about resources, and today we’re talking about a book that was recommended to me by my therapist. I’ve been working through and really enjoying it. A lot of members of our team have liked this book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. Francis is a psychotherapist, he’s been a psychotherapist for 40 years and he’s a soul-centered psychotherapist. His process and helping people is really helping us explore and think about our soul. And in this book, think about grief and the many types of grief. He introduces a concept, the five gates of grief, which is a really wonderful complement. Check out our other video where we talked about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief, this is a very classic model that many of us know about that details in there for you and understanding kind of where you are in grieving.
What I really like about Francis Weller’s book, in The Wild Edge of Sorrow is how it expands the notion of grief from how we often think about it, right? A funeral, someone dying, and and that’s kind of it, to a much more expanded sense of the types of grief that we might be struggling with. It’s very helpful and we’re going to talk about those in these video and and tell you a little bit more to help you maybe think about the kinds of grief that you’re experiencing right now.
Hi, everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist. You may know me from my work in Nutritional Psychiatry. In this grief maxxing series, we’re wanting to talk about different ways to process, think about, and explore grief. Not that we want grief to be more, but we hope that you can do more with grief. As you’re going to learn in this video, grief is an inevitable consequence of being a creative human who likes to attach, likes to love, likes to be connected to people. Most of us are like that. I bet you’re like that and that involves a lot of loss. Let’s get into Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief and talk about some of the lessons and as he calls it the healing medicine that comes from different types of grief.
One the first things to note is the approach to grief is a little different here. With Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, we’re thinking about the stages of grief. And while that’s nonlinear, you can kind of track yourself in some ways, going from disbelief to anger, or maybe going back and forth between these different stages. Francis asks us a different question. He asks us, “what kind of grief am I having right now?” And that’s where the five gates are so interesting in thinking about different kinds of grief. Let’s go through these five gates of grief, as Francis Weller calls them, talk about what they are, and we’ll go into a couple in detail.
The first gate of grief, everything we love, we will lose. As Francis tells us, this is a fierce truth and invites us into the mystery of love, that as we connect and attach, we have to be open to what he calls the medicine of this gate, the medicine of vulnerability. To love involves a lot of vulnerability.
The second gate is called the places that have not known love. And this is about the act of self-compassion that we have to have in adulthood and as we grow up, as we mature. This really is about understanding more compassion and self-compassion. There are things, as Francis says, within us that have been outcast, that maybe haven’t seen the light of day, that haven’t gotten the attention they need. And so this is a really wonderful gate to think about self-compassion. So often we’re looking out for people to see things about us, and the first step for all of us is to see those things within ourselves.
Gate three is the sorrows of the world. I think this gate really resonates for all of us right now, today. This modern world is filled with so much sorrow. This gate invites us to be in more contact with the entanglement, as Francis calls it. The notion that we are very connected with one another, to think in more detail about our creation and our purpose, but to sit with the sorrows of the world, not let them overwhelm us. To learn from them and also not to ignore them.
The fourth gate is what we expected and did not receive. This is such a hard thing for us to think about and process when we work towards a goal and we lose sight of the fact that it’s about the working towards something that’s so pleasurable, not necessarily the goal. We expect so many things of this life that don’t happen. And this teaches us about the medicine of belonging. In many ways, this gate, I think, is belonging right where we are, which is I think such a hard feeling for so many of us to consistently feel grounded, feel that we’re right where we need to be, that this is exactly the spot that I need to be to bloom.
The fifth gate of grief, ancestral grief, teaches us and asks us to think about our lineage, to think about trans-generational trauma. The fact that if you have family members who were involved with a horrible world event a generation or two ago. It still can be influencing you. We actually see this even in our biology, in our DNA, and and what gets passed on, trauma gets passed on. Understanding ancestral grief gives us more access to wisdom. And this is the medicine of the fifth gate.
These five gates of grief give you something to think about, maybe something to journal about. In his book, Francis Weller calls rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. That this is work for you. It’s homework. It’s therapy homework, as I call it. And I love how this expands us from the first gate, thinking about loss, everything that we love, we will lose, and then expanding into these other realms of grief.
There are two that really resonated for me and our team as we thought through these. The second gate, we see this a lot clinically, where people are struggling with an expectation, almost with the notion that we want the world to look a certain way, we want our lives to unfold a certain way, and we want things to be under control in a way that isn’t exactly compatible with reality. We have a lot less control than we think. That can be really terrifying.
So, how do we think about this gate having more self-compassion? I’ve seen it in my own life where I really love playing guitar and piano and singing, but I spent a lot of decades not doing very much of that. It wasn’t really compatible with my professional life. What a loss. Having more compassion for the part of me that loves to make music, loves to make noise. That I don’t need to be a professional or even great musician. I can just enjoy it and having more compassion for that hopefully allows me to bring more music into my life. And if I think about it, that’s kind of been happening. Since I picked up this book and read through it and thought about parts of myself I want to have compassion for, lo and behold, I started working with a music therapist in our practice. I started for the first time playing music with patients. This has just opened up a whole sense of compassion and connection and healing that I really wouldn’t have had access before this book. So I hope thinking about this gate of grief for you maybe helps give you the same sense of self compassion. What’s something inside yourself maybe people don’t know about that you love, that the world might not see or recognize, but you can?
I also wanted to say something about the fourth gate of grief, what we expected and did not receive. This one really resonates with our team and and with a lot of patients I speak with because we have this expectation. We work hard, we brush our teeth, we do the right things, we eat the Nutritional Psychiatry foods, and things are going to go a certain way. And of course, our planning, our efforts that does influence life. We do have some control, but we don’t have as much control as we would like. And oftentimes we are in a situation we really didn’t expect. I see this happening a lot in middle and late adulthood with patients. The healing medicine of this gate is really intriguing, the idea of belonging. That as we sit through some ways the pain and anger and and and grief, that things aren’t what we expected. Maybe you lose a family member earlier in life than you expected, and just the rest of life kind of is not these chapters don’t look the same. They’re missing one of the most important characters. In some ways, it’s not something you want.
Understanding the process of letting go of that and belonging to this moment, belonging to the life you have right now, right in front of you, is the powerful, powerful medicine of this gate. I’m so grateful for Francis to mapping this out because using it allows you to be in the place you are right now, not stuck in your grief, not stuck in anger that things aren’t what you expected. Because if we’re really honest with ourselves, they never are. And as a patient once told me a long time ago, it really stuck with me. Like, isn’t that great? Do you want to know how everything is going to go? Does that sense of control really serve us? Isn’t that mystery of things, of what’s going to happen, something kind of remarkable and whimsical and wonderful? And puts us in a stance of anticipating and hoping and and appreciating instead of this sense of bitterness that yeah life’s not meeting our expectations.
This video series on grief maxxing is to highlight tools, to make sure that you don’t feel alone in your grief. We all struggle with this as humans. We’re all going to experience it. This is a wonderful book you should get. The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. It was recommended to me by my therapist, and it’s something that our team thinks about and uses and has really helped us as we work with patients to think through and work through the different types of grief that we’re experiencing. This isn’t meant to have you wallow in all these different types of grief. The point of this is all of these types of grief have a medicine for us. They have a path and a procedure. As Francis talks about, he talks about the rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. And sets that up for us in a way that helps us work through and think through what we’re struggling with, what will liberate our soul to be more creative, more loving, to attach more deeply.
I hope this helps you think through grief. I hope you grab a copy of this book. Please leave a comment below of some other people who really inspire you and help you think through grief or ways that Francis Weller has. Please check out his work, Francisweller.net is his website. And please share this video with anybody that you know who needs a little help thinking about grief in a broader way, in a more empathic and self-compassionate way.
Please save this video and subscribe so you don’t miss any and check out the other videos in the grief maxxing series. I hope this helps you sit with some very powerful and hard feelings and make something of them that is powerful and deeply personal. I’ll see you in the next video. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. Thanks so much for your time.
