Grief is a natural and healthy process, the way we heal from a loss, and not a problem to be fixed, numbed or taken away. It needs to be felt and given time, and it cannot be rushed without a cost. Shamanic work can support someone who is grieving, with the help of the Plant, Stone and Animal People, laments and soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer, but it never tries to remove the grief itself.
What does animism teach about grief? #
That grief is part of healing, not a sign that something has gone wrong. Grief is the response to loss, most often to a death, though not only to a death. When someone is in pain, anyone at all empathic wants to help, and the easiest kind of help to reach for is rescue, taking the pain away. With grief, rescue usually does more harm than good.
Therapeutic Shamanism, rooted in animism, treats grief as a natural process that needs to be gone through. Waves of grief a year after a death, even overwhelming ones, are “absolutely normal, and a part of the healing process.”1 Feelings “need to be felt and allowed to move through the body” They are not to be “by-passed or suppressed.”1 In this approach there are no good or bad feelings, only feelings, and they are resolved by being brought into awareness, acknowledged without judgement and actually felt.2
Why should grief never be taken away? #
Because the grief is part of the person, and part of their healing. Shamanic extractionExtraction. Drawing a foreign body (an intrusion) out of a person and packing the hole with something healthy. The iron rule: only ever foreign bodies, never a part of the self: extracting a genuine part of self creates soul-loss. More about this removes things that do not belong in us, such as an intrusionIntrusion. Something lodged in us that should not be there, having entered through the holes soul-loss and Power-loss leave. Four broad types: unhelpful thought-forms, introjects, foreign-body energetic intrusions, and entity possessions. More about this, a harmful thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this or something someone else has said. Grief is not one of those things. “The grief itself is not a foreign body though, but a natural part of the psyche, and a process that needs to be gone through in order for the person to be healed.”3
Trying to extract grief is therefore the opposite of healing. It takes away a healthy part of someone, which in effect creates soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer or Power-loss. Telling a grieving person that their grief has gone, and that from now on they will feel only peace, does something similar from another direction. If it worked at all, it would suppress a healthy process and put a thought-form in its place about what they “should” feel, which is in effect casting a spell on them.3 See What is an intrusion, and what is extraction?
Extraction can still have a place. If a grieving process has become stuck, something foreign may be getting in its way, such as a wonky belief, hurtful words someone has said, or an ancestral issue. Then it is that obstacle that is removed, never the grief.3
How long does grief take? #
As long as it takes. “And grieving is a process that takes time.” It has recognisable stages, thanks to the work of people like the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and “It is simply not something that can be rushed or circumvented, at least, not without negative consequences.” For the death of someone close, “A year is still early days in the process of grieving a loved one.”4
The same is true of anything that grows out of grief. Forgiveness can be powerful and healing, but “as with coming out of grief, getting there is a process that cannot be healthily rushed or bypassed.”4 Choosing to ‘forgive’ instead of facing the anger, grief and pain is what the body-centred psychotherapist Jeff Brown calls “forgiveness bypassing”, and it resolves nothing.5 See What is the forgiveness trap?
What can shamanic work offer someone who is grieving? #
Support for the grief, never a way round it. “Grieving needs to be gone through, but there are also lots of things that can help make the process more bearable and help it unfold in a healthy way and not become stuck.”6 Whatever a practitioner does, the aim is to help the healthy grieving process along, not to rescue the person from it.
Several kinds of help are possible, guided as always by the practitioner’s Guides.
Many of the other-than-human Peoples have healing gifts for grief. “There are lots of Plant People and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer whose healing gift is to help with the grieving process”, among them Aquamarine, Apache Tears, Rose Quartz, Sea Salt, Bleeding Heart, Love-Lies-Bleeding, Trailing St. John’s Wort and Borage, and amongst the Animals, “Swan being one in particular.”6 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Laments are another. “Lament-singing is an ancient practice for helping with the process of healing the trauma of grief.” Hunter-gatherer cultures the world over would have known the power of laments and had their own version of them, and a practitioner can ask their Lower-World Human Guides for help with it.6
Grief often involves soul loss, so soul retrieval may be needed. Grief also involves entanglementEntanglement. An unhealthy energetic tie hooking us into another person, a role, an object or a family story; released by disentanglement. More about this with whoever or whatever has been lost, so disentanglementDisentanglement. The ceremonial practice that unbinds unhealthy energetic ties to a person, role, object or story: a fourfold exchange in which each party gives back and takes back what they hold of the other. Not ‘cord-cutting’: done well it usually deepens the relationship, because what is unbound is the unhealthy aspect, not the love. More about this, handled sensitively, can help as well.6 See What is soul retrieval? and What is disentanglement?
What happens when grief is not allowed to move? #
It stays, and it causes trouble. Feelings that are bypassed do not go away; they become part of what Jung called the Shadow, “something that haunts us and becomes stronger the more we deny it.”7 In the language of the elements, wallowing in the past, holding on to things and “unfinished and unresolved grief” are all water issues.8
Grief that is not faced can also shape a whole family. In his family constellation work, Bert Hellinger came to see that this applies even to miscarriages and abortions: a dead child “and the associated and unresolved grief or shame around them, can cast a deep shadow over families until they are acknowledged, and any feelings are faced and resolved.”9 See What can Family Constellations offer shamanic work?
Is it healthy to grieve for the living world? #
It is grief like any other. In an animist view the Animal, Plant and Stone People are kin, so losing them means losing relatives. Paul Francis has written of his own grief when the last male northern white rhinoceros died in March 2018: “I am still overwhelmed with a grief about it that I just do not know will ever go.” It is usually only the big, iconic species whose extinction we notice, though they are “but a tiny part of the picture.”10 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Is grief the same as letting go? #
No. Grieving is the process we go through after a loss; letting go is allowing what has gone to go, and with a death both are needed. One reason the dead can fail to move on is that a living loved one is unwilling to let them, which “highlights the importance of the living being able to move through the grieving process and then be able to let the dead go.”11 See How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death and what happens when we die? and Who are the unquiet dead, and are ghosts real?
Is grief only about death? #
No. Endings of every kind need facing, not only deaths. Endings “need to be fully faced, acknowledged, processed and resolved”, and this is not just true of deaths but of “the ending of relationships, the endings of the various stages of life, the ending of old roles and ways of being.”12 Endings that are left unresolved leave unfinished business behind them, and this is why healthy endings matter so much. See Why do healthy endings matter?
