The six gates of grief can be thought of as areas that bring up grief or our pathway into the feelings of grief. This may or may not be gone over in more depth in your community grief ritual. As you read this list, feel into your body. Feel free to use these as journal, song, or movement prompts.
Gates 1-5 are introduced by Francis Weller in his book “The Wild Edge of Sorrow” and gate 6 was first articulated by Rachael Rice.
1. Everything We Love, We Will Lose: This gate refers to the natural grief we feel when we lose someone or something dear to us. Death, breakup, or other changes (having a baby, retiring, etc.). Partners, pets, parents, trees, homes, jobs, faith, etc. Even a choice to change something of your own free will can bring grief.
2. The Places That Have Not Known Love: This is about parts of ourselves that have been neglected or unloved, often leading to feelings of low self-worth or shame.
3. The Sorrows of the World: This gate recognizes our capacity to feel the world’s pain, like environmental destruction or the suffering of others. This gate brings anger and outrage (which may initially come out as aggression/intent to harm, but technically anger and aggression are different). This gate is for systemic harm; accepting the reality that this harm is happening makes it easier to set a boundary: “THIS HAS TO STOP.” For example, “Forest devastation has to stop. Retribution has to stop. Retaliation has to stop. White supremacy has to stop.”
4. What We Expected and Did Not Receive: This gate is about the grief that comes from not receiving the nurturing, love, or support we needed at different stages of life. It’s also about the collaboration of community that our spirit expected, but did not receive.
5. Ancestral Grief: The fifth gate is about the inherited grief from our ancestors, which can be passed down through generations through behavior, epigenetics, and collective memory. (See this potent TED talk on intergenerational trauma by Serene Thin Elk)
6. The Harms We’ve Caused. This gate includes personal harms we’ve caused, to ourselves and others, as well as collective harms we’re complicit in, such as racism, patriarchy, capitalism, ecocide, human supremacy, and inequity.
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More about Gate 1:
This gate is resistance to the disruption of an attachment: Mother, father, child, dog, horse, cat, grandfather, partner, our health or youth, our singlehood, a marriage, a home, a dream. We also experience grief for the loss of old identities even when it was our choice: becoming a mother, taking on a new job, moving, gender-affirming surgery, graduation, retirement, etc.
By letting ourselves feel grief, we bridge the chasm between what our hearts are still expecting and what reality is now. But we can’t just leap from point A to point B or fly over. We have go the long way before we can build the bridge. We have to feel it. The deeper the attachment or connection, the deeper the sorrow that asks to be felt to bring the heart to a place of acceptance of the loss. In doing so, the love or connection we feel has a place to go. Love and energy can flow again.
Getting back where we WERE, is not possible. But we can transform, learn, and let grief initiate us into another phase of wisdom.