Francis Weller is a writer and retired psychotherapist in Northern California, best known for his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, who has led grief rituals since 1997. He teaches that grief is not a problem to be solved or medicated but a lifelong “apprenticeship with sorrow”, best held in community, and that it comes to us through five “gates”, only one of which our culture recognises. His view of grief as natural and necessary sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s own, which adds the shamanic work with the GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this and the other-than-human Peoples.
Who is Francis Weller? #
A writer, teacher and retired psychotherapist who worked with people’s emotional and spiritual lives for around forty years, and who now calls himself a soul activist. He describes his approach as soul-centred psychotherapy, and draws on depth psychology, mythology, group work and indigenous traditions. He founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organisation offering educational programmes, and has co-led week-long retreats with Michael Lerner at the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in California.1
His best-known book is The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, first published in 2015 and revised in 2025. His other books include Entering the Healing Ground, The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, written with Rashani Réa, and In the Absence of the Ordinary (2025).1 He began leading grief rituals in 1997.2
What does Francis Weller teach about grief? #
That grief belongs to being human, and only becomes a problem when we are denied what we need to work with it. In his words, “grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human.” He thinks grief has been “colonized by the clinical world, taken hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes”, and that it becomes problematic when we are forced to carry our sorrow alone, or pressured to return to normal too soon.3
Grief, for Weller, is not an event to get through but a relationship that lasts a whole life. He calls it an “apprenticeship with sorrow”: grief is an intense emotion, but also a skill we develop through a long walk with loss.3 He also pairs grief with love and praise: “Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives.”4
What are the five gates of grief? #
Weller’s map of the different ways grief reaches us, and the idea he is best known for. Our culture is familiar with the first gate, the loss of someone or something we love, but “The other four gates receive virtually no attention in modern society”, so the grief that gathers at them goes untended and is “often misdiagnosed as depression.”5
The first gate is that everything we love, we will lose. The second is the places in us that have not known love: the parts of ourselves wrapped in shame and pushed away, which we cannot grieve because we feel they are not worth grieving. The third is the sorrows of the world, the losses of the living world around us. The fourth is what we expected and did not receive: the welcome, belonging and community that human beings evolved to expect, and that modern life rarely gives. The fifth is ancestral grief, the sorrow we carry in our bodies from what our ancestors went through and could not grieve.5
Why does Weller see grief as communal? #
Because, as he sees it, for most of human history grief was held by a community and not by individuals alone. He sees modern society as having forgotten “the commons of the soul”, the satisfactions that sustained people for tens of thousands of years, and names two sins of Western civilisation, amnesia and anaesthesia, “we forget and we go numb”, linking the first to what the author Daniel Quinn calls the Great ForgettingGreat Forgetting. Daniel Quinn’s term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as ‘pre-history’. Read the full answer.6 His grief rituals bring people together to grieve with witnesses, and he speaks of the gathering as a “sudden village”, an idea he credits to the storyteller Michael Meade.7 He also draws on the West African teacher Malidoma Somé, of the Dagara, a farming people, who calls ritual “the anti-machine”, and writes of the welcome he felt in Somé’s village of Dano in Burkina Faso.8
Does Weller connect grief and soul loss? #
Yes. Of the second gate he writes: “Seen from an Indigenous perspective, the grief we experience at this gate is a form of 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”, a blunting of the desire for life. To traditional people, he adds, soul loss was the most dangerous condition a human being could face.9 Late in the book he names three practices for living with loss: “to die before we die, to befriend the darkness, and to learn to let go.”10
How does Weller’s work relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
There is a lot of common ground. Therapeutic Shamanism also treats grief as natural and healthy, “a part of the healing process”, and never something to be rescued from or taken away.11 It also links grief and soul loss: “grief often involves soul-loss, and so doing a 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 would have probably been appropriate.”11 And it treats grief for the living world as real grief.12 Both draw on Daniel Quinn’s account of what went wrong with our culture. See What does animism teach about grief? and What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Where they differ is in the healing itself. Weller’s work is with human ritual and community. Therapeutic Shamanism adds the shamanic journey, with the help of Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Guides, of the Plant, Stone and Animal People whose healing gifts include help with grief, laments, soul retrieval and disentanglement.11 It also looks for its models to hunter-gatherer animism, without borrowing the ceremonies of any particular living culture. See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
