🎧 Listen to the Essay and/or Meditation 🎧
Why, yes, those are 2 separate audio links – 1 below, 1 above. || My reading of this essay is before the opening Hi friends. 👇🏾 || A guided meditation is at the top of this email. 👆🏾 || An archive of meditations lives here.
Listen to me read this essay:
This is the second in a 3-part series based on Let It All Out, my online course about grief. You can find all posts here.
Hi friends
Thank you for being here. I hope you’re finding moments of rest in these chaotic streets. I’m learning (once again) whatever I choose to write or teach about, that’s what echoes in my life. Guess what happens when you start a series on grief?
😭😭😭
As I mentioned on the 🌑 New Moon, due to recent illness and pain, I’ve been navigating grief around diminished capacities. As an added bonus, writing about grief has re-surfaced feelings around other losses, including the end of my marriage (3 years ago) and my mom’s death (9 years ago). I do not currently feel acute grief about any of these (even my return to using a cane, which stinks)—and I feel in their emergence a deep well of emotions yearning for liberation. Sharing helps me remember not a single one of us goes untouched by intimate loss. In this month’s 🌓 First Quarter Chat, people wrote about grief they’re experiencing including around changing bodies, deaths of pets and people, and the heartbreaking ordeal of losing parents to dementia. All this flows in the larger collective ocean of aching anguish for our world. Yet, most of us learn to mask sadness in a society that pathologizes grief and does not practice mourning rituals. As I stated last time: grief is what we feel when confronted with loss, and mourning is how we process those feelings. Modernity does not celebrate allowing loss or processing feelings. I too am modern. Or, I am too modern. Probably both.
In my early twenties, I attended an intro session at a large Zen center. The students all faced inward as I sat on one of the only empty cushions at the front, near the teacher. I was the only Black person in there and one of the youngest. Feeling on display in the packed Zendo, my mind raced while my body squirmed. Only twenty or so minutes of silent stillness exposed the dysregualtion of my then often activated system. Panicked thoughts about everything from my latest crush to whether I belonged in that room ran rampant. I fidgeted to the point that the teacher was basically directing instructions at me. I longed to weep. My body craved release but only found more agitation. Even years later, after regular practice, after my body learned to sit still, after I found my first teacher, I never felt permission to cry during meditation. No one ever told me not to cry. Also, no one else was crying (not that I could tell). Through many years of therapy and other interventions, I came to understand the complex trauma that manifested itself in my life, often through tears, including during meditation. I benefitted greatly from teachings that contextualized emotions. I appreciated spaces that did not stigmatize my intense sobbing on the cushion. On retreat, I received helpful instruction to find refuge in nature (I highly recommend screaming in the woods). And I still feel weird for crying. Almost anywhere.
Some of you probably know the story of Kisa Gotami and the mustard seed. The short version: Kisa Gotami lost her only child and in hysterical grief she convinced herself her baby boy was only sleeping and carried his dead body around asking everyone for medicine to wake him. Eventually, she made her way to the Buddha who said he’d help her if she could bring him a mustard seed from a house that did not know death. Of course, she could not find such a home. After encountering so many other stories of loss, Kisa Gotami came back to the Buddha understanding the universality of grief. End scene. Or is it? I like Sylvia Boorstein’s unorthodox addendum to the story: "And then the Buddha and the woman sat together for a while and cried."
My strongest emotions express through tears: fear, anger, shame, excitement, joy, nostalgia, love... cue crying. Last month, on my way to my friends’ farm in Pennsylvania, a traffic cop on Canal Street yelled at me when I failed to follow his directions. I mouthed my sincerest apologies through the closed window, but he was livid and kept up his raging rant for the very long light change. In the darkness of the Holland Tunnel, I burst into tears from embarrassment. After, I felt calm. The other day, while driving upstate to visit my sister, the swell of feelings I’ve been experiencing since starting this series on grief finally broke. I had decided to pause the never-ending podcast stream and instead listen to the The Sound of Music soundtrack, something I had not done since maybe the fifth grade (though I watch the film every year with my sister—it’s one of her favorites). The opening title song with its sounds of Alpine winds, melodramatic orchestration, and descriptions of nature as melody had me weeping. Belting along to each tune, I continued to cry through the entire album. Maybe I need to ritualize more musicals from my childhood into my grief work lol. Reviewing notes from last year’s Let It All Out course, I found this quote:
“A man who can’t cry is a social time bomb... In my village, emotion is ritualized because it is seen as a sacred thing. If addressed within a sacred space, the emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace.” — Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa
My discomfort with grief and mourning makes sense given our larger death phobic culture. Researchers believe our disconnection from dying (and therefore grief) intensified in the 1800s with the medicalization of death which introduced a parallel shift from the religious to the medical and from the communal to the private. People no longer died at home surrounded by ritual and community but in the hospital, often alone. As it became medical, death transformed from a regularly shared occurrence into something to be fought or fixed by professionals. These attitudes increased as society became more industrialized and mobile. Even seemingly good things like the focus on hygiene and sterilization contributed to our disconnection from dying and dead bodies. As death became associated with contamination and contagion, cemeteries moved from within communities to the edge of cities. With modernity, fewer witnessed death up close or tended to the bodies of the dead and dying. In this process, death and any subsequent grief became distant and shameful.
This is the environment Elizabeth Kübler-Ross encountered when she came here in the 1950’s to work in American hospitals. Most of you probably know her name from the popularization of her five stages of grief. Before moving to the U.S., Kübler-Ross was a Swiss village doctor who treated people mostly in their homes where she was a witness to death like everyone in traditional cultures. By the time she arrived here, there had been almost a a century and a half of sanitization and silencing of death. She encountered settings which shuttered away the dying into isolated floors and wings. Kübler-Ross began to interview them. Out of this she wrote her first book which included a list of the stages of dying as exemplified by the people with whom she spoke. Although she highlighted the five that many of us now know (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), she did include other stages including shock, partial denial, anticipatory grief, guilt, anxiety, and numbness. She insisted that none of these were meant to be linear, universal, nor totalizing descriptions. She simply hoped the experiences of dying people would encourage others to talk about death. Though she tried to correct this in her lifetime, pop culture took over and these five stages of dying were caricaturized and codified into the five stages of grief, as if there’s a universal, sequential tidy process for grieving. News flash: nope.
I had the honor to witness my mom’s death. I will always be grateful for that. I sang and chanted as she took her final breaths and I wept while the doctor and nurses removed her body. After, through no efforts of my own, friends and family swooped me up into the traditional Ethiopian mourning practices which feature, as many cultures do, a whole lotta wailing. I’d heard wailing a few times before, but growing up largely disconnected from my heritage, I did not viscerally know our steady rhythm of rituals around death and had never experienced others wailing for my own loss. When my mother and sister moved back to Addis Ababa in the late nineties, they seemed constantly to be going to a leqso. Something like sitting shiva or attending a wake, leqso literally means lamentation or wailing in Amharic and signifies the mourning period including when a grieving family receives visitors. In this process, wailing occurs with almost every new arrival to the home. It doesn’t usually go on long, but it creates a steady stream of weeping. The highly embodied and emotive practice of wailing became a powerful release for me, especially in the Orthodox services where it mixed with the soulful music and drums. In these contexts, others thrashing and crying about my mom’s death gave permission for my deepest grief to emerge.
There are countless traditional mourning practices and rituals including altar & art making, various rites, and ceremonies. Many are tied to the rhythms of time and nature. All of them make space for grief to be felt and let go. Personally, I love wailing. There’s something powerfully performative to it. It features movement and musicality. If you’ve never experienced wailing traditions, check out this YouTube playlist I created for the course which features mourning practices from various cultures. In many countries, you can hire professional mourners who are called moirologists by nerds (the playlist clips from Sardinia and China feature some). Professional mourning existed in ancient China, the Middle East, Egypt and Rome. It can also be found referenced in many places in the Old and New Testaments. In Ancient Egypt, every burial required two women mourners representing the goddesses Isis and Nephtys. Until recently, a service called Rent-A-Mourner operated in Essex, UK. During the pandemic, the wildly popular annual contest for best mourner in San Juan del Río in central Mexico had to be made virtual which means we can watch the entries. And guess what mourners were called starting in the14th century? Placebos. I know! Those of you paying attention may remember placebos featured heavily in Soulful Cycles, my series on ritual. You may also remember this: placebos work. Do wailing and other mourning rituals provide placebos for the healing of grief? And what kind of sacred witchy magic is that?
My mom’s best friend, Mulalem, lives in the Bronx. For the year following my mother’s death, every time my sister and I went to visit Mulalem, she would open her apartment door and begin wailing. After we finished crying, we would drink tea, look at old photos, and laugh about my mom’s quirky ways. As I’ve experienced it, often friends and even distant family vie for role of loudest wailer. Intimates help move grief into a space of appreciation and love. Everywhere else in the world, Finot and I were expected to no longer be crying about our loss. But at Mulalem’s, our tears were welcomed, even encouraged as a portal into healing. There’s a specific rhythm to mourning in Ethiopia, with special services and rituals throughout the months following a death and for the annual anniversary. After one year, the ritual completed, Mulalem stopped wailing when she opened her door.
Tears still come for sweet memories of my mom, for many good moments of married life, and for the pain of losing these. Sometimes loss is how I recognize the preciousness of someone or something. I only grieve what I love. I hear a lot of people say grief never ends. I don’t know yet if that’s true. I do know the immensity of acute grief can feel like crashing waves overwhelming me. Through mourning, these deluges become smaller currents, even ripples. When stillness arrives, I sense the goodness of love underneath the water. Here I touch gratitude, grief’s often sidelined sibling. Next time we will explore how to engage grief and gratitude through sacred practices.
Until then, may we remember and honor the goodness of grief.
With love,
Sebene
JOURNAL PROMPTS:
Has emotion been ritualized in your life? Whether it has or has not been ritualized, how do you imagine this has impacted you?
ONGOING PRACTICES:
Explore at least one way you can ritualize grief. It may be listening to music or going to a specific place in nature. Create sacred time and space to experience this.
One more chance to practice with me in person this year…
Meditation Party: Reckless Conviviality With Mindfulness Superfriends (with Dan Harris and Jeff Warren)
October 24–26 at Omega Institute
Many of us meditate solo, especially these days. This is a chance to get all of the high-occupancy-vehicle-lane benefits of meditating in a group.
Join self-proclaimed meditation nerds Dan Harris, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for a weekend “do-nothing” party with lots of meditating. This is definitely not a silent retreat. It is an opportunity to connect with others, move your body, nap, and discover the power of applying your practice to everything in life.
Note: Meditation Party is one of Omega's most popular workshops and will host as many as 425 participants. Register early to secure your seat and housing.
