Why Grief Is a Spiritual Practice, Not a Problem From Which to Recover

Somewhere along the way, we were told grief was an illness. Shamanic traditions have always known otherwise.

Someone close to me died a few years ago. Within weeks, well-meaning people were asking how I was "doing" in a tone that clearly meant: how far along are you? When will you be back to normal? There were stages offered to me, timelines implied, gentle suggestions that I might want to "talk to someone", as though grief were an infection that, properly treated, could be cleared.

I understand the impulse. Witnessing grief makes people uncomfortable. It is unruly, it has no schedule, and it refuses the tidy arc we want for it. But the framing itself, of grief as malfunction, grief as something to get through and out the other side of, may be the most harmful story our culture tells about loss.

Shamanic traditions, across vastly different geographies and lineages, tell a different story entirely. In those traditions, grief is not a problem. It is a practice. It is, in fact, one of the most sacred things a human being can do.

Feel your grief; let it bring what you are to become.

The Metabolising the West Forgot

The word that keeps returning to me from shamanic teachings is metabolise. Not process. Not overcome. Not heal from. Metabolise: the way a body takes in something and transforms it, extracts what is needed, releases what is not. A slow, biological, non-negotiable act.

You cannot rush your liver. You cannot schedule your digestion. And you cannot rush grief, not if you want the transformation that grief actually carries.

In many indigenous traditions, grief is understood as the soul's appropriate response to love encountering loss. If you loved something, a person, a relationship, a version of yourself, a way of life, then grief is the price of that love, and it is also the proof of it. To rush through grief is to dishonour the love that caused it. To medicate it into silence is to refuse the very thing that might change you.

Grief is not what happens when love fails. It is what happens when love succeeds,

and then the beloved is gone.

Malidoma Patrice Somé, the West African elder and author who brought Dagara teachings to Western audiences, spent much of his life saying that the West is in a grief crisis, not because people here grieve too much, but because they grieve too poorly. We have no containers for it. We have no rituals. We have no community witness. And so it accumulates, unmetabolised, and turns into depression, rage, numbness, and addiction.

He was not being poetic. He was being diagnostic.

What Grief Actually Is, Shamanically Speaking

In shamanic cosmology, emotions are not private internal weather. They are relational phenomena: responses to the real world, information from the spirit, communications between a soul and its circumstances. Grief, specifically, is often understood as the water element moving through you: cleansing, dissolving, clearing what the self clings to but can no longer hold.

This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is a living metaphor, one that shamanic practitioners work with practically. In ritual, grief is given form, given direction, given a place to go. It is not vented (which disperses without transforming) and it is not suppressed (which festers). It is held and moved, the way a river holds water and moves it somewhere.

The container for this movement, in traditional cultures, was community and ceremony. Not the awkward condolence card, not the three days of compassionate leave your employer offers. Actual gathered people, actual tended fire, actual time, sometimes days, set aside to let the grief do its work in the presence of witnesses.

GRIEF DOES NOT WANT TO BE WITNESSED. IT NEEDS TO BE.

There is something crucial in the witnessing. Grief kept private stays strange to itself. Grief witnessed by others and held by a community that says yes, this is real, this matters, we see you carrying this, becomes something else. It becomes part of the shared fabric. It stops being a wound and begins being an initiation.

The Five Stages Were Never a Map

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of grief were originally observations made about terminally ill patients confronting their own deaths, not a prescriptive roadmap for the bereaved. She said this herself, repeatedly, and spent much of her later career dismayed at how her model had been misappropriated. There is no correct order. There is no finish line. The stages are not steps on a ladder; they are weather.

But we grabbed those five stages and turned them into a curriculum. We use them to evaluate whether someone is grieving properly. We become quietly worried when someone stays in anger too long, or when they seem to have accepted something too quickly, or when, months after a loss, they are still, openly, sad.

The shamanic view finds this bewildering. Why would grief have a finish line? The love it corresponds to has no finish line. The dead do not become less dead, and the love does not become less real. What changes, through proper metabolising, is not that you stop grieving but that the grief changes its nature. It becomes less like drowning and more like depth. It becomes part of who you are, carried with dignity rather than swallowed in shame.

The goal is not to reach the end of grief. The goal is to become someone

who can carry it without it carrying you.

Why the Culture Fears Grief

It would be too simple to say we avoid grief because it hurts. We avoid many things that hurt and call them medicine. We avoid grief, I think, for a more specific reason: because grief, properly entered, undoes the self.

To truly grieve is to let the shape you have made of yourself come apart. Grief knows no ego. It does not respect the careful architecture of identity, of role, of the person you have presented to the world. It reaches past all of that and touches something that was real, that is now gone, and in touching that absence it asks: who are you now?

A culture built on productivity, on self-determination, on the myth of the stable individual cannot afford grief. Grief is inefficient. It is undignified. It makes demands on others. It refuses to resolve on schedule. And it asks, again and again, the question that consumer culture exists to prevent you from asking: what actually matters?

So we pathologise it. We give it a diagnosis. We medicate its sharper edges. We offer strategies for coping and techniques for resilience, and in doing so we miss the entire point which is that grief is not something to cope with. It is something to be changed by.

The Descent as Sacred Structure

Every shamanic tradition has some version of the descent narrative, the journey into the underworld, the loss of form, the encounter with what cannot be controlled. Inanna goes below the earth and must surrender her symbols of power, one by one, at each gate. Orpheus descends for love and loses everything by looking back. Persephone is taken down and the world above goes barren in her absence.

These are not stories about tragedy. They are stories about the necessity of descent. About the fact that certain kinds of knowledge, the knowledge that makes you real, the knowledge that makes you useful to others, the knowledge of the interconnectedness of the living and the dead, can only be gained below. Not through transcendence. Through descent.

Grief is that descent. It takes you into the underworld of yourself. It strips you of the things you thought you were. It forces acquaintance with what is actually there: the love, the loss, the fear of your own ending, the unbearable tenderness of having been alive alongside someone who is now gone.

The shamanic practitioner does not try to get the grieving person back to the surface quickly. They sit at the threshold. They tend the fire. They trust the process. They know that the person who comes back up will not be the same person who went down, and they hold that transformation as the point, not the problem.

Grief as Ancestor Work

One of the most challenging and ultimately liberating ideas in shamanic practice is that grief is not only personal. We carry not just our own unmourned losses but those of our lineage, of the generations before us who had no space to grieve, no words for what they lost, no ceremony to metabolise the wound.

This is not mystical speculation. It is increasingly supported by epigenetics, which has demonstrated that trauma and the physiological responses it generates can be transmitted across generations. The grief your grandmother swallowed becomes a pattern in your nervous system. The loss your grandfather never spoke about shapes the way you relate to absence.

When we grieve consciously, by creating genuine space for grief to move through us, we do not only heal ourselves. We interrupt the transmission. We metabolise what was passed to us unmetabolised. We return to our children what we were never meant to carry in the first place.

This reframes the entire endeavour. Grief is not wallowing. Grief is ancestral service. It is one of the most generous things you can do for the people who come after you.

You don't grieve only for yourself. You grieve for

everyone in your line who was never permitted to grieve.

The Body Is the Altar

Shamanic practice is resolutely somatic. The body is not a vehicle for the soul; it is where the soul lives, where transformation happens, where grief does its actual work. You cannot think your way through grief. You have to let it move through tissue, through tears, through the particular heaviness that lodges in the chest, the particular exhaustion that makes the limbs stone.

The body knows things the mind hasn't caught up with yet. It knows that someone is gone before the mind has accepted it. It grieves in its own language: in sleep disruption, in appetite loss, in the strange forgetting of ordinary tasks, in the way you reach for the phone to tell someone something before the absence crashes back in.

Honouring grief somatically means not managing the body's responses but letting them move. Crying when the crying wants to come. Sitting with the heaviness rather than immediately trying to lift it. Moving the body in ways that allow grief to become physical, like walking, rocking, swaying, the rhythmic movements that humans have always reached for in sorrow, as if the body knows it needs to be rocked through this the way an infant is rocked through what it cannot yet understand.

Shamanic ritual often incorporates drumming, movement, and breath for exactly this reason. The drum at four beats per second is the heartbeat, the earth's pulse, the oldest rhythm the body remembers. To grieve with drum is to bring the grief back into the body's own cadence and to remind the mourning nervous system that the world's heartbeat continues.

What Grief Asks of Us

Grief asks for time - real time, not the compressed version our culture grudgingly offers. It asks for witness - the presence of others who can hold the space without trying to fix what cannot be fixed. It asks for ritual - some structured way to mark what has ended, to honour what was real, to acknowledge the threshold between before and after.

And grief asks, eventually, for gratitude - not the performative kind, not toxic positivity repackaged, but the deep acknowledgement that what was lost was worth losing. That it mattered enough to hurt this much. That love, which always risks grief, was still the right choice.

This is the alchemical gift that shamanic traditions have always understood: grief transforms love from loss into legacy. The dead become, through grief, something other than absent. They become part of the texture of who we are. Not ghosts who haunt, but presences who have joined the ongoing conversation we carry inside ourselves, the permanent and still-living relationship with those we have loved and lost.

That transformation requires the metabolising. It cannot be rushed into, and it cannot be bypassed. The shortcut around grief is also the shortcut around love. You cannot have one without remaining open to the other.

Permission to Grieve Fully

If you are in grief right now, whether recent or long-carried, tidy or complicated, grieving a person or a marriage or a version of yourself or a country or a future you had counted on, I want to offer you something our culture rarely does: permission.

Permission to not be over it. Permission to let it be as large as it is. Permission to let it change you, slowly and without your full control, into the person who has carried this and been deepened by it. Permission to need witnesses, ceremony, time, and the company of others who have been below and know the territory.

You are not failing to recover. You are doing something ancient and necessary. You are metabolising love that has nowhere else to go. You are serving your lineage and, though you may not yet feel it, you are becoming more alive, not less, through the willingness to be in this.

The shamanic view does not see grief as the opposite of thriving. It sees grief as one of its prerequisites. Those who have never been broken open stay oddly thin in their understanding of what it means to be human. Those who have grieved fully, messily, bodily, communally, carry a quality that is unmistakable. A warmth. A groundedness. A capacity to sit with others in their darkness without flinching.

That is the gift grief gives, if we let it. Not transcendence. Depth.

THE WOUND IS NOT WHAT KEEPS YOU FROM THE WORLD.

IT IS WHAT TEACHES YOU HOW TO ENTER IT.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is a researcher, philosopher, and shamanic practitioner. She works with people who are ready to stop managing their pain and start being transformed by it. If you're sitting with grief that has nowhere to go, reach out at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit www.magicinharmony.com.

If this touched something in you, if you have found your own path through grief that was less about recovery and more about becoming, I would genuinely love to hear it.