There Are Two Moves When Faced with Uncertainty (Francis Weller)

Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread. Today I'm talking to the awe-inspiring psychotherapist and author... Frances Weller. Hi, it's Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here. My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.

Here is today's guest, Francis Weller, on why he is hopeful that we will find the vitality and the meaning that our grief carries with it. So something is happening in the collective field. That gives me some sense of hope. that if our hearts break enough we might fall in love again with this world it will be through the broken heart it won't because we've held it all together it will be because we've

We felt enough of our own grief and pain for what we love. Because when we're honest with ourselves, we actually love this world. Wow, he's amazing. Many of you will know Francis Weller from his incredibly moving conversations about grief with Anderson Cooper. Francis worked as a psychotherapist for more than four decades, and he has written some of the most beautiful books on making sense of the human experience. One of his best known books is The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

And then his newest book, which is exactly what I think we need right now is called In the Absence of the Ordinary, Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty.

Today, we talk about the wisdom and vitality that our grief can bring forth if we resist the impulse to go numb. Francis talks about, as he says, keeping our grief company. It's not about shaping the outcome of our grief, but about allowing it to stay soft, allowing it to keep moving so that it can become what it wants to become. And when we manage to do this, there is such an immense relief.

When our psyche recognizes that this is what we needed all along. While so many of us fear our grief, Francis illuminates how what's actually far scarier is what happens when we don't tend to our grief. the way it comes out sideways, and the chance that we miss out on to connect to our own immensity, to accept the invitation of what Francis calls the long dark, to...

When faced with uncertainty, move toward imagination instead of regression. Francis reminds us that we are not bereft of soul medicine. We're not empty containers. We're also our own medicine carriers. This conversation, Frances's wisdom, feels like medicine to me. I hope you find it healing and beautiful too.

There's so many places I want to go, and I want to talk about the medicine that you offer for these particular moments, I think, that feel... paralyzing, and obviously a lot of your work is in structuring these containers for grief, these rituals for grief and for processing. What's required to move? Or to even allow or experience some of what's happening in a way that changes us positively or expands us rather than constricts us or isolates us even more.

If you could prescribe to our culture grief-stricken, grief-riddled, many of us... can't look at that or even acknowledge that, right? Traumatized individually and collectively. Where do you think we even need to begin? I think the first move is to come out of isolation. No matter where I go to talk about this material, what you end up encountering is how alone people feel with it. Because we don't have collective grief rituals. We don't have communal practices.

that would allow us to feel supported and held while we encounter our own grief, our own traumas, our own fears. So when you're asked to carry it in isolation, the psyche wisely kind of shuts down. And so we have a lot of amnesia and a lot of anesthesia in the culture right now. We've forgotten what we need. And as a consequence of forgetting, we have to go numb. So one of the first moves is to come out of isolation and begin to talk about and share and to be...

in a communal context so that the psyche can be given the things it needs to keep it moving. You used the word move. And that's so critical. Because when we... approach our grief, our fear, our wounds, our uncertainty with suspicion or doubt or resistance, that keeps that energy cold. And if that energy stays cold, it doesn't move.

So one of the old alchemical principles is that whatever is in the vessel, you have to keep it warm. And we keep it warm with our affection, with our care, with our noticing, with our efforts like writing or dancing or art. or poetry. We keep it warm by bringing it into communal context. And if we can keep it warm, it can keep moving. That's what I have faith in, not the outcome.

Like, I'm going to shape the outcome of this grief. I don't know how to shape the outcome of the grief. I know how to keep it company. I know how to allow it to stay soft and warm and to keep it moving so it becomes what it wants to become. And frequently what I notice in that process is not so much something gets resolved as much as it helps me hold a deeper ground for it.

So as I sit with my grief, as I sit with hundreds and hundreds of people in grief circumstances, what happens isn't so much we fix the damn thing, but what we've done is we've brought reverence to it. We've brought warmth to it. We've brought the constituent elements that allow it to keep moving to bear. And when that's happening, our psyches recognize that. It's as if we've been waiting.

for the signal frequency that says, ah, that's what I need. That's what we need. I mean, if we were an intelligent culture, which we're not, we would have grief rituals every other week. or at least monthly, in every community. And that would keep us current. Because right now, most of us live backlogged lives. We're still chewing bones from childhood. We're still chewing bones from ancestral.

wounds and losses and grief. So we rarely get present. We end up kind of backing our way into the grave. So how do we make that pivot? Well, we have to have the means and the medicines. that the psyche requires in order to set these things down, to keep them moving. And that's why I've been so fascinated by ritual process and indigenous traditions, because they haven't forgotten.

For however they've done it, they've kept a thread of their aliveness and their living culture so that the dances, the songs, the stories, the rituals, they can provide a certain guardrail. for the human encounters with loss and trauma and death and, you know, uncertainty, those guardrails gave a certain assurance to the psyche that I will be held. Yeah. You know?

That's a long answer. No, it's so beautiful and I feel it so deeply. And I don't remember if it's in the wild edge of sorrow or in the absence of ordinary, but you talk about... the vital need for community in times of sorrow so that once someone knows you don't use the words that other people have their back or that they're in some sort of protective embrace then that's the opportunity or invitation to sort of collapse or be with your

pain, which feels so important right now because we're not only grief-stricken culture, but also fear. And I don't know what's more... I don't know if they're twins. I mean, you talk about grief and love as twins really beautifully, but how do you think about grief? Is it the most basic? It's one of, I guess, the most basic emotions.

Yeah, there's nobody you'll ever meet on the street or in your neighborhood who doesn't know loss. Or even anticipatory loss, like you were sharing before we started here. Parents right now are carrying a lot of that uncertainty and anxiety about what will I be giving my children? What will their future look like? Will there be one?

I mean, we haven't had to ask those questions so deliberately and so much to the forefront of our lives. But that's the current right now. That's in the atmosphere. We're breathing that in every day. So when you say there's fear, yeah, but I think part of our fear is a fear of grief. Because for many of us, that grief feels bottomless. But if I get near that energy field...

I will get swallowed up and disappear. There have been so many times in my practice where somebody says, you know, if I go there, I'm not coming back. And I find myself saying, if you don't go there, you're not coming back. There's vitality in grief, but we don't trust it. We don't have any faith at all in the soul value of grief and sorrow. So we try to avoid it in our happy, obsessed.

You know, smiley face culture. And yeah, and the ascension culture. It's always up and to the right, right? And I have that. It almost feels archetypal, this I'll be swallowed by grief. What I wrote about was... These moments that I can very clearly remember, 2017, this movie, Ma Vie en Rose, which I don't even know if we fully had the language, but it was about a transsexual seven-year-old boy.

France. And my brother had just come out of the closet and it was roughly, I mean, Matthew Shepard had happened. I grew up in Montana. I think that's why, but I had a breakdown. I mean, I was just inconsolable watching that movie. A few years later, I was watching a Disney movie about a boy who loses his horse. He's reunited with his horse, Francis. Don't worry. But I was in college. Similar breakdown experience. And then I lost the ability.

I mean, those were years apart, but I can't, I haven't been able to access my tears until actually what happened in Texas in any reasonable way. What is that? What is that armoring or hardening? Where does this archetypal idea of falling apart and the fear that's part of that, where does that come from in our? I don't know if it's in the collective unconscious or what is that? Well, I don't think it's collective. I think it's specific to particularly white Western culture.

When the breakdown of community occurred, when we broke down village and we began to ascend to the individualistic idea, that model of individualism. That moment you've done that, you've basically created a circumstance where you are completely exposed to life and you are not covered by any meaningful system of protection.

I often speak about Jeanette Armstrong, who's an Okanagan elder from British Columbia in northern United States, Canada. And she speaks about in her culture that they have a word for belonging, which means our one skin. And she says, in our village, we lived like this way, community first, family second, and the individual is last. She said, you've inverted that completely in white culture, individual first, family second.

She said you use the word community a lot, but it's empty rhetoric. There's no blood in it. So the moment you've inverted that understanding, you create a condition in which you are asked to face individually. everything that's going to befall a human being. That's overwhelming. The psyche can't process that in isolation or alone. So this...

grief fear, this grief panic. It's almost like I rarely see a grief moment. I almost always see a grief panic moment. They've gotten so hinged together because of the absence of the holding environments that we need. in order to feel what we feel, to process what we have to carry, and then move it, keep it moving. That's a communal process. Grief has always been communal, Elise. And suddenly, it's up to you, it's up to me, all on our own.

to somehow digest not only my lifetime, but the world around me, the cultural collapse, the ecological collapse, the ancestral material. I'm supposed to digest all that on my own? Not possible. So we have developed a very grief-phobic society. We don't know how to go there. And consequently, when you repress grief and oppress death, it comes out in the margins. It comes out sideways.

arms sales and mass deportations and genocides and it doesn't go away it just comes out in more and more distorted fashions you know yeah It's like a massive collective cultural shadow that we have to eat. And yeah, we're just dragging it around through our lives, unwilling to look at it and begin the work of slowly metabolizing it.

I know you're co-conspirators with Thomas Hubel, right? And I'm sure probably Richard Schwartz and IFS. And I think about his work too here. And I just wonder how many of us have... grief-stricken parts that are just protected by firefighters and managers and that it also creates some sort of reactivity in the culture.

too. We're all harboring these like little children who are overwhelmed that we feel extra. We have to keep those children safe. And so that it becomes ever more tender, too. I don't know.

You might know. Well, when I talk about the apprenticeship with sorrow, one of the key moves in the apprenticeship is to migrate grief from a child's hands into an adult's hands. Because only the adult self can process this grief. All the child tries to do is survive. Yeah. And so it takes up a strategic life. How do I avoid this? How do I push this away? How do I live safely but not alive? So those parts of us, bless them for enduring and finding ways.

to survive, but it's up to the adult to make the encounter with grief generative and to bring it back into its requirements like community, to ritual. to soul, to the sacred. When those elements are invited in, our deep archetypal psyche, the ancestral psyche, recognizes those frequencies as the ones that we expected.

and did not receive, you know, what I call the fourth gate of grief, what we expected and did not receive. There have been many occasions when we've done rituals and somebody at the end of it will say, you know, I've never... ever done anything like this before in my life but it felt oddly familiar now what is that in the psyche that recognizes this frequency that's what jung called the unforgotten wisdom

at the core of the psyche. I love that idea that there's an unforgotten wisdom in us. When I first got my first scent of living ritual, I said, oh my God, that's a missing piece. in our psychological framework. All of our frameworks for psychology are primarily individual, maybe family systems, but that original matrix?

Almost completely forgotten. So that's been my life work is to bring that original matrix back into culture. Do you have a spot in your home that you find yourself thinking about? even dreaming about returning to throughout the day? For me, it's pretty much my bed. Maybe it's because I spend an above average amount of time right in my bedroom. That's where I am now. That's where I record almost all of my podcasts from.

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A lot of my work as a writer We inherit as individuals, right? And then similarly, we're like, this is who I am. This is my personality structure. And then we're sort of blame our moms or maybe our dads or, you know, family of origin for.

the way that we are. And then when you actually start talking or making conscious these stories, you realize, oh, these are... cultural collective we're all operating with the same program script etc and it's interesting because i think we all want to be self-authored right and we all want to believe that were singular and yet as your work suggests so much of this is we're all like string instruments in an orchestra we're all part of a collective you write about it so powerfully as

Sort of a Western misunderstanding that this is about Elise becomes a woman, like this is an individual initiation and that that's upside down, backwards, not quite. that there's a larger container. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? Initiation from a traditional sense was never for the individual.

Had nothing to do with personal growth or self-improvement. I mean, they didn't give a shit about that. What they wanted to do... About atomic habits. That's right. What they wanted to do was generate potent adults. capable of sustaining the lifeblood of the community. So initiation was really bringing forth the medicine, the gift, the capacities to sustain living culture.

and to sustain relationships with the sacred. So an initiation, again, was not about me. It was about an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater good to which I am now aligned. In a sense, I'm giving purpose through initiation. I'm given a place to participate in the generation of culture. But it was not about, it's never about me. never about the individual. And so I think also what you're alluding to is what I often call rough initiations that we don't have for the most part in our society.

traditional initiatory practices. There are still some left, like in the Jewish tradition, but for the most part, we've abandoned initiation practices. One of the premises I go by is that initiation is not optional. Yeah. So you will be taken to the edges of your ripening, but in the absence of traditional... contained relationships of initiation, we have to go into an uncontained experience of it, a rough initiation through cancer, through an accident, through a divorce.

through some kind of descent into depression or an underworld experience, but psyche will take you to the edges. Rough initiations are difficult because they often lack that sense of containment. I call initiation a contained encounter with death because there is no initiation without an encounter with death. That's why when you look at these practices in traditional cultures, they're harrowing.

You're taken to the edge of your capacity of endurance. Again, not to somehow punish you, but in a sense to articulate the necessity of something dying. Something needs the dying initiation. That's why the death element is always present. In what I call a rough initiation, it's an uncontained encounter with death. You're still brought to the same edges.

but without containment, without elders, without ritual, without a place that's saturated with myth and story. You're basically thrown into these initiations by circumstance. To see it that way is helpful. When I'm working with the Cancer Help Program, one of the first nights when we gather in the circle, I say, you're going through a rough initiation. And all the elements, the first element is there's a radical departure from the world you once knew.

So I'll ask him, how many of you, when you received the call or met with a doctor and you were given the diagnosis, did your world radically change? Of course it did. I'm no longer this person kind of... casually walking through life. Now I am a cancer patient. The second element that happens is a radical alteration in your sense of identity. So I hear them say almost every time, I don't know who I am anymore.

Well, that's the purpose of initiation, to dislodge the fictions of identity that we've been caught in, living in, and to emerge into a larger identity that's infused with... sorrel and redwood and hawk and mycelia, and that that's also me now, that I'm initiated into a sea of intimacies.

Not just, again, to my own particular individual interiority, but no, to a much larger embrace. And the third thing you realize in true initiation is you can never go back to the world that was. which is one of our biggest fictions in this culture, that we're going to get you back to where you were before the accident. No. That would be...

Like I wrote in the book, you'd waste a perfectly good heart attack or you'd waste a perfectly good cancer. That's not what we're trying to do, get back to something. We're trying to see what the emergent identity... is supposed to be, you know, to come into that. Yeah. It's so beautiful. It works on so many levels too. I mean, on a cultural level too.

Whether it's make America great again, or it's the move to become a trad wife, hashtag trad wife, or this deep, you can disagree with it, but it's clearly a deeply felt nostalgia. for before times even though many of those before times were not so great and but it's that it's this I don't like this I don't like this and I want

something before, ultimately, right? It's a rejection of change. It's a rejection of the evolution of life, which includes a lot of things that we want and a lot of things that we definitely don't. I thought, too, the way that you describe I think you call it suspended animation, that trauma creates, particularly is it, I would imagine, individual trauma that spins people out into a suspended initiation where they can't come home.

Yeah, the idea there is that initiations require, for them to land in us psychically, they need a ritual of return. So that's one of the biggest absences in... Rough initiation is the idea of return. We don't even know we need it. We're just trying to get through it, whether, again, it's an illness or a divorce or something. We're just trying to get through it. But if we can see it from soul's point of view...

There is a need to complete the cycle. And so any initiation that remains suspended, in a sense, keeps you out of this world. So there's an idea in initiatory practices called the liminal phase. I'm sure you're probably familiar with that term, liminal. It's that time where you've departed what was and you haven't arrived in... to what will be. And you're in that in-between world where everything falls apart. Well, if you get caught there, it's no longer liminal, it's liminoid. And it becomes...

the reality in which you live, uncertain, untethered, disconnected. I mean, when we talk about trauma, we often use the word dissociation, right? We often talk about how some part of us... In the old language, there was a soul loss. And you lose that feeling of animation, of aliveness, of joy, of enchantment. We enter into kind of a deadened world.

And part of what we're waiting for is, again, that place of return. So I've worked with many people, helping them craft a ritual of return, you know, gathering four or five people. and telling your story fully, and for them to respond to you with even language like, welcome home. Thank you for doing that.

Thank you for bringing back the medicine. We see what has happened to you. So some kind of reflection and some kind of offering from the community to recognize that you've been gone and you're now returning to us. And we want to help you return. We want to help you land back into this incarnation, into this community. And then for us to learn what you've brought back with you.

Again, initiation makes no sense outside the context of community. Why would you go through that? Unless it was to help elicit your contribution to the village. Yeah, just getting the antidote, right? And the hero's journey or, yeah, the medicine. And when you talk about return, it's interesting because it's not going back, right? The world has changed. It's not a temporal place or physical place.

It is a living community. Yeah, again, the intention is emergent. If I'm living into a new sense of identity, I can't forge that in isolation. Jung once had a phrase, the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a you. So our psychology is very internal. You're going to go work on yourself.

oftentimes you're working in yourself because you don't feel good enough to belong. So a lot of that's the hidden agenda of going into therapy is self-hatred, basically. So when we can dispose of that fiction...

We actually come into a deeper calling of identity is shaped in relationship. Identity is more like an alchemical mixture of ingredients. You're helping me to become more Francis right now. And I'm hoping that you're becoming more Elise by our connection right now. So when you begin to see it more as a relational dynamic, you begin to see the poverty of that individualistic. approach to our work.

You know, obviously within Judaism, which you mentioned, there is the bar mitzvah and the bat mitzvah, although originally I think it was just the bar mitzvah for most of history.

That these initiation cycles, and I know you're not talking about them in a gendered way, but historically they have been this, I think... inherited or understood as this process of individuation and separation for boys and men right this transformation and this is different I think than what you're describing and I think about our culture And when I look at it, what I see too is, and this is...

some of Carol Gilligan's work in developmental psychology, but that you have these boys who are pushed towards individuation and separation. And not told that they then need to come home, that they need to find the feminine and return into relationship. And so when you talk about the suspended initiation of trauma. I think it is a small T trauma, right, in our culture of saying to boys and men, go out into the world, bye. Meanwhile, it's its own.

constraints on girls who are left holding the relational sphere. Or that's what I think is implied in our culture. We'll do all the relating and all the caring over here while you guys do all the separating and individuating over there and never the two shall meet. So I don't know when I look at what's happening to boys and men.

Not all, obviously, but it feels to me like a collective suspended. It's kind of the best language I've seen, a collective suspended initiation where these boys are just wandering around as lost men. How do you see it? You did a pretty good job there, at least. I mean, the emphasis on individuation and separation is still a remnant of individualism. Yeah.

Initiation, again, was not about individuation. It was about finding a larger identity through which you can feel your corresponding alliance with... place with ancestors, with the sacred, with mystery, with the green world. It wasn't about me separating. It was about me joining. Without losing my sense of autonomy, my mentor, Bob Stein, talked frequently about the soul has a simultaneous need for intimacy and freedom. In other words...

We need to feel simultaneously connected and autonomous to find our own sovereignty. So we have genderized that a lot. So men have been conditioned more towards the sovereignty and women towards intimacy. grossly speaking, in terms of gender associations. But the soul needs both of those things. I need friendship. You know, my sovereignty is cool. I love my alone time. I love my solitude.

I've had to work on connecting. I've had to work on intimacy and friendship and fortifying bonds of closeness. And that's not what I've been taught to do as a man. Yeah. Consequence to that have been drastic as far as depriving me of the things that my soul needs. A soul without friendship? Bad news. So the conditioning isn't towards initiation. It's conditioning towards individualism. And that's not healthy for the boys. It's not healthy for the men. It's not healthy for the culture.

Because again, we're not coming back into a relational field. We're caught in a dynamic of competition, focusing on difference and separation, rank. I've done so many men's initiation programs that one of the things we look at is, how do you hold power and rank? And that becomes the sustaining note in a man's psyche, is where do I measure up?

in the hierarchy of power. Yeah. You know, you walk into a room, you're not looking to see who could I connect with. You're looking, well, who's better dressed? Who's better looking? Obviously has more money. We're status searching constantly. The first book that I wrote uses The Seven Deadly Sins as a superstructure, but it's the way the women are conditioned for goodness, quote unquote, to perform our goodness in the world, and as a corollary, the way that men are programmed for power.

And it's not really about men, although it's about the feminine, the book. But the last chapter, you probably know this, but the... Desert monk, Evagrius Ponticus, he first wrote down what ultimately eventually became the seven cardinal vices, which were assigned to Mary Magdalene in 590 AD and became the seven deadly sins. Not in the Bible.

He wrote them down originally as these eight demonic thoughts, demon meaning distractions from prayers. And he's credited as an early father of the Enneagram because he saw them as sort of aligned to certain. personality types amongst the monks. And the eighth thought was sadness. And he wrote about it as sort of a homesickness, a longing for people. And then that's the one that was dropped, right?

which I think is so interesting. I write about it in my book in the context of men and what happens when you're conditioned for power and anything that it's corollary to be perceived as weak. feminine, defenseless. There's nothing powerful about sadness, although I actually think there's a lot that's very powerful about sadness, but at its surface, it's not.

Masculine. So I think about this a lot. And yet I also feel in my own masculization through the culture, severed from my feelings and scared of my feelings and willing to let go of attempts at control. And it feels like if we don't reconnect people, and I thank you for your work and for other men, because

I also think that there's so much pressure put on fathers for good reason. And yet most boys are not initiated. It's not necessarily done by your father, right? It's done by elders in the community. It's other men. mm-hmm not your father yeah that's the intention that's too close a bond it's what they often call the unrelated uncles would be the ones to take you through initiation because they wouldn't

Interfere. Personalize it. They wouldn't interfere with things that are difficult and painful and scary. And they know that they have a job to do, which is to temper the boy. to bring heat and intensity in that ritual ground to cook him so that the old dies and the new emerges. Yeah, there's elegance to that.

Yeah. Not ease. It's not, you know, initiation is uncomfortable. I mean, ask anybody who's gone through a divorce or an illness. It's not easy being cooked. But there's a necessity to being cooked. And that's where we are collectively as well right now. And we're in a collective initiatory process. Whether we make it or not, I don't know. Yeah. When you put on your profit hat...

And you look forward. And I hear you saying, I don't know. So I am anticipating that as an answer. But one of the people I love to read and talk to is Llewellyn Von Lee. And I feel like for... A long time he was like, there's still hope. I don't want to speak for him and say that he has no hope. But it feels like the sooner we sort of start to do this work.

and look at face what's present, not the better the outcome, but that we have an opportunity to make it not as bad. When you look forward, do you see... Just an increasing intensity of rough initiation until we take the medicine? There's so many layers to that question. No. Just tell me what's going to happen. The first response would be... The first response would be, I don't know. The second one was just looking at the signs just in the last 20 years when I first started working with grief.

How almost nobody would show up. I would have to convince people to come to a grief virtual weekend. And, you know, who the hell wants to spend their weekend crying, for God's sake? And just to watch this progression. So today's topic in the New York Times was how we grieve, you know, and so what has happened? So this collectively, the denial is cracking, whether it's around environmental.

collapse, that's cracking. Racial issues is cracking. Economic issues are cracking. Gender issues are cracking. So something is happening in the collective field. That gives me some sense of hope. that if our hearts break enough we might fall in love again with this world it will be through the broken heart it won't because we've held it all together it will be because we've

felt enough of our own grief and pain for what we love. Because when we're honest with ourselves, we actually love this world. That we're actually part of this world. That's what's also given me hope is the sense of the fantasy of insulation is disappearing rapidly. COVID had a big impact on that fantasy that somehow I can... protect and preserve myself apart from everybody else. If I have enough money, if I have enough power, I can somehow insulate myself and be immune.

to the collect, well, that fantasy is collapsing fast. Which takes us back to the question you were just asking or the comment you made about this return to the 1950s, basically. This move of regression. So when you're faced with uncertainty, there's two moves. One is towards imagination and one is towards regression, trying to get certainty back into your life.

trying to put people where they belong. People of color should go back to, you know, wherever they're supposed to be and gay people get them back. Women, no. Everything is trying to get back into a place of control. The other side of that is imagination. That's the invitation of the long dark. We dream in darkness. There's something about the dark that is actually quite inspirational.

and conspiratorial towards imagination. It's bringing us into the place of not knowing. And in that place, we have to get quiet. We have to listen. I wrote about this Cartzeluni idea. from the Inuit people north of the Arctic Circle. They have this term, kartsaluni, which translates sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth.

And that was the whalers. The whalers could not go out hunting until one of them received a song from the whale people. So they would sit in this utter darkness, waiting. for the song to come. So that's entering into the imaginal world. That's becoming receptive to the dreaming earth. And I think that's one of the medicines we need more than anything right now, is being receptive to this earth, being inspired.

informed, dreamt by this earth. So we can again begin to repair and stitch the tears in our coats of connection to this living, breathing, animate world. We're lonely for her. We're dying without this connection. So the imagination is another one of those profoundly important medicines we need to explore. You also tell...

As a medicine, you talk about sitting with, I think that it's a woman who has gotten a terrible diagnosis and she had a visitation in some ways. or felt this deep connection with her ancestors. Do you remember what you said to her? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, she was early 30s, just got married with all the hopes and dreams of family and children.

I was given a very serious glioblastoma diagnosis, and she sat with me in one of these individual sessions at the cancer program, and she said, I'm terrified. I'm just absolutely terrified. And I could feel it. Her body was shaking. And I said, well, can you recall a moment in your lifetime when you might have touched something that we could call the sacred? And she thought for a moment. She said, yeah, I do. I remember sitting.

in a sweat lodge one time, and it was one of those lodges that had the hole at the top of the tent, and I could see the stars through that opening. She said, in that moment, I felt this profound connection to the ancestors. I said, okay, now, that woman sitting there, connected to the ancestors, is she larger than the terror? Is she bigger than the terror? She said, absolutely. I said, well, that's who you need to be right now.

You need to touch into the one who's connected to that immensity. Because the invitation right now is towards immensity. We have to become as big as we could possibly be to respond, to hold, to... be able to not be overwhelmed and crushed by the weight of what's happening. So our immensity implies a lot of overlap, right?

There's a wonderful phrase from Michael Sendivogius, the alchemist. He said, the greater part of the soul lies outside the body. So I'm into that overlap. So I'm connecting with whether it's a beautiful... Dahlia that just emerged out of our garden, keeping me company and reminding me of that deeper, darker beauty that's available to us all.

I think in that part you write about when you can embrace or look at your terror or your fear, you can separate from it enough to face it, I guess, in one way or embrace it. Well, that's absolutely critical, what you just said, because without separation, we're basically powerless. Jung said that we can't heal what we can't separate from.

which is based on the old alchemical model of separatio, that when they were cooking material in the vessel, they were trying to also separate it out, you know, to see what was all in there. So when we can separate, when I can... turn toward my grief or turn towards my fear or turn towards the trauma, I have agency. I have capacity then.

to not feel so overwhelmed by this, but actually can respond to it, you know, and bring compassion, bring warmth, and bring care, bring support. I can ask for help when I separate. You know, we go into survival so immediately when we're caught in those feeling states, and that's all we know how to do is survive. But if we can get separation, that's 90% of the work right there.

That separation is required if you think about all of these hard things that we don't want to experience as part of our individual and collective shadow. And part of our therefore unconscious drives, right? Present but not seen. That that separation is maybe the first step of that type of shadow work of being actually willing to.

put the bag down and turn around and look inside and start to make these things more conscious, more aware, more felt rather than just armored, locked away in these boxes. I'm using a lot of different metaphors, Frances, but boxes, bags, you know, whatever. You choose your metaphor. Vaults. I just want to end because you mentioned this and I think it's so powerful. And at one point you talk about.

grief and love as two sides of one coin. And do you mind if I read a few sentences to you from your own book? Is that okay? That'd be fine. So you write, nor will moralism save the day. We won't necessarily feel moved to hear the cries of the earth because we should. We won't lean into the great work of cultural and ecosystem change because we should.

We need the heart aroused, registering its fealty to our lives and the wider animate world. We will protect what we love, and so much needs our protection. And when you wrote about heartbreak, I felt such a stirring. I think that that's it, right? That's really at the core of this. We will protect what we love. And maybe when we're so scared of losing what we love, we can't.

be with that, but the more of us who can register that. Well, it goes back to that permission to grieve because a congested heart saturated with grief. has a hard time feeling its love for the world, even for your own children or for your neighborhood, you know. So that's soul practice. of moving the sorrow, keeping the grief moving, that's what helps me to feel my love for the world. Because woven within my grief is love. You know?

My heart breaks when I drive up the coast here and see the clear cuts or seeing the dams that prevent the salmon from running. There's so much, or just the roadkill. On any given day, my heart breaks for all that. Well, if I can keep that soft, I can also then keep my heart loving this world. Wendell Berry, that wonderful poet farmer, said that it all turns on affection.

You know, so that was the last chapter in my book, In the Absence of the Ordinaries. It all turns on affection. So our job, our deep soul responsibility right now, our soul activism, if you will, is about affection.

It's about loving this world again, ardently, wholeheartedly, to not hold anything back in our affection for the world. Which means, again, because... When you go through initiation, my identity is not separate from what I'm loving. My identity is now fused with what I'm loving. They're one and the same. So when you look at traditional cultures, they're the most fierce.

I won't generalize, but they fiercely protect their land from oil incursions and mining incursions. Not, again, out of should, but out of identity. I am that land. That land is me. And you're cutting into my body. You're tearing out my veins when you do that. So that's the gap that white culture has. We do it more out of moralism. I'm not downing moralism, but I don't think it's potent enough. It has to have more of a sense of identity that I am this land.

It's a wonderful movie that just came out called The Eternal Song, put out by Sand, science and non-duality people, Maurizio and Zaya Bonazzo. And it's an amazing film. A couple of years ago, they did a movie on trauma with Gabor Mate and others. And Gabor said, you know, what you really need to do now is go out and visit indigenous cultures and talk to them about the trauma of colonization.

So they went to 13 communities around the planet, from the Maasai in Africa to South America to Native cultures in the United States to Australia to Greenland and talked to these folks about... how did they survive you know what was the impact and of course the movie is painful as hell to watch but at the same time you see how they were able to take the eternal song

And let it run underground. See, they've been dealing with the long dark for 500 years. Right. We're shocked by what's happening right now because it's finally hitting white culture where we live. you know, in our pocketbooks and in our futures and in our certainties and our guarantees of the pursuit of happiness and all that stuff. They've learned how to somehow survive that.

I feel like they are our teachers now. That's why most of the work I do isn't about trying to emulate indigenous cultures, but to try to understand the values that they espoused cross-culturally, like restraint, reverence. gratitude, respect, mutuality, deep listening, patience, imagination. These are the things that allow them to endure for 50 to 75 to 100,000 years.

We're barely surviving after 500 on this continent because we've abandoned those core values. In its place, we've put all the values that are actually destructive, greed, self-interest, power. position, rank, privilege. Those are the things we idolize in this culture. But they're the very things that disrupt the sense of connection and belonging to the wider.

ground that we're supposed to be nourished by and to nourish so we have a lot of remembering to do we sure do it's tough medicine to know that you'll be a chapter in human history where people will look at what we've done and say well wow isn't that obvious right but it feels that way yeah

The patterns are clear, right? The patterns are there for us to see, for us to understand. And again, from the perspective of soul, this is the ripe time for us to do this work. We have what we need. That's why I wrote that one chapter, The Medicine for the Long Dark. We have community. We can create friendships and community. We have access to imagination. We have this deep time ancestral inheritance.

We know how to turn towards our grief and our pain, or we can learn how to do that. We have the capacities for patience and rest and deep listening to hear what is being dreamt by our time and by the earth. We're not bereft of medicine. We're not empty containers just being filled up with fear and terror and trauma. We're also medicine carriers. And it's our job to bring our medicine. I was giving a talk up in Victoria.

some years ago and a young woman asked me towards the end of the talk so what's the answer how do we fix all this i said there is no answer but there is a response and every one of us must decipher the response we are being asked to make, and then make it. So that's what I've been trying to do, is just honor the response I've been asked to give. And you are doing that.

You know, in your writing and in your podcast and in your work, we're trying to bring the response that is authentic to us. And that's what we're being asked to do right now. Wow. I just, when I do feel bereft, I am so comforted by the fact that we have, as he said, we have the medicine we need. We have. The teachers and the elders like him, I would add. I just want to go to what he was talking about. I'm going to read to you about the medicine that we do have.

He writes, this is what we need in the long dark. This is what we bring to the long dark. This is what we find in the long dark. The idea I'm trying to share with you, my friend, is that we are not without medicine. We have what we need to navigate the long season ahead. We have the resources. We have access to our gifts. We have friendship and community to lean into when need be.

We are all carriers of medicine, and there are many other forms of medicine available. Beauty, laughter, awe, nature, creativity, play. And many others are all vital forms of support to help us walk steadily during the long dark. We have entered a liminal terrain where everything is changing. We don't know what will happen. We do know.

There's medicine available to the challenges we will be facing. We are being ripened to become a place of shining darkness, a point of combustion of incandescence. We will still know joy, passion, delight, and wonder in the long dark. The decades ahead will not be a steady pall of gray and shadow. The world will need our affection and warmth, our outrage and kindness. Let us become capable of generating a living culture once again. Let us dream of a wild earth.

Teeming with life and richness. We are not bereft. We are not alone. We are part of this dreaming earth. There are many forms of sweet soul medicine. And share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That's how we grow this thing. It's so helpful. Thank you. If you want more in this world, please sign up for my newsletter at eliselunan.substack.com or consider picking up copies of my book On Our Best Behavior.

and the new workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. Thanks again, friends. Hi, friends. If you have been waiting to read Honor Best Behavior because you like reading paperbacks, no judgment. I also like reading paperbacks because I like to mark them up. You're in luck because Honor Best Behavior is finally coming out in paperback on August 26th. And guess what? It has a friend. And this friend is pretty incredible.

The friend is a workbook companion to the book. It's called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. And I did this workbook because as I went around the country talking to groups of people, primarily women, about on our best behavior, they wanted to know now that they had this new. awareness of what they were up to and all the stories that they had unconsciously subscribed to like a good woman is never tired a good woman has no

wants. She subjugates what she wants to other people's needs. A good woman doesn't talk about money. A good woman keeps her body as small and quote unquote disciplined as possible. A good woman is sexy, but not sexual, desirable, but not desiring. A good woman needs no praise, affirmation, or attention. And a good woman is never upset about any of this.

What I just gave you are the seven deadly sins, which is the superstructure of the book. As women became more conscious of how they were keeping these stories going in their lives, they wanted to know what to do about it. So I worked with my friend, Courtney Smith, who is an incredible coach and teaches the Enneagram and coaches within the conscious leadership group framework and has studied with Byron Katie and Katie Hendricks and so on.

I partnered with her to create a workbook where you actually get to really make those stories that you're subscribed to conscious and then make them as big as possible and then swap them out. for something that's different and a little bit more expansive and a little bit more freeing instead. The workbook is called Choosing Holeness Over Goodness. It is so good.

I can't wait to take it out into the world and do workshops and groups with people because it will take you deep into your own psyche really quickly and then show you. One, why those stories were wise and what they did for you and also what might be possible if you put them down and choose something else instead. So to give you an example of one of my big stories, one of my big stories is.

I'm the only one who can do it right. So I should do it all. This is part of the sloth chapter. And through this process, you take that story and you make it really big and you start to become aware of just how much energy you are. bending to make sure that that story stays true and what is underneath that story, what fear is driving you to make that story true. And it is eye opening, truly an eye opening.

experience to see what you're up to. So paperback of Honor Best Behavior and the workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, are both available on August 26th. And I can't... wait to see you in the world to talk about them. You can get them wherever you get your books.