The Wild Edge of Sorrow

Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

By: Francis Weller, Michael Lerner - foreword

Narrated by: Derek Botten

Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections, he leads us into the central energy of sorrow and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow explains that grief has always been communal and illustrates how we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. Weller describes how we often hide our pain from the world, wrapping it in a secret mantle of shame. This causes sorrow to linger unexpressed in our bodies, weighing us down and pulling us into the territory of depression and death. We have come to fear grief and feel too alone to face an encounter with the powerful energies of sorrow.

Those who work with people in grief, who have experienced the loss of a loved one, who mourn the ongoing destruction of our planet, or who suffer the accumulated traumas of a lifetime will appreciate the discussion of obstacles to successful grief work such as privatized pain, lack of communal rituals, a pervasive feeling of fear, and a culturally restrictive range of emotion. Weller highlights the intimate bond between grief and gratitude, sorrow and intimacy. In addition to showing us that the greatest gifts are often hidden in the things we avoid, he offers powerful tools and rituals and a list of resources to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully.

©2015 Francis Weller (P)2016 North Atlantic Books

Help with grief

I have been feeling grief in many areas of my life and this book helped me understand the multi-faceted grief experience. I feel grief about our earth, our ancestors and in my present situation of a recent loss of my dad and upcoming loss of my mom. As I grew to understand the grief experience in a deeper way through this book, it helped me with perspective and how to view grief in a way that honors it and me. If you are grieving, this book might be one to consider reading.

An Essential Book of Our Time

I found this book to be both nurturing, and a diagnosis of our culture that I feel I have been chasing for decades. It comes from a place of goodness and respect. I want to share it with friends and family, though they may not be interested. In gratitude.

Highly recommend

Incredible depth of wisdom on grief and how to let it move through the body.

Grief for Dummies

FIRST CLASS!!
Francis blends all of my favorites:
Malidoma Some, Doug von Koss, Robert Moore, Robert Bly, Martin Shaw John Lee, Miguel Rivera, Martin Prechtel, Alice Miller, Carl Gustav Jung, Danny Deardorf, Jay Lemming, Marcus Wise, David Whetstone, Thomas Smith, & Tim Young into a multicolored grief essay! 🌈
Long life
Honey in the heart
No evil
Thirteen thank yous

Deeply moving

Francis Weller has opened my eyes to a realm of healing from grief beyond those methods of traditional therapies. He demonstrates the power of a collective experience fitting the situation at hand to metabolize the kinds of grief which require a collective strength and network to bear. I look forward to learning more from him and from applying his wisdom in my own life moving forward.

more than i hoped for!

another step forward in healing of myself and perhaps more fo give to others. highly recommend!

Transformational

This book was suggested by podcaster Anya Kaats on Millennial’s Guide to saving the world, and has been on my list for a while. Recently she featured an episode with Frances Weller where they talked about grief and rituals and all the lovely topics covered in detail in the book, and I was convinced it was time it came off the wishlist.

I could not be more grateful!

Beautiful and healing book

Grief is so repressed in our lives. It is extremely healing to learn more about it and how to safely express it. I learned so much from this book. I would totally recommend it to anyone who is interested in feeling better, more relieved, in love with everything life has to offer, and also to those interested in uncovering their authenticity.

Rich content

This book is helping me so much through the uncertainty and severity of grief. It’s helped me revere and honor it as something sacred.

Nothing else like it

There is no other book quite like The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Rather than being another 'how to'/grieve-by-numbers manual, this work explores the vast terrain of grief, loss, and sorrow as a vital/essential part of the human experience. The crown jewel is the chapter on the Five Gates of Grief, which are not stages of grief but the five primary doors through which we encounter grief and sorrow in our lives, most of which are not well understood or even acknowledged in our culture. This is a work of great depth, compassion, and insight, and I suspect it will be the catalyst for much inner work among its readers...it certainly has been for me. Highly recommended for anyone who has struggled with a sense of sorrow/loss (of any kind) and is seeking psychological/spiritual healing.