Frances weller biography

She is the face of "Weller's Wheels," a station holiday-season campaign to collect new bicycles and distribute them to less-advantaged youngsters. One cause that's particularly close to her heart, she said, is the Pink Ribbon Project of the New Hanover Regional Medical Center Foundation, funding mammography screenings and offering assistance to breast cancer patients.

Weller campaigns in memory of her mother, Katherine Weller , who died in after a long battle with breast cancer. Weller inspired her daughter to launch the local "Buddy Check 6," campaign, in which women remind friends to do a monthly self-examination for cancer. Among top stories, Weller particularly remembers hurricanes such as Fran in and Diana in --"We didn't have generators back then.

We did sit in the dark for a while. Azaleas Festivals, she said, are always fun. Biggest of all, perhaps, is Wilmington's phenomenal growth. We would laugh more. Life is asking us to meet it on its terms, not ours. We try to control every minute detail, but life is too rambunctious, too wild. What we can do is bring compassion to what arrives at our door and meet it with kindness and affection.

We can become a good host. Weller: We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not been granted what we need to thrive. Addictions are an attempt to cope with intolerable states. We are meant to have a more sensuous, imaginative, and creative existence. For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning.

In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status—or, on the shadow side, addictions. The problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. We always want more. Though primary satisfactions are rare in our culture, we do experience them. We can remember what that felt like and let our longing for that state become our compass, telling us what direction we need to go to get back to those satisfactions.

We can find them through our friendships, by spending time in nature, by risking being vulnerable with someone we trust. Soul invites the marginal, the excluded, and the unwelcome pieces of ourselves into our attention. Soul is often found at the edges, both in the culture and in our lives. Soul takes us down into the places of our shared humanity, such as sorrow and longing, suffering and death.

Soul requires that we be authentic, revealing what lies behind the image we try to show the world, including our flaws and peculiarities. It cares about participation. Soul is revealed in dreams and images, in our most intimate conversations, and in our desire to live a life of meaning and purpose. Weller: Yes. Our biology and our psychology were shaped together over a long period of time to help us survive as a species.

For the vast majority of human history we have lived in a tribal or village context. From the moment we are born, we expect to be a part of a tribe; to step out of our enclosure in the morning and see many pairs of eyes looking back at us; to find those people there to meet us and to affirm us; and to go and gather food with them and build a fire and perform the rituals the community needs.

When a child is born there, all the children gather around the house to sing a welcoming song. In the Native American Blackfoot tradition the welcoming ritual presents the newborn to the cosmos. There are many tribes today that have an active ritual life. Consider how different that is from going to see a private-practice therapist. Yes, we have, for more than two hundred thousand years.

And then, within the past few hundred years, it practically disappeared. Weller: It takes us out of our familiar mode of functioning and into an altered state of consciousness. Getting there is not easy, however. Before I learned to conduct rituals to help people express their grief, I had to participate in many such rituals myself.

I carried an enormous amount of grief in my body from decades of shame, but because I was self-conscious, I worked hard to keep it under wraps. After all, I was a therapist. And letting go of it frightened me.

Frances weller biography

At the third I was still feeling stuck when a man came up to me and placed his hand on my shoulder, and that was it: I fell to my knees and cried for hours. The dam had broken. The psychiatrist R. Laing said we arrive here as Stone Age children. In other words, we inherit at birth the entire lineage of our species. During the grief ritual you go off by yourself to weep, and when you return, the group welcomes you back and thanks you for helping to empty the communal cup of sorrow.

How many of us have ever been thanked for our grief before? We think of grief as a burden we lay on someone else. Of course, the tears might not come. In a circle of thirty people, perhaps only a few of us might really grieve. But the others can support those individuals and thank them heartily—because they helped everyone. And the next time it might be you or me.

We have to learn to think like a village. And we also need to grant attention, to bear witness. Call some friends together to share stories and simply listen to one another—not to offer any advice but to make room for the unacknowledged pieces of our lives. Forty miles north of Chicago, the Center is home to breathtakingly beautiful prairie, savanna, wetland, woodland, and ravine in the homelands of the Council of Three Fires—the Potawatomi, Ojibwa, and Ottawa.

Francis Weller. Contributions to HumansandNature. Join our community of contributors advocating for the wisdom and wonder of nature by sharing your ideas and stories. Contribute Your Work. Follow your nature.