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Mindstates
A Time to Grieve, A Time to Grow:
The Healing Wisdom of Africa
by Dr. Malidoma Somé
Water is a key element in the cosmological wheel. In the beginning, it cooled the raging fires and brought stability, reorienting the cosmic energy towards producing continuity and community. Since then, people all over the world have felt the need to return again to water for purification, cleansing, reconciling and making peace in the face of the onslaught of life’s challenges.
This means that challenge or crisis is cosmologically and spiritually symptomatic of a rise in fire. When someone is in crisis regarding the nature of the challenge, that person is said to be returning to the fire. The distress of the person drifting towards or into the fire is a plea for radically reconciling the introduction of water. When there is no water around, we are vulnerable to crisis. People, especially when in crisis, are naturally attracted to water. Many recognize that when they are agitated about something in their lives, they find peace at the waterfront. Just the sight of a large body of water brings a feeling of peace and calm, a feeling of home.
Water resets a system gone dry in which motion is accelerated beyond what we can bear. African healing wisdom looks at physical illness as a fire moving a person’s energy beyond the limit of what he/she can bear. This suggests that we all need water and rituals centered upon this element to stay balanced, oriented and reconciled.
There are countless aspects of human experience that water rituals affect in a healing way. One of them, and perhaps the most important, is the emotional self. Many people in the western world walk around like time bombs, loaded with contradictory emotions that are often so hard to articulate that the individual is dangerous to himself and his surroundings. Perhaps the strongest among these emotions is grief. In this culture, the challenge of confronting overwhelming grief must be considered the most crucial task in reconciling the energy of water.
In indigenous Africa, one cannot conceive of a community that does not grieve. It is the same for my people, the Dagara of West Africa. In my village, people cry every day. Until grief is restored in the west as the starting place from which modern men and women might find peace, the culture will continue to abuse and ignore the power of water, and will subsequently be fascinated with fire.
Grief must be approached as a release of the tension created by separation and disconnection from someone or something that matters. The average western person is grieving about being isolated. Western men in particular are grieving about the dead because they couldn’t grieve properly if they were told that men don’t cry. In my work, I hear this everywhere. Grief is not only an expression in tears, but in rage, frustration and sadness. An angry person is a person on the road to tears, the softer version of grief. Sadness and the feeling of heaviness within are symptomatic of a deep well of grief in the psyche underground.
One must ask why tears, the softest expression of grief, are not as acceptable in the modern world as anger and rage. I say this because to indigenous Africans, emotions are sacred. To villagers, it looks as if the west is uncomfortable with tears because one cannot argue verbally or logically against this kind of emotion. Villagers also believe that westerners are afraid of emotion because they fear losing control. Emotions have the tendency to spread from person to person. Therefore, social control in the western mind is at risk with any display of emotion.
Many westerners are beginning to see that there is also danger in remaining stuck with anger and sadness; they are the directionless vehicles of a grief that remains hidden. When these emotions are not allowed a fluid catharsis, one is left in a state of incompleteness. The end of the domination of one’s life by such emotions requires an outpouring of liquid. You cannot truly grieve within and remain composed without. Emotion is an extraverted phenomenon and it cannot find its much needed release if expressed only internally. Denied an outward expression, grief grows stronger and organizes itself like a hurricane that can rise up and sweep us away. Many times, I have heard people express their fear of grief because they feel that if they begin to release it, they will be overcome, eventually drowning in their own tears. Indeed, this is how it feels, but this is not what actually happens.
In my village, emotion is ritualized as sacred. If addressed with a sacred space, emotions of grief can provide powerful relief and healing. Any time the feeling of loss arises, there is an energy that demands ritual in order to allow reconciliation and the return of peace. These are crises that water ritual can resolve. Water ritual helps to shed the massive accumulation of negative emotions due to feelings of loss, failure and powerlessness. Each one of these problems heightens our awareness of the challenges of life. Loss and powerlessness are particularly humbling because they disrupt continuity and reveal our humanity. One of the things we all have in common is loss, whether it is loss of a loved one or a dream, loss of a job or a relationship. In all of these situations, water rituals are a necessary element of life.
Dr. Malidoma Somé is one of today’s most eloquent champions of indigenous wisdom. His life and teachings form a bridge between the modern world and the traditional ways of his people, among whom he is an initiated elder. He is the author of several internationally acclaimed books including Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, Of Water and the Spirit, and The Healing Wisdom of Africa. Join Dr. Malidoma Somé for a rare U.S. appearance at Blue Deer Center in Margaretville, NY, September 25-27. For more information, visit: www.bluedeer.org or call 845.586.3225.