Hold It, Together.
Why communal mourning beats solitary coping
“This can’t be my life.”
When grief has me in its grip, I’m tempted to reject what doesn’t match my expectations.
“This isn’t the future, the partner, the kid, the job, the life I expected.”
It’s undeniable–sometimes we lose what we love, don’t get what we badly want. Beloved people or institutions disappoint us and feel like strangers. We may carry griefs we inherited before we were born.
A battered heart is a birthright. Everybody hurts, so why can grief feel almost… embarrassing? Why do we hold sorrow as a solitary burden?
Across time and around the world, grief rituals are a universal impulse to carry the weight of loss in community. These days, we shave down the why and how long of acceptable grief to a sliver that can lodge in the heart. An ache we try to work around.
The flinch makes sense. Even single-celled organisms instinctively move away from painful stimuli. But wisdom teachers and neuroscientists agree: Something opens up when we turn toward what’s hard. Contemplatives call it “a long, loving look at the real.” In meditation, it can sound like acknowledging, “This too is here.” Gentle, curious attention to what is actually happening. We soften the secondary suffering that comes from fighting or denying it.
How do we pivot from “This can’t be my life” to “This too is here”? From not this to this too?
Hold It Together–Or Hold It, Together?
When you count the cost of an open heart, be sure to factor in the cost of one clenched shut.
Author Francis Weller writes, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them.”
When we fixate on what we don’t want, our hearts constrict. Fear causes us to tighten, to brace—and to cling to anything that resembles safety. Even if it isolates us or narrows our hope.
Gratitude, on the other hand, loosens our grasp. When paired with grief, it honors what we love, opening us to the full spectrum of joy, pain, and shared connection.
“Grief is the hard and tender work of keeping our hearts open to love, and to the Divine that connects us all,” says Mike Petrow, who will be co-facilitating our upcoming workshop on grief.
You literally can’t hold someone’s hand with a clenched fist. Unfortunately, our culture often leaves us isolated in our sorrow. We tell ourselves to “hold it together,” keep pushing forward, keep producing in a world turned upside down.
Open the hand, and the phrase rearranges itself.
Hold it, together.
That’s the invitation of our upcoming grief ritual. Guided by spiritual guides and grief counselors Mike Petrow and Dianne Disston, we will build a shared container for sorrow. Your personal losses, your neighbor’s pain, and the ache of the world – all of it.
What happens when we forget any of the 4 layers of grief (individual, interior, collective, and ancestral)
Why it’s still worth loving, even if we know we’ll lose
How our own healing work leads us to the medicine that is ours to share
A ritual for bearing witness to our grief together
When we name “this too is here,” that includes our holy longings. As Rainer Maria Rilke writes,
God speaks to each of us as he makes us: Go to the limits of your longing. …Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.
We can grieve the gap between the world we dream of and the world we wake up to each morning. And we don’t have to do it in isolation.
Where does “not alone in this” show up in your body? Can you breathe into that invitation and follow it to a community practice of holding it all, together?
Sorrow is meant to be shared. We’d love to see you November 14.
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