An invitation to be present with loss and discover the wisdom and beauty that can emerge from it.

Grief and loss touch us all—tumbling into our lives and carving riverbeds through the soul. A partner dies, we lose our home, a marriage ends, and we find ourselves alone. It rises too from our collective heartbreak of witnessing racial injustice, climate catastrophe, and economic disparities that plague our suffering world. When these rough initiations come, we’re often swept beneath a tide of fear, confusion, and overwhelm. How, then, do we learn to carry our grief without collapsing or turning away?

Here, Francis Weller invites us to undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. He shows us that while grief is an intense emotion, it is also a skill to be cultivated—one that allows us to greet loss when it arrives at our door, work with it, and transform it into something medicinal for the community. Weller highlights that within the very depths of grief’s pain lies the sacredness of life itself; and goes on to offer powerful writing practices, reflections, and rituals to help us cultivate the interior space needed to hold life’s inevitable suffering with presence and grace. In these audio sessions, explore the following ways to live soul activism:

● Getting to the root of our sorrows, peeling back the layers of a collective, societal emptiness left behind by lingering individualism.

● Exploring rough initiations and the legacy of trauma that pervades our lives and leads to the descent into what’s known as the Long Dark.

● Unearthing healing medicine we can draw upon as we undergo this underworld journey of holding our grief and sorrow.

● Keeping our heart open, not by denying or avoiding pain, but through the cultivation of an embodied, moment-to-moment awareness.

As we journey through, “there is a dawning recognition that this is our shared sorrow—the communal cup from which we all drink,” says Francis Weller. We do this together as we enter the healing ground, where our hearts are ripened for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press Essentials.