Post-Gathering Integration
Coming out of ritual space and into the mundane world of tasks and carrying on with our life-as-usual pace can feel a bit jolting. Here are some reminders to help you with your integration of what moved through you today:
1) Allow the material of what you worked on stay close to your heart. In terms of alchemy, let it ripen in the vessel before taking the lid off too soon. This means to not talk about it with other people before it’s fully cooked. When you do decide to talk about it, be sure it’s with people you trust.
2) What you did MATTERED. We can easily begin to judge ourselves for what we did or did not say, and downplay the importance of what we just did. Be aware of the inner critic and don’t let it steal this moment away from you.
3) For this reason it can be very powerful to do some art or writing around what came up from our time together. A simple writing prompt starting off your sentence with “I remember” can help you access the benefits that you received from our time together. Take a look at the 7 gates of grief below and write about how each one is touching you at this time. Share it with someone you trust.
4) Take in the beauty around you. Opening up to grief and sorrow also opens us up to the joy and beauty of life around us. Get outside, take in a film, a song, perhaps a whole album. Let yourself be touched by the beauty of the world.
5) Let yourself REST. In the words of Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey, “We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.”
6) Keep your grief warm, keep working with it, stay close to the vulnerability you touched. Check out the work of Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé, Martín Prechtel, or the book by Francis Weller, perhaps pick up a copy of this children’s book to read to your inner child if you lost a parent, or listen to some grief-inspired music like the songs on this Spotify Playlist
The 7 Gates of Grief
First Gate:
Everything you love, you will lose. This includes people, places, animals, and times of our lives that have ended.
Second Gate:
The places in us that have not known love. Places that have been wrapped in shame and rejected, places that have never felt compassion, parts of us that we have cut off out of shame or fear.
Third Gate:
World grief, climate catastrophes and crises, species loss, wars, and ongoing genocides, the collective loss of cultures and languages around the word.
Fourth Gate:
What we expected and didn't receive, things we didn’t even realize we lost but we feel the loss that might be hard to even put words to.
Fifth Gate:
Ancestral grief that we carry within us. Disconnection and loss of stories and language. Sense of psychological homelessness from this.
Sixth Gate:
Grief over having caused harms as a human species on the planet, both collectively, and personally towards other beings.
Seventh Gate;
Grief of having someone die under our care as someone in the healing or helping profession