The Wild Edge of Sorrow Review & Extract

Mind Body & Soul Ezine Book Review: The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller. Published by North Atlantic Books. RRP US 

$14.95 : Can $19.50 

“Embrace you grief for There your soul will grow.” Carl Jung

This is a wonderfully enriching book, written by a very qualified facilitator who specialises in grief. Many quotes, meditation, guidance, rituals and maps, and five important gates/stages are detailed. If you feel your soul should has broken and you have lost great chunks of it, this book will help you feel whole again. It describes many ways grief is expressed, in retreat, anger, addictions, complexes. 

Extract: this book is a meditation on the sacred ground of grief and the way it enables us to walk with its realities of loss and death, how it shakes us and breaks us open to depths of soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes suffering into fertile ground. 

We are made real and tangible by the experience of sorrow; as it adds to us substance and weight. Beyond the crazed hunger of our culture to be exceptional, loss and sorrow wear away whatever masks we attempt to present to the world. Like the stone carvings of south America that lie broken on the forest floor, the monuments to our own self importance also collapse. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls to be authentic beings.  And in truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature. It is a broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love. The heart familiar with loss is able to recognise there is a still deeper grief and a sadness at the very heart of things that binds us to the world. Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving. 

A highly valuable book for all people! Recommended. Review by WendyStokes https://wendystokes.co.uk