Thomas: One is you used this beautiful term vesseling. Let’s speak a little bit about the competence of creating these collective spaces, or in your case, these grieving spaces. And I would also like to talk in connection to that about apprenticeship. Building these collective spaces, how do we build these spaces? What do we need to take in account when we build those spaces? And I know that’s a big topic. You’re teaching about this a lot, but let’s see what are the most important points, and then the sense of apprenticeship and how we may be lost in some cultures, the apprenticeship, and what’s its power and its necessity. These two things I would still love to touch on.
Francis: Okay. I think they feed each other quite beautifully because our capacity to do vesseling requires a certain maturation, and that’s part of the apprenticeship. But what I mean by vesseling is the work of trauma, the work of grief, the idea is that we need a certain degree of heat and intensity in order for the work, the material to be cooked. For it to move, we have to build a certain degree of intensity and a certain quality of heat, because if we don’t, again, things just stay tepid. There’s no movement. It’s a nice conversation, but nothing was generated. I don’t want to come out of ritual space the same as I went in. I want to be deranged. I want to be rearranged by the process of ritual. That requires heat. One of the core elements of vesseling is how do we keep the material warm, again, collectively?
That means I have to be comfortable with my own ability to be in intense emotional fields. If I’m building a vessel, if I’m helping to craft a vessel, I have to be willing to work with my own deep grief, my own experiences of rage and hurt and vulnerability, because I can’t build a vessel strong enough to hold those things if I can’t hold them myself. That’s part of the work. The old alchemist would say that the vessel has to be strong enough to hold the material has to be clear enough to be seen into, so you know what’s going on. And it has to be properly sealed. These are very important ideas that we typically don’t think of psychologically. In other words, it has to be strong enough. Well, building a strong container takes time. The vessel doesn’t automatically manifest. It’s a slow process. We’ve all had the experience of sharing something too soon with somebody or sharing something with whom I should not have shared it. Well, we’re starting a relationship and putting too much pressure on it right off the bat. Let’s get married. Well, I don’t even know your last name.
These kind of things, there’s too much pressure on the vessel, and the vessel collapses. It cracks. Creating a vessel that’s capable of holding the material takes time. Over three days, we build this vessel. And when the feeling is there that the vessel is strong enough that then we can put the heated material in there of our shared grief. You do it too soon, or I should say that differently. If there’s not enough time, what you’ll have is a nice ceremony, but not a genuine radical ritual. There won’t be enough heat presented to that. It has to be strong. It has to be seen into. In other words, as someone building that vessel, doing the vesseling, I have to watch out for my own projections. I have to, in a sense, do an inner diagnostic about my own vessel. Is it cracked? Is it overflowing?
Is it empty? Is it brittle? Is it cloudy? These are good diagnostics to take a look at your own interior vessel so that when you’re helping to shape one, it’s able to be clear enough so we see what’s actually happening in the field. I think you speak to that a lot. And the last part about being well sealed. There’s a strong admonition in alchemy about not taking the cap off the vessel too soon. You have to let the material cook adequately. I just had this insight. Let me tell you all about it. And then it evaporates. Learning to practice restraint, holding, allowing something to mature, to cook, to ripen. Psyche will tell you when it’s ready to be taken out. But those three things I think are very important metaphorically to building that vessel in the community. We do this slowly in our village work, in our ritual work through singing, through writing, through movement, through reflection exercises, slowly building that field and hearing the stories, the writings, without commenting on them, we just hear them. And you begin to feel that people are recognizing that this is a circle of kinship, that the griefs might be different, but their willingness to express that grief connects us all.
We arrive Friday, there’s very little conversation in the room. You might say hi to the person sitting next to you, but by Sunday evening, we are a village. That transmutation from individual to collective to the village mind is part of the mystery of that space that we hold. And part of the beauty of that space that I love is to see that movement along those three days to a place of arrival, which carries an auxiliary grief. Almost every time we gather, someone will say, “It feels like we just got here, and I’m feeling so connected to all of you. Now I have to go.”
And I say, “Yeah, we don’t live inside of what I call primary satisfactions. We don’t live inside of village mind. But this becomes like a homing beacon. Don’t ever forget what you felt here, and try to shape your life around calibrating this into your world, with your friendships, with your family, with your community. How can you now generate that village feel so it isn’t just like a weekend special, but it becomes part of the principle of your life? How do I generate this? How do I support it, over and over again until it becomes the currency?”
We started a project back in 1997 called Men of Spirit, and it was an initiation project, a year-long process of taking men through a series of first of all kind of deconstruction of the current image of masculinity and then deepen them into a soul calling. And it was beautiful. And part of the reason I’m bringing it up is that we started this with a 200 year project, that in 200 years, perhaps the young men standing here will, they won’t have to scrap their way to a feeling of village. They will be living in a village, and that the salmon will still be running and the green world will still be vital and alive. So all of this work has that long term imagination behind it of trying to reseed and trying to remember what we have forgotten in the great amnesia of how to be human beings here.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. So many things. I mean, we could talk for hours, and I want to also make some space for maybe some practical exploration. Is there anything else about the apprenticeship?
Francis: The apprenticeship, yeah, let me just touch upon that for a second. This apprenticeship idea is one I really like because it implies a long time of study. The apprenticeships typically would last years, sometimes a decade or two decades, whether that’s painting or pottery or stone masonry or whatever the craft is. It took a long time and usually began very humbly. Like if you were learning to be a carpenter, maybe for the first year or so, all you did is sweep up shavings. You didn’t even touch the saw or the hammer. You had to really in a sense apprentice yourself to the material.
And that’s a beautiful image, beautiful idea, where you cleaned the brushes for the painter, you never did the painting. Then maybe you began to create and mix the pigments, but it might be a while before you’re allowed to touch the brush and put a stroke on the canvas, a long time of apprenticing.
And with a fidelity to that apprenticeship, you may actually make it to the point where you might be called a master, a master craftsperson. That’s beautiful. In the work of soul and the apprenticeship with sorrow, it doesn’t lead to mastery, it leads to elderhood. And that’s what we really are craving right now, is people who have been willing to sit in the heat of their own grief and the culture’s grief and not turn away, and over a long apprenticeship be ripened into somebody who can take their place in the community and with the young ones and say, “I see you. I see what you’re carrying. I want to just honor what you’re doing with that grief. I’m right here with you. I won’t go away.” How few of those people are walking around right now, in part because we haven’t known how to engage the material of grief.
So the apprenticeship has many elements, but coming into right relationship with it, developing a practice, cultivating the ground of the adult as the only one who can work this material, working with silence and solitude as sanctuary territories for grief, self-compassion. And this last one, which might lead into this experiment or experience I’d like to share, is the idea of entanglement. That to remember our profound entanglement with the living world, we couldn’t be having this conversation if we weren’t being blessed by sunlight. It gives us these protons that allow light to actually be transmitted and have it come across this device. My God. Or the air that we’re breathing is the gift of these trees outside and the ocean.
And there’s not a moment that we’re not gifted, but we typically don’t see that. So the entanglement becomes part of that apprenticeship, which leads me into wanting to offer a little imaginal practice. Would that work for people?
Thomas: That would be great.
Francis: Okay, let’s get quiet for a moment and let your eyes soften or close, if you’re comfortable with that. And let’s just begin by taking a few slow breaths to let go of the other busyness around you. And maybe for this next few minutes, just allowing yourself to be with what is here. Just greet what is there, curiosity, anxiousness, sadness. Just make a space for it all. And for the next few minutes, there’s no place to go, there’s nothing to do, but just be with your own experience. Let’s begin just by letting your attention center on your heart, come down into that nest of the heart and just be there for a moment, again, greeting what’s there in your heart.
And with your imagination, I’d like you to allow an image of filaments extending out of your heart, going to everything that you love. Feel your heartstrings, the filaments from your heart, reaching out to your family, to your friends, to beloved animal companions. Let those filaments extend out to the trees that are special to you, maybe to rivers and creek beds, maybe to stars and the moon, to color and song. Let those filaments extend out to everything that touches your heart, everything that you love. And feel that connective tissue between you, your heart, and what you love.
And now allow an image to become aware of all the things that love you, the filaments from all of those beings and places and ancestors that love you. And let those filaments come into your heart and feel the reality of that love, the filaments of those love, of that love coming into your own being. And if you feel resistance, just allow that to be there and soften and just see what you can do to enhance your ability to receive this love. Again, coming from star clusters and the sun, the blue sky, your community of friends, all those who love you.
And let’s now just imagine that your in breath receives all of this love and your out breath extends your love to all those you are connected with, breathing in, receiving, breathing out, offering, blessing. Breathing in, I take in the nurturance, the love, the support, the encouragement. Breathing out, I extend my love, my encouragement, my support. Breathing in and out, the circuitry of love, the circuitry of entanglement and connectivity.
Now move from your heart and radiate that sensation through your whole body. Imagine every cell of your body receiving this and offering this. You are now alive with that quality of love. Breathing it in and offering it, breathing it in and offering it. Extend it out to every cell in your body. Just feel the reality of that. This is who you are.
And now just let your imagination get even a little bit more bold and allow that sensation to move out of your skin into the surrounding field around you. Maybe just the room that you’re in, maybe out to the watershed you’re nearby. But just allow this feeling to extend outward.
And let this feeling of connectiveness encourage you now in how you show up for your life and for your families, your friends, your community, for this culture, for this world that’s tender and vulnerable and beleaguered. Let it move you to feel your medicine for this time. We need you. You are needed.
So now as you’re ready, you can just begin to become aware again of your body and your chair, my voice, this moment.
Having been a therapist for 40 plus years, what you meet every day in the office is grief. It’s the most frequent guest in the room in a sense. So there’s grief around the loss of innocence, the loss of childhood, the loss of relationships. No matter what you’re walking in the door with, it’s accompanied by grief because typically you’re coming in because you’re dealing with some sense of loss, maybe a loss of your own integrity. You lost parts of your own being through shame or through trauma. So I center that because it’s like a threshold emotion. If we can move into that territory, all the other ones in a sense become accessible. But if we can’t go into that grief room, everything is shut.
I would also say that anger is oftentimes a part of grief. We talk about outrage, that grief isn’t just about tears, it’s also about protest. It’s about saying that what’s happening to my body or to my community or to my culture or to my planet is intolerable. It’s unacceptable, what is happening. So when we’re at our grief shrines in our ritual spaces, some people are bellowing. They are screaming in their outrage about what has happened to their own experience, whether through molestation or through rape or through racism or whatever it is. They’re expressing that at the shrine. That’s also grief work. It isn’t, again, just about tears, it’s also about protest and outrage.
But I do feel, having sat with so many people for so many years, that this is really a threshold emotion. And if we can soften it to that territory, everything becomes accessible in some direct way. Do you want to say anything to that, Thomas?
Thomas: No, that’s beautiful. Also, the question was very much centered, like directed to you, and I think you said many things that I could just echo.
Francis: Okay. The second question I think is so important. I was interviewed some time ago by The Sand Project people, Mauricio and Isaiah. And our conversation was centered around what I call … At the heart of all our sorrows was the topic I was exploring. And at the heart of all our sorrows is this feeling of profound emptiness among white western cultures, I shouldn’t say culture, civilization, that the rupture that happened in our European traditions has left an indelible feeling of emptiness in many of us.
And that emptiness is not just a neutral territory, it is filled with a ravenous hunger for more, all of what we don’t need, but for more, more power, more wealth, more privilege. Isms of all kinds arise out of this emptiness, racism, sexism, all of the, capitalism. These are all ways of trying to fill the emptiness. And it’s our responsibility, I think as a white man, to explore this emptiness.
I was at a gathering on race matters some years ago, and as it happened, I was the last person to share in the opening circle. And I said, “Part of what I’m really exploring is the issue of emptiness in white people.” And this Black man literally jumped out of his chair and pointed at me and said, “That’s it. Until your people deal with that issue, you’re going to continue to kill us every fucking day.” And it felt like one of those moments of, okay, I have to look at this. I have to work with this material because that’s what’s ravenously emptying our world every day with consumption, or any of these situations we’re facing.
So centering whiteness, part of our work as a white culture is to deal with this emptiness and address it fundamentally by grieving into it and begin to recall and remember those things that actually shape us as human beings so we can come back into a relational field with the world rather than just consuming the world. There’s so much more we could say on this, but I want to open this up a little bit more here. Other comments?
Kosha: Thank you. And I just wondered, Thomas, whether there’s anything you would like to add to the last question before we go?
Thomas: Yeah. I want to echo the importance and the urgency, and I also want to come back to what I already said before. I think if we go deeper into, and we have to go deeper into our feelings, into our grief, into our inner connectedness inevitably. Also what I said before, all the ethical transgressions ancestrally and maybe in our life, of course, but also for many people ancestrally, are going to show up. And I think it needs a lot of courage.
And there, I want to echo also what you just said, Francis, before is we need collective spaces to do that. We need that village mind, we need that collective field. We need the representation that we exist in each other, and when we hurt each other, we empty a part in ourselves. And because we’re all entangled, we all exist in each other. So every pain, every hurt we inflict is living as a scar in ourselves. So I think that that courage and having collective spaces, that’s why I’m often saying I think we need to have mainstream cultures for integrating the legacy of our societies and cultures and civilization. I think we have to have that.
Without that, we keep reproducing it, and nobody’s going to build it for us. That’s very important. If we see a need that’s there, so we need to do something about it. And so I think that’s also why we put on this course and why we are doing a lot of things, like yourself, for instance, like working on vesseling and vessels, is because we need collective spaces where we can explore that deeply together. And that leads to the societal transformation that is needed. But it’s also scary. So for this, we need courage. We need courage to look inside because it’s going to change the world. So yeah, and the rest you said already, and I think it’s very, very urgent and high importance because we are inflicting a lot of pain.
Francis: It was an honor to be here, and to just touch the soul of our times. We are entering, as I said before, the Long Dark, or we are in the Long Dark, and it’s going to be generations, my friends, before we hopefully see the far side of this current story.
But we all need to become very skillful in knowing how to show up and keep our face turned into the wind and keep showing up for our youth and for ancestors and for watersheds and circles like this, gathering places like this, this is the nourishment that we need. So I’m glad to be tossing seeds with you, Thomas and you, Kosha. Thank you so much.
