Grieving is necessary for change

A few months ago I wrote about how every memory hurts and everyone is traumatized.

Every memory still hurts.

And what I, along with our team at Co-Creating Inclusion, have been exploring is how grief is necessary for change.

The ability to grieve, then, is a rarely articulated leadership skill, if we are aspiring for creativity, innovation and transformation towards equity, inclusion, justice and liberation.

And I’m not talking about a narrow definition of grief as the process you go through when you lose a loved one.

I’m talking more broadly about the grief that comes with change, that is also necessary for change.

The Five Gates of Grief

In one of Malaika’s favorite books, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller (full disclosure, I haven’t read the entire book), the five gates of grief are described as follows (chapter three):

The First Gate: Everything We Love, We Will Lose (death and illness)
The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love (the parts of ourselves we deny, hold in contempt, feel shame about - the parts that feel unloved)
The Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World (sadness at the state of things around and beyond us, locally and globally, including our loss of connection with nature as well as with each other)
The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive (unmet needs and expectations, including unfulfilled potential and being undervalued)
The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief (the sorrows experienced by our ancestors that often linger unacknowledged - which in the US includes a legacy of attempted genocide, land theft, enslavement, colonization and separation from home)
Trauma - Weller doesn’t name this as a gate but acknowledges it maybe needs its own one, saying:
“Trauma always carries grief, though not every grief carries trauma. Therefore, grief work is a primary ingredient in the resolution of trauma. Ultimately, these gates all lead to the same chamber, the communal hall of sorrows. It makes no difference which door we open, which threshold we cross.”

There are many ways to inventory grief, but I find it helpful to have a bit of a map.

Then what?

Weller also talks about grief rituals that allow for containment (falling into the depths of our sorrow) and release (in order to enter into a more full expression of who we are).

As I said, I’m still reading the book.

In the meantime, LaVoya has put together a practical grief guide that provides different methods of moving through grief.

Grief is important right now

Grief is always important, but as we are going through some particularly fast moving news cycles as the US election approaches it’s important that we steady and ground ourselves.

Grief can feel utterly unmooring, I know, but grieving is a process through which we can come back to ourselves and our communities in order to move into dreaming, action and change.

Grief can also be utterly debilitating and I’ve been working on accepting that sometimes that’s just what is necessary. It can feel “unproductive” and yet it is critical. I see too often how when we don’t take the time to acknowledge grief, it can come out sideways and cause harm to ourselves and/or others.

What are you grieving? And what are you doing to grieve?

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The Five Gates of Grief

Then what?

Grief is important right now

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