Meditation – Terry Lang
“‘Grief is praise for what you have lost.’”
“These are the words of Martin Prechtel, a Guatemalan shaman. In his village, as in many indigenous cultures, community grief rituals are common.
“I will describe for you a grieving ritual of the Dagara people in West Africa as depicted in Malidoma Some’s book Healing Wisdom of Africa. While I was studying ritual with Malidoma in this country I participated in an abbreviated version of such a ritual. I came to see that my long-held anger at my father, who died 20 years ago, was grief for what I had lost, possibilities lost and never to be realized. Acknowledging and releasing this grief allowed me to move from anger and resentment to a place of forgiveness. At the end of the ritual I felt a great burden lifted from me.
“As I describe this ritual, if it feels comfortable to you, you may wish to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a favorite place in nature surrounded by your own community.
“So imagine: The people of the village gather as a throng in an egg-shaped space, one end of which is designated as the village where the people will gather, and the other end as the shrine. The egg form represents life in formation. The village area is the place of gathering emotion. The shrine is where the highly charged emotion will be released.
“The shrine is built carefully by the people of the village using elements freshly borrowed from Mother Nature such as: tree branches, plants, and flowers. Its form depends upon the creativity of the village but it will often look like a gateway with an arched form atop a wide base. The surface of the base serves as the doorway to the Other World, and as such it requires the reverence and respect due such a gateway.
“Once the shrine has been prepared at one end of the shape, the villagers begin their inner preparation. Gathering together in small groups they tell one another what causes them grief. This is because grief does not necessarily come on demand. It is something that can be evoked through stories and images. One of the ways of triggering emotion is to speak about it or hear it spoken about by others. Each person will have brought an object symbolic of his or her loss, which they will describe in the form of a story to the rest of the group. Every grief story has similar elements. This is why one story invites another. This process can take hours.
“After everyone has shared their story, the small groups rejoin to engage in the ritual proper. A strong feeling of emotional tension has been built, propelling the grieving process forward. There may take place a procession toward the ritual village space which will symbolize this forward movement emphasizing the depth of the internal journey required in order to heal—a pilgrimage, which encourages the flow of emotions even before the cleansing transformation produced by the ritual itself.
“Upon reaching the ritual space, a rhythmic song of grief supported by drums will be taken up by the entire village singing in unison, allowing their bodies to move with the music. Responding to music and rhythm allows emotion to build so that it can be unloaded at the shrine.
“Shortly after beginning the song each group will place their objects of grief upon the shrine. Because they represent the sum total of the losses of the village, together these objects constitute a magnetic point that pulls the emotional self toward it.
“As emotion builds up in the people, they move to the shrine and release it, then return to the village to build up again. There is no prescribed way of releasing these feelings. People follow their own instincts. Any person, who moved by emotion, begins to head toward the shrine will be discreetly accompanied by someone who is not emotion-filled at that moment in order to protect and watch over them and to ensure that the emotion stays at the shrine and the person returns to the village where she or he belongs. The space between the shrine and the people filled with the back and forth motion of people symbolizes possibilities and hope.
“There is no telling how long the period of commuting between the village and the shrine will last. As long as there are emotions to be expressed, the ritual must continue. In the Dagara tradition such a ritual usually takes three days while other life functions are either suspended or operate at a minimal capacity. The ritual does not end until it feels as if the emotional force is dissipating.
“At that time the village chants its way to the shrine while a task force collects the objects of grief and carefully buries them into the ground like a spiritual form of composting. After purification, the village disburses returning the next morning to undo the shrine and return every piece of it to nature.
“A periodic return to this kind of ritual has positive consequences far beyond what words can express. Villagers gauge the amount of grief that is built up in them by the barometer of their joy. When emotion has been fully unloaded, the rush of joy that fills you up can last for weeks. When that feeling of joy subsides, grief is again building and soon will require another release.
“Achay and Amen.”
Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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