WHAT TO EXPECT AT A GRIEF RITUAL

You do not need to know how to grieve.

You do not need to arrive already opened, emotional, spiritual, or ready to cry. You may arrive numb. You may arrive skeptical. You may carry grief that has been waiting for decades or something that happened yesterday. You may not know what you are grieving at all.

The ritual begins by making a village together.

Before entering the grief ritual itself, time is spent arriving, orienting, singing, listening, sharing, moving, and building the agreements and relationships that will hold the work. Sometimes we are together as one body. Sometimes we gather in smaller groups. There is poetry, song, movement, sacred listening, witnessing, silence, food, rest, and preparation.

Eventually, we cross a threshold into ritual.

And then we enter ritual time.

The clock becomes less important. The ritual is allowed to move at the pace of grief rather than being forced into an ordinary schedule. There is drumming and singing. People may cry, tremble, rage, pray, move, wail, lie on the Earth, sit silently, laugh, make sound, or remain very still.

There is no particular emotional performance required of you.

You may find yourself grieving something you expected to grieve. You may find yourself somewhere entirely unexpected. You may witness someone else's grief and suddenly recognize your own. You may feel nothing for a long time. All of this belongs.

Communal grief ritual creates a place where sorrow does not have to remain private.

When we hear another human give sound to something we have carried silently, something can become recognizable. What felt strange or unspeakable may suddenly have company. Grief can move through bodies rather than remaining something we are expected to privately manage, diagnose, overcome, or carry alone.

The community becomes part of the medicine.

We witness one another. We sing for one another. We hold the edges while someone enters their grief. We receive one another back. We remember that sorrow has always belonged to community.

And grief is larger than personal loss.

We may grieve the people we have loved and lost. We may grieve what we needed and never received. We may grieve ancestral wounds, estrangement, violence, loneliness, the condition of the world, species loss, war, genocide, sexual violence, medical violence, state violence, colonization, white supremacy, patriarchy, anthropocentrism, ecological devastation, ruptured relationship with Land, generations of sorrow that have never had somewhere to go, the unnamed, the unnamable, the ineffable, the unfathomable, the unknown.

Sometimes what comes is not grief as we conventionally imagine it. It is rage. Numbness. Shame. Fear. Relief. Longing. Joy. Exhaustion. Love. Laughter. Praise.

The ritual makes room.

THE LINEAGE OF THE RITUAL

At the center of this work is the communal grief ritual brought to the West by Dagara elders Sobonfu Somé and Malidoma Somé of Burkina Faso.

Sobonfu and Malidoma were sent West by Dagara elders carrying teachings about grief, ritual, ancestors, community, and the consequences of living severed from these relationships. One understanding passed through this lineage is that communal grief ritual was offered as medicine for the consequences of colonization: helping people shaped by colonized ways of living reconnect with ancestors and community, remember how to grieve together, and thaw what has become frozen around the human heart.

This history matters deeply to how the ritual is carried today.

There is a commitment to preserving and carrying what Sobonfu brought with as much integrity as possible. Since her death, part of that practice has meant gathering what remains: teachings and practices she shared, alongside memories, stories, and fragments of ritual knowledge carried by people who studied, facilitated, and worked closely with her.

It is a mosaic.

Some pieces remain vivid. Some have traveled through many hands. Some have been lost. And a living ritual inevitably encounters new people, places, ancestors, histories, and times.

The work therefore carries an ongoing responsibility to ask what it means to preserve something without pretending it has remained untouched.

THE COMPLEXITY OF CARRYING THIS LINEAGE

That question becomes particularly important because ahlay, a white woman of European descent, is one of the people carrying and facilitating this ritual today.

There is no desire to step around the complexity of that.

The history of European colonization, enslavement, extraction, and violence against African peoples makes the transmission of an African-rooted ritual through a white body worthy of ongoing examination. Financial reciprocity adds another layer. Questions of appropriation, inheritance, responsibility, permission, relationship, and what it means to carry teachings outside their original cultural context remain alive within the work.

There may never be a perfectly resolved place to stand inside those questions.

And the work continually returns to the reason these teachings traveled West at all.

The story carried through this lineage is that Dagara elders were themselves witnessing the consequences of colonization and asked what had happened within the people capable of creating such destruction. Part of their understanding was that something had become profoundly severed: relationship with ancestors, community, ritual, grief, and the living world.

Sobonfu and Malidoma were sent toward that rupture despite their own reluctance/resistance.

The intention is to carry what remains with humility, relationship, reciprocity, discernment, and as much integrity as possible while continuing to ask difficult questions about how it is being carried.

MANY TRIBUTARIES

The Dagara grief ritual is the central river feeding this work. Other tributaries have entered over years of study, practice, collaboration, ancestry, and relationship.

There has been sustained inquiry into communal mourning practices within European ancestral traditions: the Mekonenet, the Jewish professional mourning woman and lamenter; the keening traditions of Ireland; Scottish lament; Eastern European professional mourning women; and fragments, folklore, and stories of Scandinavian communal grief practices.

These histories are approached as fragments rather than an attempt to reconstruct a single lost European tradition. Much of what remains is partial, contested, buried, changed, or carried through story. The Wailing Human is one attempt to gather some of these fragments into a contemporary mythology of the professional mourner and the communal role of lament.

The ritual has also been touched by the work and teachings of Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, Martin Prechtel, Angeles Arrien, somatic and trauma-informed practice, song and poetry, and the particular communities and Lands where rituals have taken place.

And there are teachers who are not human.

The Whales of the Sea have become part of this listening.

Whales breathe consciously. They descend into darkness and rise again for air. They sing across enormous distances. They live within cultures of relationship, communication, migration, memory, and sound.

Their bodies and songs have become teachers within this work: reminders to breathe, descend, listen, sound, and eventually rise.

Humpback Whale, teach us how to breathe
into our bodies so that we may grieve.

Deep into the dark, into the abyss,
so we may rise up into all our bliss.

SOMETHING ANCIENT, SOMETHING EMERGING

The ritual is therefore both an act of preservation and something alive.

It carries pieces of something ancient while responding to the world in which we actually live.

What materials are here?

Water. Salt. Earth. Fire. Smoke. Wind. Song. Bodies. Tears. Trash. Poetry. Drums. Silence. The particular Land beneath us. The grief carried by the people who have gathered.

What does this community need in order to grieve here, now?

How does the community become part of the healing?

How might human grief become an offering back to Land?

What becomes possible when the healing of human beings and the healing of our relationships with the living world are no longer imagined as separate?

These questions help “cook” the ritual each time it is made.

No two grief rituals are identical because no two villages, Lands, facilitation teams, or moments in history are identical.

WHAT YOU MAY EXPERIENCE

Grief ritual can be intense.

You may be surrounded by many people expressing grief simultaneously. There can be loud drumming, crying, screaming, singing, raging, wailing, movement, trembling, prayer, and silence.

This is part of why considerable time is spent creating the container before entering ritual.

There are shared agreements. There is a ritual protocol. There are boundaries. There are facilitators and community members tending the edges. There are ways to step back, use ear protection, stand on the periphery, rest, or regulate your body.

The purpose of the container is not to make grief tidy.

It is to create enough structure that grief can be their feral self.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW WHAT TO DO

Perhaps the most important thing for someone attending for the first time is this:

You will be taught how to enter.

You do not need previous ritual experience. You do not need to know the songs. You do not need to understand the lineage before arriving. You do not need to know how to wail. You do not need to manufacture catharsis.

Your task is to arrive.

To listen.

To notice what happens in your body.

To allow yourself to be witnessed and to witness others.

And, when and if something begins to move, to follow it.

RECIPROCITY

Each grief ritual includes a tithe to the Water Reciprocity Fund through The Sonder Project, supporting sustainable clean water for Dagara communities in and around Dano, Burkina Faso.

Water carries particular meaning here. Ritual knowledge traveled from Dagara communities toward the West. Tithing toward water infrastructure is one small, tangible practice of allowing something to flow back toward the communities from which these teachings came.

Participants who feel able or called are also welcome to contribute directly.

Learn about or contribute to the Water Reciprocity Fund

COME AS YOU ARE

There is no correct grief to bring.

There is no amount of suffering required to belong.

There is no requirement that you cry.

There is simply an invitation to enter a temporary village in which grief is allowed to have sound, movement, witnesses, ritual, Land, and time.

For a little while, we practice remembering together.