What Ceremony and Ritual Know About Grief — On Being Witnessed
Billy buttons (Craspedia), planting native Australian herbs, flowers and trees as rituals.
Lately I have been reading about how First Nations people in the US and Australia carry loss, and I kept finding the same idea.
Grief was never meant to be carried alone.
We were taught to talk
Many of us learnt that healing happens in words, in a private room, one person at a time. I believe in that too. It is how I work. But across the world, and across thousands of years, people have also carried grief through community, ritual, the body and the land.
What the documented practices show
In the United States, the Department of Veterans Affairs has offered programs where traditional healers, including a Navajo medicine man, treat American Indian veterans for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A survey led by Washington State University researchers found that many Native veterans favour traditional ceremonies such as the sweat lodge, and an early report found that around half said usual PTSD treatments do not work for them. Among the Hopi, a ceremony called Wiping Away the Tears is described as helping dispel a "ghost sickness" that can haunt survivors of battle.
For the Lakota, the sweat lodge is one of seven sacred rites. It is also described as the way warriors are welcomed home and reintroduced to their community. An anthropology thesis on Pine Ridge suggests that ceremonies help Lakota veterans reintegrate while keeping ties to language, community and the next generation.
I want to be honest about what this is. These are surveys and lived accounts, not controlled trials, and they do not prove that one approach beats another. What they show is what people choose, and why it matters to them.
Dadirri
In Australia, Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, an Elder of the Ngangikurungkurr people from the Daly River, has shared the concept of dadirri. She describes it as inner, deep listening and a still awareness, drawn from a deep spring inside us. Her people learnt by watching and listening, waiting, and then acting.
Dadirri is not a technique. It is a way of living in relationship with people and Country. Psychotherapist Carl Rogers spent a career arguing that being deeply heard changes us. Here is a way of life that has known this for far longer.
The power of a small ritual for grief
Ritual does not need to be ancient or grand. In a series of experiments, Harvard researchers Michael Norton and Francesca Gino found that people who performed a ritual after a loss reported lower levels of grief, including those who did not believe rituals work. Their explanation was a regained sense of control, something grief so often takes from us. Many of the rituals people described were neither religious nor communal. A private act can be enough. It fits what I see. Ritual gives grief a form. Being witnessed gives it company. Ceremony often offers both.
What they have in common
When I look across these practices, I see the same needs again and again: a ritual to hold the loss, a witness, time, and a larger story to place it in.
Irvin Yalom named one of the most healing forces in therapy as universality, the relief of discovering that we are not the only ones. Ceremony builds that into its very structure. Your loss is placed within a circle of people, and within a long line of others who have also lost.
It reminds me of the ripples. No one grieves in isolation, because no one lived in isolation.
A word of respect
These are living practices, held by particular peoples with their own protocols and traditions. I am not a member of these communities, although I have spent time with some of them, and I do not offer their ceremonies as tools. What I can do is learn, credit my sources, and ask what my own practice could explore in more depth.
Rituals you can make your own
If you would like a ritual of your own, you do not need to borrow one. Many of the rituals people describe after a loss are simple and private, and they often draw on traditions closer to home. A few ideas:
Light a candle at a set time, on an anniversary or on a hard evening, and say their name aloud.
Write a letter to the person, or to what you lost. You can keep it, burn it or bury it.
Share a meal or a toast in their honour, cooking their favourite dish or raising a glass on a day that matters.
Plant something, a tree, a herb, a few bulbs, and tend it over time.
Make a memory box from objects, photos and small things that carry them.
Walk a place that mattered to you both, on the same day each year or whenever you need to.
Finding company in grief
If you are carrying a loss, you may need someone to hear it, and the time to let it be heard.
That is not a technique. It is a ritual. It is company.
Sandrine Lonchampt is a grief counsellor and psychotherapist at Colibri Counselling & Psychotherapy, offering online sessions across Australia, in English and French.
If this resonated with you, I offer a free 25-minute consultation.
References
ICT Staff. (2010, December 16). Heavy heat. ICT.
Norton, M. I., & Gino, F. (2014). Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 266-272.
Perkins, D. A. (2010). An analysis of healing and honouring ceremonies practiced by Lakota veterans on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Texas State University.
Phillips, R. E. (2014). Ceremonial PTSD therapies favored by Native American veterans. Washington State University News.
Roberts, M. (2005, December 22). Practitioners of healing arts help veterans cope. Associated Press. Reprinted in ICT.
Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist's view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Ungunmerr-Baumann, M.-R. (n.d.). Dadirri: A reflection.
Urquhart, G. (n.d.). Native American veterans' perceived barriers and facilitators of seeking treatment for PTSD.
Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.
Yalom, I. D., & Leszcz, M. (2020). The theory and practice of group psychotherapy (6th ed.). Basic Books.
