Finding Healing and Connection Through Grief
Learning to Live with Grief
“Where there is sorrow,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “there is holy ground.”
The ache. The missing parts. The nausea and the punch to the heart. If you know grief, if you’ve ever let yourself feel grief, then you already know this language.
Three weeks after Luna’s passing, my beloved therapy dog of thirteen years, I find myself watching time distort. Last week I couldn’t believe two weeks had already passed; this week I can’t believe it’s only been three. Grief plays strange games with time.
This isn’t my first grief. Life, like most lives, has handed me losses before—loved ones, identities, dreams. As a psychotherapist, I’ve also spent fifteen years walking alongside others in theirs: holding hands, sitting in silence, witnessing the unraveling and re-forming that loss demands.
For me, Luna’s death lands differently than the others. It’s a grief that has moved in, taken up residence in my body, and rearranged my inner furniture. Like all grief, it doesn’t simply visit, it teaches.
I once heard a quote I really loved: “Time doesn’t heal grief; it accommodates it.”
I feel that strongly right now. I have always known that grief isn’t meant to simply leave us: it is meant to transform us. That is why, when a friend recently placed The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller in my hands, I knew I was meant to talk to you about my grief. Weller writes about grief not as something to “get over,” but as a sacred terrain to inhabit. His words have become a comfort as they resonate with the knowing already inside me.
How The Wild Edge of Sorrow Is Helping Me Heal
The Five Gates of Grief
Weller names what he calls the Five Gates of Grief. These five gates have become a sacred remembering for me of our shared, universal humanity.
Everything we love, we will lose. Love and loss are inseparable; to love is to risk grief.
The places within us that have not known love. The grief of self-abandonment, shame, and exile.
The sorrows of the world. The pain of the earth itself moves through us—the collective grief of violence, disconnection, and environmental loss.
What we expected and did not receive. All the ways life failed to meet us; the unmet needs we carry quietly.
Ancestral grief. The unfinished mourning that echoes through our bloodlines, asking to be felt and released.
Together these gates remind me that grief is not a wound to close but a living threshold. When we allow ourselves to cross it, we touch something larger, our belonging to each other and to the world itself.
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss, and no loss that is not a reminder of the depth of our love.” — Francis Weller
Grief as a Path of Healing: Learning to Live with Grief
In walking through my own grief, I keep learning that sorrow, when tended to, ripens us. Grief is a portal. It unifies us with our brothers and sisters. It asks us to soften instead of harden. It’s humbling, holy work—something no amount of training can fully prepare you for. And as Weller writes so profoundly, grief returns us to life itself.
At re:treat, the integrative psychotherapy practice I founded in Los Angeles, we speak often about healing off the couch—through connection, embodiment, and presence. My current fellowship with grief has me yearning for more of that communal healing. Out of this season, something is taking shape…
A Virtual Grief Group Inspired by The Wild Edge of Sorrow
A free one-time, two-hour virtual grief circle inspired by The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. It’s a space for anyone navigating loss—a loved one, a version of self, a relationship, a dream. Together we’ll explore how grief can open us rather than close us, and how presence can become its own kind of healing.
If you feel called, I’d love to have you join me.
Grief is wild, yes, but on its edge, I’m finding something tender and fiercely alive.