This is a whole new aspect of my work. You may well be wondering: “Why the focus on grieving? Isn’t there enough grief and sorrow in the world already?” Yes, is my answer. “Wouldn’t it be better to just focus on the positive?” It depends, I say.

There is so much grief about so many things going on in the world, in so many countries, in our own communities and so many individual losses and griefs through just living life as it is. Any of these alone can feel overwhelming, let alone many happening all at once. If you are following ‘the news’ and beyond, you will know what I am talking about. You’re most likely deeply affected by it all too.

Grief  hurts and can bring us to our knees. It often feels too hard to face into it, let alone allow ourselves to feel it, especially in our Western imperial paradigm, where we have lost the (he)art and skill of grieving well. “Grieving Well? Why would I want to get good at grieving well, rather than living well?” Maybe surprisingly, I have found that being able to grieve well has a significantly positive impact on living well. And I am not alone in that.

Some of us eventually stumble into the gifts at the bottom of the well of grief (see David Whyte’s poem “The Well of Grief” ), yet many of us don’t know there are any gifts, wouldn’t know how to go about finding them, find the journey too painful, or have ways of sidestepping grief to be able to cope. Any or all of this may be a direct result of modernity’s way of living. It doesn’t need to be like this.

Seven years ago, I was introduced to Francis Weller’s work through his book “A wild edge of sorrow”. When I finally had an opportunity to join his programme “Facing the World with Soul” at the beginning of 2023 I jumped at it; and followed it up by participating in his “Grief Ritual Training” programme twice after that.

I was deeply moved and inspired (transformed, even) and saw the ‘missing piece’ in my work with the Living Well programme. I realised that in so many ways my own journey had been about metabolising grief. Yet I had not previously experienced the depth of transformative power that 'grief tending’ created, as brought to my world through Francis Weller’s work. So I decided to make this my current focus and have been developing  the “Grieving Well” services and making them available through The Welcome Connective.

Here are some of the basic / foundational premises of grieving well through developing an “Apprenticeship with Sorrow”, as Francis calls it. I have cited, paraphrased and interpreted this from his latest book “Entering the Healing Ground”, Preface, pages xii-xiii):

• Grief and grieving is a core human faculty. We can develop skills and capacity to turn towards our sorrows in a way that transforms them into a ‘medicine’ for ourselves and our communities, over time.

• Grief ‘works us’ in profound ways. If we turn towards it, we are invited or called to ‘work grief’ as an active process, not just to endure it, or let it wash over us. This will allow us to nurture and develop the deep roots that will feed and nourish the trunk, branches, leaves and fruits of our “tree of our wellbeing”, from the bottom up.

• This ‘apprenticeship with sorrow’, needs to be “a sustained practice in the art of vesseling” - allowing our being to become a strong enough vessel to hold and transform grief, by staying in relationship with it, “through attention, affection, compassion, interest, and efforts like writing, dancing, drawing, ritual, painting and intimate conversations with trusted people”.

My journey into grief tending allowed me to see that it deeply feeds my “tree of wellbeing” from even below  the bottom up. By nurturing and tending the health of the mycelial and microbial networks in the darkness, depth and ‘messiness’ (our grief) of the soil that is feeding this tree, it is likely to thrive, being much more deeply and strongly rooted, even in the wild and stormy weathers that may be on our individual and collective horizons.