keening

What is the sound of grief?

How does it move?

 

Today I sat with a familiar feeling – perhaps you can relate (I imagine any human can) – the feeling of frustration.

 

My frustration came from a recent phenomena. Lately in my spiritual practice I have been receiving silence – or no answer – to the questions I have been asking.

To clarify a bit – these are not “big” questions necessarily. Often questions like – which deck should I use, this one or this one?

Nothing.

No deck then?

Nothing.

Just radio silence where normally there is loud, direct clarity.

 

I feel frustrated and at a loss – literally that’s the feeling.

Adrift in frustration.

 

“That’s it!” I yell, slamming down the tarot deck.

“I’ll just make a fucking decision for myself then”, I huff in anger, fuming.

 

And then I see it.

 

Anger.

 

Anger is always a red flag for me, not of something negative, but of a very important piece of information I have either been missing or blocking from my psyche.

 

I awoke in this agitated state, and no amount of meditating or card reading is going to take it away.

The only way out is through.

 

Keening is a cross cultural practice of singing, wailing, over the dead.

I have found it to be an amazingly powerful practice for moving grief through the body – any grief, it doesn’t necessarily have to be related with death, but we all feel and experience loss through our lives, and that sadness, grief, longing, can settle into our cells, blocking the vitality and flow of our emotions, and eventually our vital life force.

 

Back to anger.

Anger is totally misunderstood in our culture and thus unfortunately villanized as something we have to learn to control (on one spectrum) or learn to “transmute” (on another spectrum.

Either way, we’re told some how or another that is “wrong” or not a “high vibe” emotion and we need to do something about it.

This could not be further from the truth.

 

Anger shows us where our boundaries have been trespassed.

Anger points to the most tender, sensitive, and often hurt places within us that need compassion, care, and attending to.

Underlying anger often lies sadness, and grief.

 

But we can’t just jump straight there without going to our anger first, for it is our anger that shows us not just where to look, but where to feel.

 

So this little red flash of anger disguised as frustration called me to my somatic practice I’ve been working with for years now. It’s so simple, that it allows me to straight to the thing, no analysis or overthinking required.

And the thing that lay underneath of the frustration, flashes of anger, was a need to wail.

 

So wail I did.

The deep wails moved through my whole body, and through my throat.

No control or contortion of worrying about what it would sound like coming out.

We keen like injured animals – yelping, whimpering, crying, but certainly not self conscious about what other animals might think.

Unsilenced, animals shriek their pain in honest keening in the moment, while us humans stifle our own voice, swallowing our grief, we think without consequence.

 

But grief oozes out into our lives in the ugliest and least suspecting ways.

It oozes out into our relationship dynamics.

It manifests as chronic health issues.

It settles into our lungs.

 

I wasn’t really the least bit surprised actually that a deep keening session poured out from me.

I had been praying over and asking my guides to help me in healing a virus that had settled into my body and seemed to be most comfortable seated in my lungs and throat for the last 7 weeks. For the last 4 weeks I have been asking my guides for healing and many magical occurrences had unfolded and I was beginning to feel better little by little.

In classical Chinese Medicine, the lungs is where grief is held.

For a long time, I’ve felt in my own body that my lungs have been a vulnerable place for me. Not only were my lungs the first and longest thing to be affected any time I caught a cold, but I often felt that my own grief often settled there and held a bit too comfortably. I also have had a sense that other people’s grief including ancestral grief would take up residence in my lungs without my really being aware that it was there.

 

And so, keening.

Keening is a beautiful practice that helps to give literal voice for that which needs to be heard.

It moves the energy of grief, of sadness, of loss through us so that we can free the river of emotions to run freely through our bodies.

 

We may engage in cleansing rituals, burning sage, or incense, but until we can move the emotional charge we hold in our cells, we will not be free.

 

In writing this entry about my own experience with keening, I also wanted to do a bit of research in how other cultures and peoples keen. The word itself comes from Ireland, however the practice is truly cross cultural.

I learned that the Catholic Church at one point banned the practice of keening, associating it with paganism and worship of the devil (of course).

Why would the church fear the practice of woman crying, wailing, and singing over the dead? One might ask.

Because it is a practice of direct relationship with Spirit, with our own source within.

When we learn to flow and be in union with our physical body, our emotional tides and currents, our spirit is at peace.

We are uncontrollable, un-manipulatable.

 

We are free.