gates of grief
We acknowledge our connection with teachers, mentors and loved ones who have apprenticed us in the use of ritual to support tending to grief. We identify Francis Weller’s work in helping to conceptualize gateways into grief. We recommend The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (2015) as an important text for those who thirst for more.
The First Gate: Everything We Love, We Will Lose
This gateway into grief is most familiar and recognized in contemporary culture. And it also betrays our ambivalent relationship to loss. Corporate policies define bereavement benefits to proscribe who is eligible to grief what kinds of losses and for how long.
We all secretly know that the price of love is grief. As Weller writes, “everything is a gift, and nothing lasts.” This painful truth may reside in our body as an ache in the heart or as a weight in the pit of our stomach.
Funerals, grave side ceremonies, and spreading cremated remains are examples of rituals for collective grieving. The soul yearns to gather, to mourn, to weep and to cry out in pain. This form of grief tending helps to begin our healing journey.
The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love
Beyond the loss of people, places, and things we love, there are parts within us that have never known love, kindness, or welcome. These parts often live wrapped in shame, exiled from our own compassion.
This sense of defectiveness is a hidden loss—one we cannot grieve until we accept its truth and meet it with care. Trauma, emotional neglect, and adverse childhood experiences often lead to this inner splitting and exile.
The Second Gate invites us to name the regrets we carry. Weller speaks of “choices that hindered or harmed, abandoned dreams, faded friendships, and the decision to close our hearts”—all as sources of deep loss.
Therapeutic approaches like inner child work, shadow work, parts work, and self-compassion help us tend to these tender, hidden parts and support healing.
The Third Gate: The Sorrows of the WorlD
The Third Gate opens us to communal grief and our shared loss as beings on a fragile planet. The climate crisis, war, famine, and mass extinction are constant reminders of this “Earthgrief.”
Weller notes that “the loss of our connection with nature” is a key aspect of this gate. We may mistake this grief as personal failure, but it can also reflect our alienation from the “beautiful and strange otherness” of the natural world.
“When we open ourselves to the sorrows of the world,” Weller writes, “we are overwhelmed by grief and, in some alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet… Remembering our bond with the earth helps heal our bodies and souls.”
The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive
The Fourth Gate invites us to feel our deep “longing for belonging.” As “Stone Age people,” we evolved in small, connected groups—our birthright was touch, soothing words, and being held in a primal web of life.
We often mistake this longing as personal failure, but it reflects a society that has not offered what we were built to expect.
This gate also holds the loss of purpose. We yearn for an identity beyond “what do you do?”—one rooted in authenticity. Our true gifts emerge when we live from the core of who we are, connecting us to others and the more-than-human world.
“Facing our emptiness is key to our freedom,” Weller writes. “It is not a personal failing, but a symptom of a wider loss.”
The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief
We carry ancestral grief in our bodies—grief that often lingers in silence, unacknowledged.
Many coped in ways that added a second layer of suffering: alcoholism, isolation, rage, and a silence that cut them off from support.
What was meant to be a blessing—our psychic inheritance—became a weight we still carry.
“Tending this undigested grief of our ancestors not only frees us to live our own lives but also eases ancestral suffering in the other world.”
This grief also holds the pain of collective violence—the shadow of those abuses still lives in our psyches.
Another facet is the loss of connection to the ancestors themselves. No longer rooted in their songs, stories, rituals, or relationship to land, we are left feeling spiritually homeless.
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