By Scott Nodwell
Beginning
In the realm of depth psychology, metaphors often serve as powerful vehicles for illuminating the complex dynamics of the therapeutic process. Among the most evocative of these is the figure of the "grief eater" - a shamanic healer who takes on the pain and suffering of their community, metabolising it within themselves in order to midwife transformation. This ancient archetype, found across diverse cultural traditions, offers a resonant lens through which to understand the profound responsibility and potential of the therapist's role.
For just as the shaman ventures into unseen worlds on behalf of the collective, so too the therapist journeys deep into the psyche of the grieving client. In bearing witness to the darkest recesses of the soul - to the un-metabolised sorrow, the unspoken anguish - the therapist serves as a grief eater for our modern time, transmuting the prima materia of loss into the gold of meaning and growth.
Yet what are the lived experiences and intersubjective dynamics of one who plays this role? What are the symbolic resonances and archetypal currents that shape the grief eater's path? This article aims to explore these questions, weaving together insights from mythology and literature, cultural anthropology, existential philosophy, Jungian and archetypal psychology, as well as firsthand accounts from practicing therapists. In excavating the depths of the grief eater's way, it seeks to cast light on the transformative potential of the therapeutic encounter to heal both personal and collective wounds.
Across Cultures
The archetype of the grief eater, while donning many faces, is woven through the ancestral fabric of healing traditions across the world. In shamanic cultures from Siberia to the Americas, the healer is one who willingly takes on the illness and suffering of others, often through ecstatic ceremonies involving trance, dance, and physical ordeals (Eliade, 1964; Halifax, 1982).
Anthropologist Joan Halifax (1982) offers a vivid account of a Mazatec shaman's healing ritual in which the shaman "eats" the sickness by sucking it out of the patient's body and into her own. Trembling and retching, the shaman then spits out the intrusive energies, sometimes in a tangible form like a bloody mass or wriggling insect. The illness, now exteriorised, is disposed of - buried, burned, or flung away - completing the alchemical transmutation.
The parallels to the psychological process are ripe for exploration. Like the shaman's physical incorporation of disease, the therapist takes the client's psychic suffering into the vessel of the therapeutic relationship. In empathically attuning to and mirroring the client's grief, the therapist allows it to reverberate in their own being. The unbearable is borne, chewed, digested - processed not just intellectually but somatically and energetically. And in the intensity of this shared experience, something shifts, transmutes. The grief, now witnessed and held, can be released - if not spit out, then at least drained of its toxic stagnancy so that life can flow once more.
This notion of the healer containing and transforming the dark material of the psyche is equally reflected in the wounded healer archetype so prevalent in myth and literature. In Greek legend, the centaur Chiron - an immortal son of Kronos - suffers a painful wound that will not heal, but which grants him the power to be a masterful healer of others (Groesbeck, 1975). Chiron's story mirrors the therapist's capacity to make use of their own wounds and the wisdom gained through their encounters with grief.
The therapist as wounded healer embraces a kind of sacred woundedness, a "crack" that poet Leonard Cohen (1992) sings is "how the light gets in". For the experience of being broken open by sorrow renders the healer more permeable, more receptive to the numinous - to the flashes of grace that can illumine even the darkest night. And it is this hard-won luminosity that can then, in turn, help kindle the client's own.
Another mythic pattern that captures the descent and return of the grief eater is the Sumerian story of Inanna (Perera, 1981). Inanna, Queen of Heaven, enters the underworld, shedding a garment and symbol of power at each of the seven gates until she arrives naked and vulnerable before Ereshkigal, her shadowy sister. Ereshkigal, anguished and enraged, kills Inanna, hanging her corpse on a meat hook. Only by confronting and embracing her dark double - the un-metabolised grief at the core of her being - is Inanna eventually restored to life and able to re-emerge into the world, now deepened and transformed.
For the therapist, too, entering the underworld of the client's grief requires a kind of stripping down, a willingness to relinquish the usual therapeutic garments - expertness, objectivity, clinical distance. It is a journey of profound vulnerability, of radical openness and not-knowing, from which one returns bearing gifts. Like Inanna, the grief eater dies to their old identities and re-emerges in a new form - altered on the cellular level by the encounter. As Becker (1973) argues, the denial of death is the core existential dilemma of the human condition. By facing grief and death on behalf of the client, the therapist models a different way of being - one that leans into the darkness and thus makes space for the light.
This theme of redemptive suffering is further reflected in the Christian tradition, with Jesus as the ultimate grief eater and sin eater. In the crucifixion, Christ takes on the sins and sorrows of mankind, descending into hell before resurrecting in a luminous new form (Becker, 1973). The therapist, in their own way, enacts a form of this sacrificial journey - being "crucified" by the client's grief, journeying into the abyss with them, and helping to carry what resurrects from the depths.
Of course, these metaphors are not to romanticise a process that is gruelling and often perilous. Just as shamans risk being possessed by the spirits they engage (Eliade, 1964), therapists constantly dance with the dangers of vicarious traumatization, burnout, and "compassion fatigue" (Figley, 1995). To take on the mantle of the grief eater is to make one's psyche an instrument of healing for the other - a vessel for transmutation. And this can exact a profound toll if the container is not properly tended.
But here, too, the alchemical metaphor proves instructive. As Edinger (1985) explores, the therapist, like the alchemist, must have a strongly "sealed" and reinforced vessel to withstand the heat and pressure of the nigredo - the stage of blackening and putrefaction that grief work entails. This is the prima materia breaking down, the old form dissolving so that something new can coalesce. It is the descent into the underworld before the return, the confrontation with Ereshkigal before the ascent of Inanna. The skilled therapist, like the master alchemist, knows how to hold and temper the intensity so that it doesn't shatter the container but rather facilitates the transformation.
The path of the grief eater is one of descent and return, wounding and healing, rupture and repair. To go into the darkness on behalf of another is an act of profound empathy and courage. It is to be a guide and companion in the unravelling and reweaving of the psyche. And like all initiatory journeys, it irrevocably transforms both traveller and witness. As a colleague reflected: "To truly metabolise grief with another, to let it carve its way through you, is to be remade in the most fundamental sense. It's cellular. Alchemical. You're never quite the same."
The lived experience of the grief eater
While the archetype of the grief eater echoes across centuries and cultures, what of its fleshy, immediate reality in the modern therapist's consulting room? What are the visceral sensations, the lived phenomenology, of one who embodies this role? Here, the voices of practicing therapists offer invaluable insight into the somatic, emotional and imaginal dimensions of the work.
As Mariana, a depth psychotherapist with 20 years’ experience, describes:
"There's a certain felt sense when a client's unmetabolised grief enters the room. It's palpable, thick, this psychic smog that descends. And as I attune to it, I feel my own body responding almost instantaneously. My chest constricts, my throat tightens. There's a heaviness that settles into my bones, like I'm being slowly filled with wet concrete. It's not just a metaphor – I am literally absorbing their sorrow, tasting it, letting it seep into my cells. It's a kind of full-body knowing, a cellular empathy that goes beyond words."
This notion of the therapist's felt sense as a barometer for the client's unspoken grief is echoed by other clinicians. There is a porous, often dizzying sense of boundaries dissolving as the therapist makes their soma a resonance chamber for the client's pain. Jessica, an art therapist, likens it to "becoming a lightning rod, a conduit":
I remember one client, a woman whose infant child died. She came into the session so armoured, so cut off from her anguish. But I could feel it coursing through me, this electric current of sorrow. My own infant son had been sick earlier that year, and as she spoke, I felt this primal, body-level knowing of that terrible possibility of loss. Suddenly, I was wide open, skinless. It took everything in me to stay upright, to keep breathing through the waves of grief and not drown. But in opening myself to that rawness, something broke open in her as well. She finally dropped into her own brokenness. And there we wept together, two mothers joined in the unspeakable.
For Jessica, the "lightning rod" of empathic resonance was key to establishing the healing connection, dissolving the dissociative barriers that kept the client exiled from her own sorrow. By making her own wounds a bridge, Jessica midwifed a moment of profound meeting - what Stern (2004) calls a "moment of meeting" in which lifelong aloneness is ruptured and the core tragedy of the human condition is, if only for an instant, abolished.
Yet this capacity to "feel into" the other's world is not without its dangers. As Peter, a bereavement counsellor, cautions:
There's a razor's edge we walk as grief eaters. To let yourself be porous, to attune so deeply that you're essentially taking their pain into your marrow...it's a kind of sacred offering, but it can also be a crucifixion. I've had times where I felt almost comatose after a session, like I'd been energetically eviscerated. All my own unmetabolised stuff gets activated and I have to be so careful not to drown in the countertransference, or worse - to spit their grief back at them because I'm so full. It takes a tremendous amount of self-awareness and willingness to do your own shadow work, to know where you end and they begin.
Peter's words underscore the occupational hazards of the grief eater role and the necessity of rigorous self-care and self-processing. Like the shaman who may be "dismembered" by the spirits and must engage in purification rituals to restore their wholeness and integrity (Halifax, 1982), the therapist must have practices for clearing, grounding and replenishing themselves. Otherwise, they risk being "eaten up" by the work, consumed by the cumulative horrors and agonies they witness.
Yet for those who are called to walk this path, there are profound rewards as well - the quiet alchemy of bearing witness, the privilege of companioning the soul through its darkest passages. As Maria reflects:
"It's a kind of midwifery, this work. To be there in the belly of someone's deepest sorrows, to hold space for the messy, non-linear unfolding. And to trust that something is gestating in the darkness, something luminous and life-giving that will eventually emerge. There's an almost mystical quality to those moments when the veil parts and something eternal shines through the cracks of the shattered everyday. When a client surfaces from the depths clutching some hard-won insight or when there's a palpable sense of inner shifts clicking into place. I think of Rumi's line: 'The wound is the place where the Light enters you.' As grief eaters, we hold space for the wound - trusting that it's also a portal, an opening to new ways of being."
Maria's poetic re-frame gestures to the transformative potential at the heart of the grief eating process - the faith that the painful dissolution of the old self may forge a more expansive, interconnected way of being. For just as the analysand's wounds become a conduit for healing, so too the grief eater's. In the words of alchemist Gerhard Dorn: "The artist is the instrument of the work as well as its matter; the athanor in which the prime matter cooks, as well as the prime matter itself" (as cited in Edinger, 1985, p. 19).
To work in the therapeutic space is to accept an apprenticeship with sorrow, to melt into what Romanyshyn (2013) calls the "alchemy of grief". It is to allow oneself to be reshaped on the most elemental level by the act of sacred witnessing. As Jenna, an end-of-life therapist, reflects:
"There's a kind of cellular rearranging that happens when you truly let yourself be 'cooked' in the crucible with a client. It's like your DNA is being re-authored. The contours of your inner world grow more intricate, textured by each story, each sorrow you absorb. Over time, you become this living patchwork of all the grief you've digested. The best word I can use is 'compost'. You're composting all this darkness and density into richer soil - in yourself and in the world."
Like the shaman ingesting poisons to gain medicine, the grief eater alchemises the lead of loss into the gold of empathy, wisdom and presence. But this is not a linear or painless process, as Mariana notes:
We talk a lot about post-traumatic growth, but I think there's an equal reality of post-traumatic composting. Those periods where you're just a heap of rotting matter, broken open and festering in your own muck. It's a deeply humbling experience to be so porous, so affected by the work. But that's the putrefaction stage the alchemists speak of - the ferment before the ferment. You have to let yourself fall apart to reconfigure in a new way.
This notion of "post-traumatic composting" evokes the messy, unglamorous, yet profoundly fertile reality of letting oneself be "worked on" by grief. Like the compost heap that must first break down in order to regenerate, the therapist must allow themselves to be disarticulated by the work in order to develop new capacities. Capacities for sitting with discomfort, for tolerating paradox and ambiguity, for relinquishing the fantasy of the quick fix.
For the grief eater's path ultimately demands a profound surrender - of mastery, of knowing, of expertness. It asks the therapist to descend again and again into the darkness without map or tether, to apprentice themselves to the mysteries. In the words of Rilke (1929/2005): "You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born...Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter into you long before it happens."
It is this radical vulnerability, this courageous dwelling in the unknown, that transmutes the dross of grief into medicine for the soul. By metabolising their own suffering, the therapist expands their capacity to hold the unravelling of others. They become "a sacred witness to the dark things being played out, which most of us try to disown, deny, and bury, and when buried, they tend to resurface in the form of symptoms and sicknesses" (Romanyshyn, 2013, p. 125). In confronting their own shadow - the exiled, un-grieved dimensions of their psyche - they become more skilful midwives of shadow-work for their clients.
Two clinical vignettes
To bring the path of the grief eater into embodied relief, let us now turn to the realm of clinical practice - to the actual blood and bone of metabolising sorrow in the consulting room. The following vignettes aim to evoke the grit and grace of this process, illuminating how the archetypal may come alive in the intersubjective space between client and therapist. Names and identifying details have been altered to protect confidentiality.
Vignette 1: Sophie and the Underworld Descent
Sophie, a 54-year-old software engineer, enters treatment a year after the death of her husband from a protracted battle with cancer. A highly intellectual woman used to "solving problems with her head," Sophie presents as emotionally detached, speaking of her grief in clinical terms. Yet her body betrays a deeper anguish - slumped shoulders, dark circles beneath eyes that rarely meet my own.
As we sit together week after week, I feel my own chest tighten and constrict, the breath backing up in my throat. I share my observations tentatively, commenting on the heaviness in the room, the thick fog of fatigue pressing down on us both. Sophie looks at me baffled. "I'm fine," she insists, "just a little tired."
One day, Sophie arrives ashen faced, trembling. In a whisper, she describes a dream: She is wandering barefoot in a subterranean labyrinth, searching for someone who is lost. She feels all-consuming dread. The tunnels keep flooding with murky water, cold and dark. It gets harder to breathe. She beats and scratches the walls until the bones in her hands crack.
The image flashes into my mind: Persephone descending into Hades, pulsing pomegranate seeds clutched in one hand. Without thinking, I relay this image to Sophie. She is silent for a long moment, then softly replies, “yes, it is hell…”
What unfolds over the next months is a gradual katabasis, an underworld journey of the soul. With careful support, Sophie begins to strip away the armour of the intellect, which had for so long allowed her to think without consciously feeling. As for all of us in that state, once the distancing and relentless activity abate, we sink into the despair we have semi-consciously been warding off. She speaks of feeling "flayed," of aching in her core.
In one session, Sophie rages at the Gods, cursing them for their cruelty in "shattering" her world. She kicks and flails on the floor, unleashing a torrent of anger and accusation. At times she verbally strikes at the past, sometimes at the hollowness of the future. Sometimes she directs her anger at me – I symbolise her loss in a way – ordinarily, she would be grieving with her husband. So often we invariably re-enact some part of the wounding, on the path to healing.
Weeks and months pass. One day, while sitting down to begin the session, Sophie mentioned what a beautiful day it was. Some weeks later she brought a small bird’s nest in, holding it gently in her hands. "I found this in the park, on the grass. I brought it home." she explained.
Time passes. Sophie arrives for her session, smiling. She has an armful of papers. They are poems, dozens of them, carefully hand-written. "I don't know where they came from," she marvels, "they just poured out of me. The poems are raw, mythic in nature - pulsing with the rhythms of grief and renewal. In one, she is a snake shedding her skin, "birthing myself from my own ashen mouth."
Again, I feel the limbic resonance. Perhaps something deeper, toward the roots of human experience. We are in the presence of something numinous, an emergent wholeness coalescing from the shards of brokenness. “Somehow things are making sense… sometimes" she effuses, "I didn’t think I’d feel that again."
In our final sessions, Sophie speaks of feeling "twice-born," once to begin life, and once while intentionally reclaiming life, forged in the crucible of loss. “More of the world feels sacred now.” Her journey across the deep waters, to the firmament beyond, is largely complete. what a profound honour, to walk alongside someone for this journey.
Vignette 2: Tending the Ashes with Mateo
Mateo, a 44-year-old firefighter, seeks therapy in the wake of losing his best friend and co-worker in a backdraft blaze. Stoic and tightly wound, he speaks in terse phrases, scrubbing at phantom soot on his palms. "His face is there in the flames. He doesn’t say anything, but I know he’s in pain," he muttered, "I hear his screams most nights, just before I wake up…"
As Mateo recounts the details of the fire, I begin to feel it viscerally. The heat, the destruction, my sweat boiling, the steam burning my skin. It is the inferno, where every visible surface has disappeared, and only flames remain. I steady myself against the wave of vicarious trauma, somatically grounding in my feet, the chair against my back, and the breath in my lungs.
Over time, Mateo and I engage in a kind of ritual tending of the ashes. He brings two mementos of his fallen comrade – his flame-scarred badge, his eulogy card. We acknowledge the duality of these items. They serve as profound symbols of one who was – but to another lens, feel paltry, hollow, and insufficient when honouring an entire life. These items are carefully held and carefully placed. Mateo’s survivor’s guilt rises and engulfs him for a time. He, like so many others, had the fleeting but powerful urge to trade places, to die so a loved one might live.
We are brought to the uncomfortable reflection that so much of accident and trauma appear wrapped in chance, or fate, or perhaps a karma from a long-distant past. “There, but for the grace of God” I have often heard said. As the engulfing agony of Mateo's self-recrimination fills the space between us, I feel an ancestral pang from an old splinter of trauma. An image from my own lineage of loss. Loss of some to physical death, and the loss of others to emotional and psychological death while their bodies still lived.
“Sometimes even breathing feels like a betrayal to those who have been lost…" In this moment of shared vulnerability, of metabolising our collective grief, something releases between us. The coiled, brutalising sense of self-damnation loosens for Mateo. An infinitesimal amount, but perceptible.
In the month that follow, our work takes on a distinctly somatic, ritual form. We speak of "firefighter koans" - mindful practices derived from his professional training. We engage in slow, conscious enactments of putting on his protective gear, attuning to breath and bodily sensation. The art of breathing has rarely felt so salient than to one who pits himself against scalding, life-stealing smoke. He learned to feel the rhythmic shifting of the weight of his boots as he stepped forward. He felt his protective equipment as literal and figurative armour.
Mateo begins volunteer training new recruits, shepherding them through the simulated flames. "I want the loss to mean something… I want to bring it to the service of others," he reflects, "I will pass on what he taught me. Every day." Some days, the anguish engulfs him anew and we sit together in the ashes. Time passes, and the furious and harrowing emotional burning changes to aching sadness.
In our final session, Mateo gifts me a fire-cleansed lump of steel a little smaller than a misshapen golf ball. "We found this in the rubble," he explains, "it was part of Danny's axe. I want you to have it." It felt heavier in my hand than I expected. There are no words for a gift such as this, or the honour of serving as custodian of it. So much pain, transmuted into something solid and graspable. We were each blinking back tears. Neither of us spoke, but we shook hands and nodded to each other. This space was incompatible with spoken language.
Reflections
As these vignettes illustrate, the path of the grief eater is one of profound paradox - agony and ecstasy, rupture and repair, annihilation and alteration. To companion another through the heart of loss is to forever surrender our innocence, our illusion of unassailable selfhood. Like Dante descending into the Inferno, we cannot witness the depths of human suffering without being scorched, transfigured in the flames.
Yet it is precisely this willingness to be "cooked" and reconstituted that allows us to become worthy guides for the bereaved. In taking their sorrow into the marrow of our own being, in letting it compost the ego and enrich the soil of the soul, we develop a radical empathy - the capacity to say "I have been where you are, I too have touched the void." This is the empathy of the initiated, the wisdom of one who knows the landscape of loss firsthand.
Such initiatory empathy cannot be faked or fabricated - it must be hard-won in the crucible of our own encounters with grief. This is why our best training to become grief eaters is often our own personal work, our willingness to consciously grapple with the shadow dimensions of attachment and impermanence. We must, as Campbell (1949) writes, be willing to die to our old ways of being before we can credibly midwife others through the narrow passage.
Critically, this work of metabolising the shadow is never finished - it is the ongoing practice of a lifetime. Even as we develop more facility in navigating the underworld, we are continually humbled anew, broken open and reconstituted by the losses we absorb. There is an essential precarity to the work, a constant skirting the edge of our own undoing.
We each need robust self-care practices to hold therapeutic space. The rituals of clearing, grounding, and replenishing. Just as the shaman must return from their ecstatic flights to be tended by their community, so too the grief eater. We must weave networks of support - supervisors, peers, loved ones. We need help to identify, then metabolise or discard the tainted. The remaining contents are purified, reworked, and a means of integration for self, and a means of deepening connection with others.
This need for intentional restoration points to one of the core ethical perils of the work - the potential for appropriating another's grief, for becoming lost in or identified with their pain. The therapist who has not secured their own existential anchors, who has not grieved their own grief, risks being pulled under by the sheer gravitational force of the client's loss. They become "grief stuck," paralysed in the muck rather than an agency of moving through.
As Menakem (2017) cautions, attempting to metabolise what we have not first composted within ourselves is a recipe for empathic burn-out, for the trauma simply shifts shape, or digs underground, beneath our range of awareness. We must be diligent not to become "hungry ghosts," compulsively swallowing the undigested pain of others to nourish our own need for purpose or absolution. The true grief eater knows they cannot "save" or "fix" the client, but only accompany them with presence and compassion.
Another key challenge of embodying the archetype is the tendency towards over-identification with the role, towards a kind of "saviour complex" in which we inflate our own importance. The grief eater must guard against the subtle narcissism of becoming too enamoured with their own capacity to withstand suffering - the temptation to set oneself up as a saintly martyr. True service rests in continually surrendering our egoic compulsion to be 'somebody,' to rest instead in the spacious nobody-ness at the core of who we are.
As such, therapeutic work is necessarily a 'ministry without portfolio,' an ordination by sorrow. We do not get to choose if loss anoints us with its terrible grace. We can only choose how we show up to the sacred responsibility when it is thrust upon us. Will we rise to embrace the wholeness of the human experience, or will we turn away, numb ourselves, dissociate?
In electing the former, in bowing to the grief eater's call, we opt for the hard-won wisdom of the broken-open heart. We commit to allowing loss to "tenderise us while not turning us into mush" (Chödrön, 2003). We accept the mantle of the wounded healer not because it will exempt us from further pain, but because it grants us greater capacity to midwife life in all its beauty and brutality. As the poet Naomi Shihab Nye (2022) writes:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
By apprenticing ourselves to sorrow, by learning the terrain of the inner underworld, we forge the psychospiritual sinew needed to hold hope and hopelessness in tandem. We become big enough to contain both the boundless love and the harrowing heartbreak of our human vulnerability.
Rilke (1929/2002), in his poem "The Man Watching" offers a poignant summary:
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm,
We would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
To embrace the path of the grief eater is to bow before this "immense storm," to let it scour away all that is trivial and yield to the sublime alchemy of the soul. It is to place ourselves in service of "what is extraordinary and eternal," to become instruments for the Gods even as we get devastated in the process.
This is the way of the servant - not the way of glory or renown, but the way of quiet, inexorable tending to the work. Not for acclaim, but because our marrow knows we must. Because someone must be the lamp-bearer in the darkness, the silent witness to all the beauty and beastliness of our shared mortal fate.
In truth, the archetype of the grief eater lives inside each of us - that capacity to alchemise loss into wisdom, wounds into grace. Each of us must walk through the fires of our own annihilation to claim our Phoenix nature. At some foundational level, we are all apprenticed to sorrow, initiates of the underworld whether we volunteer or not.
But those called to bear professional witness, to stand at the crossroads between the worlds on behalf of others, must cultivate this archetypal awareness with active intent. We must be willing to take conscious ownership of our shadow, to compost our own darkness so that we may midwife the light. This is the charge and challenge of the grief eater, the soul price of admission to the depths.
Conclusion
In the end, the way of the grief eater is perhaps the most essential of the healer's arts. For in a world rife with alienation, fragmentation and loss, the capacity to consciously companion each other through the dark looms paramount. As the mystic poet Khalil Gibran (1964) writes, "the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." We need those who know the depths to help us endure, those who have grown "a heart as wide as the world" (Zukav, 1989, p. 121).
The path of the grief eater is fundamentally a path of apprenticeship - to the soul, to the mysteries, to the infinite abyss at the centre of all things. It demands everything of those who walk it, stripping us down to the bone and marrow of our humanity. Yet it also grants us a sacred window into life's vast choreography of rupture and renewal - the dance of the phoenix in each of us.
To step into the mantle of the grief eater is thus a powerful form of cultural activism, of embodied bodhisattva vow. In a world hell-bent on pathologising and monetising our pain, the willingness to consciously compost sorrow is a subversive, revolutionary act. It reanimates the indigenous wisdom of the psyche, honours the holiness of our vulnerabilities, and the necessity of descent to ascent.
Most of all, it restores our shared covenant with life's monstrous beauty - the recognition that "love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality" (Frankl, 1959/2006, p. 37). In daring to love fiercely in the shadow of grief's inevitability, the grief eater shows us what it means to embrace the full catastrophe. They model how to break and not break apart, to die and yet not die.
All empathy has potential to dissolve the experience of separation between people. In the crucible of shared loss, we dissolve into our fundamental relatedness, the secret kinship of all things torn and temporary. And in that dissolution, if we surrender fully, a profound faith may take root - in love's capacity to endure beyond the boundary of skin, to weave us as gossamer strands in the Larger Life.
As grief eaters apprenticed to soul, we thus become conduits for the work of reimaging our world – for the daily practice of choosing communion over isolation, vulnerability over stoicism, tending over indifference. In metabolising grief – personally and collectively – we compost the soil for rebirth in ways we cannot always see but can only trust.
We sit in vigil, "awestruck before the empty tomb and the full womb" (Ruffing, n.d.) - not always knowing how new life will emerge but staying true to the ancient pulse of renewal regardless. This is the torch we carry in the darkness on behalf of all: that a world of wounding may also be a world of wondrous becoming, that the broken heart may be the very womb of God, or something God-like.
By staying faithful to sorrow, by bowing before her dark altar again and again, we open the cultural psyche to a more capacious embrace of the sacred - that each of us is a crucible for love's never-ending alchemy of composting and rebirth, that life and death are innate lovers in the dance, not enemies. We mend the torn fabric of our shared story, weaving our private sorrows back into the tapestry of creation.
We hold some of the keys to remembrance, to loss as a pathway to life. We strive to hold firmly the knowledge that heartbreak can be a path to joy, and breakdown can lead to breakthrough. In tending the ashes, in composting our individual and collective anguish, we consecrate our allegiance to a story that goes beyond us, one of unimaginable resilience and regeneration. We bear witness to the cycle of ruin and renewal that turns the wheel.
As Jung once wrote: we can only heal others to the extent we have been wounded. We can hope to aspire to Rumi's reed, sing the music of separation until we become a clear channel for love's return. But we will be constantly reminded that to stand steady in loss and grief rarely feels comfortable and poetic in the moment. And the moment we cease to feel deeply is the moment we become a liability to our client and their process. Each time we navigate that journey intact, we trust it a little more. One day, we hope to hold the philosopher’s stone – trust beyond all doubt. A fixed point of light is etched into the present and the future, and it is a welcome guide.
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