Grief: The Portal to Spirit

Autumn brings us an opportunity to work with the shamanic power of grief. Grief holds the energy of the Great Mystery and can guide us through the portals of the visible and invisible worlds. Shamanic practitioners around the world know that grief is powerful medicine and that time spent in grief is sacred time.

As a hospice chaplain and shamanic practitioner, I often bring simple shamanic tools into non-shamanic spaces to help people navigate the watery realms of grief. Loss, grieving, and finding our way back to life are part of the human path. Here are three ways we as shamanic practitioners can work with grief and the grieving.

Grief as a portal – I’ve often sat with people in the final days of their lives as they wrap up their spiritual business, say goodbye to loved ones, and finally exit the body.  It’s common during this time for the dying to receive visitors from the other side of the veil.

I remember one woman in the final stages of dementia who regularly slept 18-20 hours a day by that point. I would sit and sing medicine songs to her and visit with her spirit, which was alive and well and actually enjoying the time in a body that was almost 100% cared for by others. She had raised 5 children and had two successful careers, so was taking a well-deserved rest before wrapping up her life.

She suddenly sat up in bed and said, “My Dad is here!  Oh I miss you, Daddy. I’m coming soon, so you better wait for me.” This from a woman who hadn’t been able to string together more than three words in months.  Seeing loved ones who have died is a common occurrence for those who are actively dying, and she did pass away two days later.

What is interesting about this case was that in the hours after she died many other family members felt the presence of her father too. They spontaneously told stories about him, sang old folk songs he used to sing, and made plans to go to his favorite diner from the 1940s that was still open nearby.

As the hospice team and I helped the family tend to their mother’s body, I used my shamanic tools – a little tobacco in my pocket, and a vulture feather tucked into my notebook – to gently keep the veils parted. I asked these allies to assist any family members who wanted to send and receive love from those on the other side.

What could have been a very somber occasion ended up in laughter and stories as the living family remembered who came before and stayed in touch with the eternally living threads of love that bind us all together.

Shamanic Practice: The portals of grief and death are all around, not just when a human spirit is leaving their body. You can find them especially active during Fall as plants go dormant and animals begin to hibernate. Use your shamanic tools to make contact with the veils between life and death and take an opportunity to peer through. Keep an eye out for the threads that flow through death and lead us back to life again; the harvest of love, the surrender of death, the hope of the flower bulb waiting patiently underground for perfect conditions to bloom again.

Grief and the physical body – When someone dies, it takes time to readjust to life without them in it. Some people, however, had such a strong connection with the deceased that physical life itself doesn’t seem possible without them.

I was called to visit with the widow of one of our former hospice patients who had not been doing well since the death of her husband. She was in her late 80s and they had been married for over 60 years. She had previously been very social at her assisted living facility; always attending Bingo, visiting different tables during meals, and was an avid member of the chair yoga class.

Since her husband’s death 3 months prior she hadn’t come out of her room. When I met with her, she was a shell of her former self. From a shamanic perspective she didn’t really seem to be in her body anymore.  As I sat and spoke with her, I noticed that she had moved her chair close to the bed her husband had died in and kept glancing up into a corner as we spoke. She spoke in short sentences and didn’t seem interested in anything we talked about.

The room was slightly chilly even though the heat was set to 75 degrees and with my shamanic perception I noticed a thin cord of light coming from the woman’s crown and reaching up into a very small energetic portal in the ceiling corner she was looking at.

I realized that in her grief she had sent her life force energy into the death portal that opened when her husband died and tried to follow him through. As we were talking, I asked the tobacco in my pocket to reach out and gently retrieve the life force energy of this woman and guide it back through the portal.  I also always keep some dried rose petals in my bag and I asked the loving spirit of Rose to close the portal for now.

When this was done, the woman suddenly said she just realized she was very tired and wanted to nap. I helped her into bed with an extra blanket and left her to rest. In the days that followed, the facility staff reported that she started coming out of her room, taking a few walks around the gardens with friends, and sitting in the sun reading a book.

Shamanic Practice: When you are working with someone in active grieving, remember to anchor the spirit in the body. It can be tempting to want to escape the physical and emotional pain of grief and abandon the body. But grief must be processed at every level – physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual – before there is relief. Use your shamanic tools to help bring someone more fully into their body during grief. This can include a strong smelling anointing oil or sacred smoke that activates the senses. You might also wrap someone in a medicine blanket, or bring someone outside to physically feel the solid earth and warm sunlight. Anything that continues to guide someone through grief without letting them linger too long near the realm of death itself will be helpful.

The medicine of grief – Many folks living in ordinary reality will try to get through grief as quickly as possible and ‘get back to normal.’  As a shamanic practitioner who knows that everything holds medicine, it’s important to draw this medicine out in your grief work.

I remember a family who had lost their 27-year old son, Peter, in a drunk driving accident. This young man was the baby of the family and had a reputation for being the light and life of any party.  He often played practical jokes on people and loved to host big dinner parties and play charades at the end.

His mother had always been a bit controlling and anxious, and when her son died she became even more so. As the whole family grieved, she began following a rigorous schedule of exercise and became very serious about only eating a strict diet of raw food. The whole family had adopted this serious energy and the once-rambunctious household was now very quiet and tense.

One day, when I was visiting the house looking at a picture of this young man I remembered how mischievous and twinkly his eyes were. Remembering the joyful energy in the house when he was alive, I asked for an ally who could help bring that back to the family.  A raccoon, of all animals, popped into my head and I quickly explained the situation.  When I had finished I saw this little energetic raccoon with a familiar twinkle in its eye wander into the kitchen and I followed.

The mother was making a smoothie with the family quietly sitting around the counter looking at their phones.  She put all her ingredients in a blender and pressed the button to turn it on. Suddenly the kitchen exploded with red goo as strawberry and blueberry parts went everywhere. She had forgotten the lid to the blender.  Everyone was silent as we stared at each other’s smoothie-covered faces then, for the first time in months, everyone in the family started laughing.

Through his laughter, the father said “Peter would have loved that,” and the laughing became tears then laughter again as the true medicine of the grief they all felt was released.

It took time for the family to grieve their loss but after that day, they were able to bring more light-heartedness into the family. The role that Peter previously played of making the family laugh and play games was redistributed to the family through their grief.  While Peter’s mother still has a strong exercise and diet regimen, she’s now also the one to suggest charades when guests are over.

Shamanic Practice:  Every grief has its medicine, and that medicine is different for each person.  When someone seems stuck, trapped, or brittle as they grieve, ask an ally for help.  As shamanic practitioners we must remember that medicine and help are available to us in every circumstance. We never do this work alone. You don’t even have to know what the medicine of a situation is to bring in an ally. Simply call upon Spirit to send you the best ally for the situation, explain the difficulty you are facing, then thank them and watch to see how they work with the problem. Often the medicine will be revealed to you as you watch the ally bring healing energy to the people you are working with.  And if the medicine is still not clear, remember that the best medicine of all is simply unconditional love for however a person may be grieving.