Feminine Art of Keening and Grief Tending: Death, Transition and Healing

My journey with grief and death has been a long one, I grew up on an old pre-Christian burial site and I spent my childhood hanging out on the land and in the graveyard. In the depths of winter, with the trees thread bare I would listen to the chilling wind whistling through the gates, like the harkening screech of the Bean Sídhe, something ancient remembered.

As a child I never feared the stories, I was captivated by them, there was deep ancestral pulse in these moments, a sense of internal knowing beyond my developmental years, a calm and resounding peace I could not name. I would receive dreams of those who were going to pass, but these were gradually shut down through continued dismissal.

I was socialized into a world that just did not feel right, labelled as “too sensitive”, “too feeling”, just “too much”. I learned to inhabit a structure, that was devoid in many ways, lacking a core element. The severance from my emotional, oracular nature brought a pervading feeling of incompleteness.

I learned to wear a mask of protection, hardened my heart and hid away from the world behind identities that were never mine. I made myself smaller, more palatable and how my anger festered, shielding my aching heart and leaking out into my life in insidious ways.

Then grief re-entered my life, like the bitter medicine I was not ready to take, the death of my father in 2012 was the beginning of a ripening with this energy, and the re-introduction to my emotional nature after many years of being shut down and defensive.

This marked the beginning of a personal initiation that took me to the depths and allowed me to alchemize many wounds. It was the catalyst in the re-awakening or re-acknowledging of my work with the energy of grief and death.

Since 2012 I have buried several close relatives, supported them in their final moments, and through transition to after soul care. That is the purpose of the Keening woman, SHE is the guardian of the soul that has passed, SHE is the protector of the soul during this vulnerable time and SHE is the one who ensures the soul returns to the Great Beyond.

This is a gift of the Great Womb, a Sacred Feminine Architecture. It was never the place of a male priest. We have an epidemic of lost souls, both incorporeal and incarnate. It is my belief that this is, in part due, to the loss of these Powerful Women in society, the rejection of the HOLY MOTHER, coupled with the rejection of the Body as Holy, our Grief as Sacred and the Sanctity of the Land. 

In order to maintain a monopoly on the people, the church had to claim power over the rites of birth (baptism) and death, from cradle to grave. As birth could not be stripped from women biologically, their beloved children were cast as dirtied by the birth process and thus the spiritual washing by the father became a necessity, death on the other hand was whipped from the women.

This is not a play on words, there are many accounts of Keening women being whipped by male priests in graveyards, when performing these Sacred Death rites. Public displays of grief were shunned and the esteemed role of Keening women in pre-Christian Ireland was diminished culturally and spiritually.

There was a gnosis in the people of Ireland that transcended the narrative of the church, this gnosis had to be squashed on all accounts, made to seem feral, wild and uneducated, but the rites of Keening women did not only exist in small community settings, although this is where the last echo’s remained.

Women were always the keepers of birth and death and were protected from death by virtue of having a WOMB. The Womb is the center you see, and the WOMAN holds space for it all. It is my belief that this is the truth for all Women. We all hold this latent capacity. If we can birth, we can also assist in death! That is why the WOMEN and the WOMB have received so much persecution.

It was Seren Bertrand who linked the word Keen to Queen. The Keening women were Royal women, Women of Wealth, Women of Spiritual and Worldly Power. They were Educated Women, Esteemed and Revered Women, Women that provided a very important spiritual function, maintaining the Universal Flow and supporting Soul Transition and Evolution.

Brídghe was said to the first woman to bring Keening to Ireland, she was a Wealthy, Influential, Powerful, Revered Woman, not a feral, outcast shunned to the darkened corners and borders of society (not that there is anything wrong with our feral, wild-woman nature that is a journey in and of itself). The original place of the Keening women is here, enthroned at the gates, as guardian to the Sacred Mysteries of the Life and Death. As I write this my whole body is humming in remembrance. The beauty and ecstasy of our Sacred Grief, the raw primal Swan Song is so needed in this world, the Eloquent Lamentation for lost Love and Life is ready to be Embodied and Remembered. In truth the Keen is both raw, primal and feral but also equally beautiful, eloquent and grace filled.

We are at a time when this ancient ritual is being RE-membered. We are at a time when the women are reclaiming the truth of their VOICES, and the truth of their WOMBS. We are at a time where the old structures are dying, the systems that have held us are crumbling and the nefarious aspects of society are being seen for what they are. We are reclaiming the Wisdom of the Wise Ones, those who honored the thresholds. We are reclaiming our grief, our song, our rites of ending and renewal! We cannot truly move into renewal, if we have not felt the grief in the closing of the old.

If you are ready to open to the power of grief work, the simplicity of grief tending as the path to healing, if you are wanting to touch your HOLY GRIEF, open to your ROYAL waters, your intimate Emotional Ecology, book in for an Exploratory Grief or Keening Session here.

Grief work is one of the most simplistic and profoundly healing Feminine Arts. It brings closure to painful life experiences, allows the release of old stories and scripts, invites the body to soften what has become hard and will bring renewal to periods of stagnancy and depression. It also brings the energy of dissolution, allowing what has had its times to leave. It has the power to transform lives. There are times in your cycle when these rituals are both necessary and deeply supportive. Get in touch, I would love to be part of your grief journey.

With Love,

Le grá

Sarah x