Men and Grief
How old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know….For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung. – Susan Griffin
I am convinced that we would solve many things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief…The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common…Yes, we must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. – Miguel De Unamuno
When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found. – West Africa
In the 1980s, during the early years of the mythopoetic men’s movement, several things were becoming clear:
1 – Twenty years after American women had embraced feminism, it seemed clear that they were growing stronger and more self-reliant. In contrast, many men who had rejected their fathers’ values and later investigated Eastern spirituality were uncertain of the value of masculinity. If being a man meant being like one’s father, maybe one needn’t be a man at all. In cultivating their own inner femininity, they were nonaggressive, “sensitive new age guys.” Robert Bly, in his immensely influential book Iron John, described such men as naïve, uninitiated, “flying boys.” Over thirty years after its publication, his words are still accurate:
The waste and violence of the Vietnam War made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was…The male in the past twenty years has become more thoughtful, more gentle…but by this process he has not become more free…He’s a nice boy…In the seventies I began to see all over the country a phenomenon that we might call the “soft male.”…You quickly notice the lack of energy in them. They are life-preserving but not exactly life-giving.
2 – One of the primary aspects of this condition was the inability or refusal of American men to confront our repressed grief. One of the most common statements we heard at men’s conferences was: I know I have so much to grieve. But I can’t begin to let it out, because I know that if I did, it would overwhelm me; it will never stop. There was an intense hunger for a community that might hold this grief, as well as the intuition that such containers no longer exist. Every man knew the fear of exposing himself to ridicule if he showed real emotion.
3 – The modern world was suffering in countless ways from the consequences of the loss of myth. Joseph Campbell described our world as “demythologized.” In this condition, men in particular needed something that might offer such a safe container to channel their potential violence – or their passivity – into creative channels. They needed a revival of ritual.
Attempting to name and meet these needs, Bly, James Hillman, Robert Moore, Michael Meade, Jack Kornfield and others began to incorporate indigenous and Eastern ritual formats at Bly’s annual Mendocino Men’s Conferences. In the early 1990s Malidoma Somé joined them, bringing the traditions of the Dagara people of West Africa. I remember him speaking of his arrival in New York City, where he claimed to have seen thousands of ghosts walking the streets. Was he being literal or metaphorical? Did it matter? We understood that we were all carrying immense loads of unexpressed grief, and it was crushing our souls, as well as the soul of our culture.
We, the sons of men who’d sacrificed so much for us (or so we’d been taught), were supposed to be the wealthiest, most progressive, most enlightened, happiest generation of them all. And yet, oddly, a common experience was that of scarcity. I addressed this idea in Chapter Nine of my book:
Civilization…invented artificial scarcity by restricting the availability of something that theoretically isn’t scarce – sexual gratification. Although most societies do this to some extent, capitalism takes it further. Advertising attaches sexual interest to inaccessible, nonexistent or irrelevant objects and motivates people to work endlessly for rewards that may never come.
Similarly, romantic love is a scarcity mechanism based often on the intensification of the parent-child relationship. It occurs less frequently in tribal societies where the community raises all children, where bonds between child and parents are more casual. Oedipal conflicts may be the primary source of the scarcity dynamics in modern relationships…
If assumptions of emotional scarcity are based on the nearly exclusive mother/child relationships in modern families, then these dynamics exist in the extreme in America. After World War Two, when young couples left the inner cities for the suburbs, they also left their networks of extended families. With husbands away at the office, isolated suburban mothers had only their children to share their emotional lives. Baby Boomers matured in possibly the most extreme Oedipal conditions in history, expecting all emotional needs to be met from the scarce resources of one person. Such unrealistic demands led to massive disillusionment, and soon the Boomers experienced the highest divorce rates in history.
Bly saw similar dynamics wherever he brought men together:
Hundreds of times one man or another has said to me that now, at 40 or 45, he realizes that his task throughout his life has been to be a substitute husband, lover and soul companion for his mother…If I ask such a man, “How do you feel about men?’ he is likely to say, “I have never been able to trust them.”… Many men say to me they literally don’t know what the word man means, nor whether they are grown men or not.
There was more, much more. It was becoming clear to some of us that America’s unwillingness to grieve the crimes of slavery, genocide and empire had a direct connection to its endemic violence. Personally, I didn’t hear the phrase “toxic masculinity” until many years later, but it certainly would have fit our sense of what we were confronting. Were there alternatives? Bly half-joked that for males coming of age in the 1950s and sixties, Hollywood had offered only two role models: John Wayne or the wimpy, self-deprecating Woody Allen.
Some of us couldn’t understand why we were so angry all the time. But a much more common lament was that we lacked energy. Here are some of the words that seemed to describe our condition: passive, depressed, numb, stuck, detached, aloof, disengaged, unable to feel either joy or anger, unwilling to lead, afraid of commitment and/or alienated from creativity. Some at midlife realized that we had traded so much of our innate exuberance for stability:
…can you hear the pipes playing,
their hunger shaking the olive branches?
To hear them sighing and not answer
is to deny this world, descend rung
by rung into no loss and no desire. - Rita Dove
I have no flowers. All of the flowers in my garden are dead. - Antonio Machado
We didn’t know what we wanted and believed, perhaps, that we didn’t deserve to achieve it. As Bly wrote, such a man “…will lose what is most precious to him because of a lack of boundaries. This is particularly true of the New Age man, or the man seeking ‘higher consciousness.’”
We had a vague memory of a magical child who enchanted everyone:
You know that one. Have you heard stories about him?
Pharoah and the whole Egyptian world collapsed for such a Joseph. - Rumi
But we didn’t trust older men. Older men had killed that child. And though we may have longed for community, we didn’t trust any forms of it that we saw.
But for the Dagara, there is no community without ritual and no ritual without community. Malidoma taught the importance of communal grief rituals, and how to do them effectively. And although traditional Dagara funerals involve the entire community and take three full days to complete, he insisted that neither of those factors should inhibit our attempts to learn this work and share it with the public. Some of us studied the matter further and learned that many indigenous cultures speak of a reciprocal relationship between the worlds. What is damaged in one world can be repaired by the beings in the other. Such cultures affirm that many of our problems arise because we have not allowed the spirits of the dead to move completely to their final homes by not grieving them fully.
Some of us were also learning Martín Prechtel’s Mayan teachings from Guatemala, where the ancestors require two basic things from us: our beauty and our tears. The fullness of our grief, expressed in colorful, poetic, communal events, feeds the dead when they visit on certain auspicious dates, such as Day of the Dead, so that when they return to the other world, they can be of help to us who remain on this side of the veil. And by feeding them with our grief, we may drop some of the emotional load we all carry simply by living in these times.
The ancestors can aid the living. But they need our help to complete their transitions. Without enough people weeping for it on this side, say the Tzutujil Maya, a soul is forced to turn back. Taking up residence in the body of a youth, it may ruin his life through violence and alcoholism, until the community finally completes the appropriate rites. Perhaps this is the essential meaning of sacrifice: when we starve the spirits by not dying to our false selves and embodying our authentic selves, the spirits take literal death as a substitute.
For some of us this led to an intuitive understanding of epistemic trauma, that we – in our bodies – were holding generations of unexpressed, ancestral grief. In a sense, the heavy loads we were carrying were not even ours. But we were being called to do the work that our parents and grandparents had not.
Was all this cultural appropriation? Our answer was that the times are too painful and the need too strong to reject anything authentic or useful. We have proceeded on the basic assumption that we need all the help we can get. Even Malidoma used to begin his invocations with a prayer to his ancestors acknowledging that so much wisdom had already been lost, that even he was clumsily trying his best and hoping that the spirits would reciprocate.
Catastrophe means to “go down.” Michael Meade (whose group Mosaic now sponsored the Mendocino conferences) argued that we never have real community in the old meaning of the term. The best we can do in this demythologized world is to invite likeminded people of deep intention to come together in brief periods of what he called “sudden community.” Then we could trust the process, “go down” and explore the darkness.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. - Wendell Berry
In Iron John, the hero loses his dog to a hand that reaches out from the depths of a pond. Bly taught us that this passage expresses the difference between depression and active grieving: In depression, we refuse to go down, and so a hand comes up and pulls us down anyway. In grief we decide to go down. With that choice – and perhaps only with that choice – the possibility exists that we might come back up, cleansed for a while of our burdens.
Over time, many of us discovered a certain secret: if, in sacred space, we allowed ourselves to break down and grieve in front of other men, we could also begin to access other things – our anger, our joy and our creativity. Opening to one extreme of the emotional spectrum allowed us to open to other extremes, all of which had been suppressed by distant fathers, the rat race of capitalism, the grey dullness of middle-class suburbs or the culture of machismo.
Meanwhile, from the mid-nineties until 2008, we men of the Redwood Men’s Center were conducting our annual conference at Camp Gualala, gradually shifting from a quasi-academic meeting for psychology professionals into a full-fledged, participatory event that included a regular Saturday evening of grief work in Coleman Hall. Doug von Koss led these evenings, and they were full of soulful poetry, song and movement. Many men looked forward to them as much as to any other part of the retreat. And, since Monday was Memorial Day, we always ended the retreat by joining in with Maurice Wren as he sang Eric Bogle’s haunting song of World War One, And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda.
There were, of course, many moments during community time, when an individual man would muster the courage to stand in the middle of a circle of a hundred men and tell a personal story that resulted in spontaneous grieving.
I remember one such moment in about 2005, when a man spoke of having served as a therapist in Germany for members of the U.S. military cycling out of (and back into) Iraq and Afghanistan. Weeping, he told us how the emotionally wounded would be shamed by their officers if they allowed themselves to break down in grief. I remember him warning us all that when these men returned home, that it would not really be home, that they would be carrying “a tsunami of grief” to communities unprepared for it.
Then, still weeping, he began to return to his seat, which happened to be next to mine. I remember that somehow I had the presence of mind to stand up, hug him and tell the whole community that he was holding grief for all of us, and that we needed to share his load, and how everyone spontaneously arose, gathered around us in a tight hug and wept together, loudly, for a long time. It was a healing moment for us all, and – I’d like to think – something that radiated outwards into the world.
Curiously, a very similar event happened in 2019, when another man spoke of his work with veterans and we all surrounded him, offering to take some of the grief he’d been holding.
Brother, when God gets ready, you got to move – Reverend Gary Davis
After 2008 we had to leave Camp Gualala. Following one intermediate year at the Valley of the Moon, we decided to stage future conferences at the Mendocino Woodlands. This camp is farther from the Bay Area, but it is much more isolated and private, and it turned out to be more amenable to large-scale, sometimes outdoors, grief rituals. Around this time, I (Barry), and for a while, Francis Weller introduced grief rituals in Malidoma’s style. And we formulated the basic principles of radical – that is, transformative – ritual:
1 – We all carry immense loads of unexpressed grief. This is unfinished business, and it prevents us from being present or from focusing on future goals. It stands directly in the way of our potential and prevents us from fully giving our gifts to the world.
2 – Beings on the other side of the veil call to us continually, but it is our responsibility to approach them through ritual, and this often implies creating beautiful shrines that visually represent that other side.
3 – Radical ritual implies creating a strong container, clarifying intentions, inviting the spirits to enter and not predicting the outcome. Radical ritual is by nature unpredictable. It is not liturgical but emotional.
4 – Radical ritual is always, invariably, communal work.
5 – The purpose of radical ritual is to restore balance.
6 – We must move the emotions. When ritual involves the body, the soul (and the ancestors) take notice. We dance our grief, amid evocative drumming and chanting. Spontaneous, strong feeling (and, says Malidoma, bad smell) indicates the presence of the spirits.
7 – Ritual involves sacrifice. We attempt to release whatever holds us back, sabotages our relationships or keeps us stuck in unproductive patterns. In this imagination, the ancestors are eager for signs of our sincerity. Then, what appears toxic to us, that which we wish to sacrifice, becomes food to them. That toxicity must not be left in the village but deposited in shrines to the other world, and they gladly feast upon both our tears and our beauty.
8 – There are certain physical places in the outdoors that, from long use by humans for these purposes, seem to have evolved the capacity to encourage and absorb such rituals, if approached with deep intention. The Mendocino Woodlands is a home for such work.
Each year Hari Meyers told a mythic story chosen in part to encourage the gradual buildup of emotion, structured around certain recurrent themes, such as exile, imprisonment or regret. The men would break up into small groups, where we’d prompt them to speak (or write) with questions such as these: What haunts you? Are you in exile from home? Family? Society? Have you exiled or hurt others? Personal losses? Choices not to have children? What have you sacrificed in order to survive? Are you clinging to something that must die so that you can live?
But this kind of internal – and public – expression still doesn’t come easily to American men. Even Francis (perhaps the world’s authority on grief rituals) acknowledges that he attended several of them before he finally broke down and allowed himself to weep. One member of our community shares this experience:
At first I was frightened about going down to the grief altar. I was unsure what I would do once getting there. I thought about the "Wailing Wall" that I had seen pictures of in Israel, of someone who had lost a child and went to release the emotions. I thought about the death of family members. I could not generate a strong grief reaction to their loss. I considered that my grief was not about their absence but about that I had not felt anyone had really gotten to know who I was. I was born not to be seen as "pure innocence" but as another mouth to feed, a person to be shaped into fulfilling another person's wishes. I thought that loss was too much to bear. I felt anger. I felt abandonment. I felt that I could not lose control. I was scared that I would shun everything and be relegated to some intense isolation. I started to feel all that. Then I had the thought that I was faking the grief. I was pounding the pillow just to activate something inside of me and to make a big show. Then there was a switch where I did not care what others might think and I actually started to grieve how I had been operating as if pleasing others was somehow more important than knowing who I was.
Grieving continues to be a subtle, but daily process of letting go. I still do not believe anyone will ever get to know me and I am letting go of that idea as well.
I could say that the annual grief ritual is the place to get to know oneself once one confronts the fears.
At night, beginning the actual ritual, stewing in our thoughts, remembering our dead, we would form a silent procession through the candle-lit woods. Someone would speak a prayer of invocation, a request that the ancestors might accept our clumsy offerings. As the drumming and chanting began, we had no idea how long the ritual might last.
All stood close together before a beautiful water shrine, which beckoned them to literally and symbolically lay their burdens down. Here, the idea of community was critical. As men left the “village” and approached the shrine to weep, scream or silently address those who’d gone over to the other side – sometimes for a very long time – the singers and drummers would encourage them. At the shrine, one could feel both the “pull” of the ancestors and the “push” of the community. Participants returned to the village cleansed from their ordeal, their faces shining. The community welcomed them back, understanding that such men were now more capable of giving their “original medicine” to others. If they were still weeping, however, we turned them around and sent them back to the shrine until they finished giving up their tears to the spirits.
We concluded with more poetry, statements of intention for the coming year, and perhaps a feast for the tired souls who had worked so hard to feed the spirits – or, with more drumming and dancing, but now as celebration.
I have another memory. For the whole community to immerse themselves in the ritual, much planning and preparation was necessary. And a few of us always had to act as holders of the container. But keeping an eye on everyone, trying to prevent injuries and maintaining the drumming and chanting required us to deliberately restrain our own emotions. One year, in preparing the men for the ritual I emphasized the critical importance of welcoming everyone with great enthusiasm as they returned from the shrine. That was an exceptionally fine night, but I personally felt a bit unfinished. The next day, during a break, I quietly returned to the shrine alone and allowed myself to break down into several minutes of grieving. When I was done, I gathered myself, stood up, turned around and realized that one man had been standing there, quietly holding the container for me! When our eyes met, he said, “Welcome back, brother!” and hugged me. I had, for a time, come home.
For further reading:
The Sixth Gate of Grief: https://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/barrys-blog-151-the-sixth-gate-of-grief/
Myth, Memory and the National Mall: https://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/barrys-blog-8-myth-memory-and-the-national-mall/
Grief and Remembrance in Greece: https://madnessatthegates.wordpress.com/2019/11/05/barrys-blog-299-grief-and-remembrance-in-greece/