An Invitation to the Immense: Lessons on Grief and Soul from Francis Weller

Book review by Nikki Wilkins (Nikkiwilkinsyoga.com)

After a devastating loss, I set an intention at the beginning of the year: to expand into uncomfortable territory instead of shrinking. To lean toward the hard things rather than avoid them. To stay open to love instead of building protective walls around my grief.

Loss changes us. It forces time to stand still. It carries a void-like quality. This is liminality — a floating space of uncertainty that offers us the opportunity to discover who we are, and who we are capable of becoming. You might call it soul-searching.

This can be difficult when our days are shaped by schedules, late nights and early alarms, busyness and productivity, rushing and exhaustion. This has become our ordinary: the way we plod along feeling numb, noticing little, sleepwalking through this beautiful and precious life we assume is infinite.

Until a good dose of darkness shakes us to the core. Loss. Grief. Heartbreak. World instability.

Then we stand frozen and speechless in the midst of chaos, wondering how we found ourselves caught in this inescapable, sticky web.

In his latest book, In the Absence of the Ordinary, trauma therapist Francis Weller writes, “Most of us live in an ascension culture. We love things rising up… up… up… always up. We value success and strength, power and prowess. When things begin to go down, we can feel panic, uncertainty, and even dread.”

Yet, he reminds us, “Soul draws us downward, into vulnerability, tenderness, loss, intimacy and death. Soul circulates through the terrain of wounds and suffering, close to the broken heart… and this offers us a sense of who we are authentically.”

Formatted as a collection of essays, this book unfolds like a poetic and steady companion for hard times. Weller encourages us to cultivate attention, ritual, and connection to community and to the natural world as ways to restore balance. He describes this disruption — this absence of the ordinary — as an initiation: an invitation into deeper presence and belonging. He offers us a language for soul work.

Much of modern life encourages us to narrow our emotional range, to avoid grief (especially in public) and sidestep discomfort. Weller asks something different of us. He asks us to live immense — to expand our capacity to feel, to belong fully to the earth and to one another, and to allow heartbreak to deepen rather than diminish us.

Never have I underlined and read aloud so much from a single book in a yoga class as I have from Weller’s exquisite work on soul-deepening. With essays on initiation, waking up, ritual and release, the apprenticeship of sorrow, reverence, self-compassion and gratitude, this book teaches us to slow down, to act with kindness and curiosity. It is filled with passages you’ll be scribbling into notebooks, or even contemplating that tattoo.