Somatic Grief Magic - A Debrief

Spinning a thread deep down into the glamour of shadow, a place of feminine magic

In feminine magic grief is very somatic, as the body spins vast threads across time.

We often think grief is feeling sad and crying, or relating to the love or absence of love. But complex grief is contradictory, silent at times, an architecture, or pattern.

After our Grief Salon I got a migraine (still going) as I decompressed from the energy, and then after 5 days I became unusually quiet and withdrawn. I could feel myself getting smaller, more remote, quieter, and I stayed with it. The energy was very cool, yin, contracting. Then suddenly, like a ripple from the deep an irritation bubbled to the surface hot and fast and uncomfortable. My words were quick, sharp, tumbled. My head was throbbing. Surges of tides were bursting up, spilling out agitated energies and heated words. I could feel the pull to blame, to splatter outwards. I anchored it.

Then the glamour came in like a weather front, thick mists creeping over the garden in the early morning. The world of shadow stalked in, with memories, threads of conversations, old feelings, dreams, questions, old cinematic worlds passing by my eyes. I tiptoed inside apprehensive, but also curious. The glamour surrounded me like a strong black velvet cape. My teeth rattled like bones, nerves stood on end, shrieking.

Old fragments of me walked by, smiling, crying, lost, silent, confused…still searching.

I did not hold them or fix them or coach them. I let the darkness of love contain us.

I remembered my time in Montserrat when the Lady said, “do not dare cry”.

I understand. Sometimes we need to release and sometimes we need to inhabit in silence. We must walk across landscapes and drop our bread crumbs and spin silver.

Grief is a spider web to tap our feet along old threads, resonating an entire grief pattern, and hearing its melancholy song transmit back to us along the fragile ley lines. It’s like an ancient siren call reminding us that nothing ever gets truly forgotten, as the spider web spins vaster, wider and wiser, and the pattern forms into a picture.

The feeling and frequency of the Grief Salon was special, unique, weird, ancient.

Orphea my young daughter tells me she’s been dreaming of a big magical crocodile, like the Egyptian Ammit, and she is riding on its back. She says it’s a friendly one.

Thinking on it, I remembered these precious words from my younger maiden days, that I had written out on a piece of paper and carried everywhere with me for many years (this was before the internet). It was referenced by T S Eliot in a poem I loved, quoting an art critic describing the enigmatic Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo.

These words were sirens to my soul as a youngling in Yorkshire. I can feel them echoing through the Grief Salon we held. This is not your modern “trauma healing” grief. It is older, stranger, more feminine, melancholy and holy, a lost remembrance.

It speaks to the lineage of Keening Women, of the Banshee, the old, wise Fae Woman, and the Priestesses of Grief, from Isis to Ma’at, who have worried the world’s grief like sacred knitting, and led our souls into the great underneath, where love takes roots.

“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.” 

― Walter Pater

Here are people’s reflections from the Grief Salon….

“The time shared had such a deep impact. Something within that has been hammered by wind - raw, exposed, integrated - is anchoring in a sea of tears and turning towards home. A couple of days later I saw someone talking about the grief process on social media and it felt so surface and intellectual and I felt really privileged to have sat in that group space and receive the wisdom of the structure of micro grief, macro, dosage, container etc.  A wisdom that has walked through my system, emptied me out, alchemised past chapters but has not had words that hold.  It's had words that rush, confuse, whisper and long, but not holding ones that say - your in the right place, walk with me....”

“I couldn’t join the grief salon and I watched the videos later and I had hard time accepting darkness or let’s say for a long time I was scared of darkness and I couldn’t even follow the whole ritual yet I watched the whole video and did some of the practice and OH MY GOD. It was just magical. I have tears in my eyes while I write this. I‘m so so thankful and sometimes I used to call upon Kali ma to guide me and after the grief salon I feel like she is here with me. In a most loving way. I feel her motherly presence and I can’t even thank you enough.”

Feminine Magic School starts on January 6th and includes the Grief Salon replays.