There Are Two Moves When Faced with Uncertainty (Francis Weller)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

Lemonada Media

Education, Self-improvement

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“We’re not empty containers just being filled up with fear and terror and trauma,” says psychotherapist Francis Weller. “We’re also medicine carriers.” Many of you will know Weller from his moving conversations about grief with Anderson Cooper, or his beautiful book The Wild of Edge of Sorrow. Weller’s new book, In the Absence of Ordinary, is exactly what we need now. Today, we talk about the wisdom and vitality that our grief can bring forth if we resist the impulse to go numb. Weller talks about what happens when we keep our grief company, when we allow it to keep moving, when we give ourselves what we’ve so been needing. He invites us, in this time of uncertainty, to move toward imagination, and what he calls the long dark—a space where we can connect with our own immensity, and collectively receive the medicine that is waiting there for all of us. For the show notes (including links to the new edition of The Wild Edge of Sorrow and In the Absence of Ordinary, which was just released), head over to my Substack. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Lemonada.
0:05.7	Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread.
0:09.6	Today I'm talking to the awe-inspiring psychotherapist and author Francis Weller.
0:29.3	Thank you. Hi, it's Elise Lunan, host of Pulling the Thread.
0:35.5	On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here.
0:39.1	My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
0:46.4	Here is today's guest, Francis Weller, on why he is hopeful that we will find the vitality
0:52.5	and the meaning that our grief carries with it.
0:55.0	So something is happening in the collective field. That gives me some sense of hope.
1:01.0	That if our hearts break enough, we might fall in love again with this world. It will be through the broken heart.
1:08.0	It won't because we've held it all together. It will be because we've
1:12.2	felt enough of our own grief and pain for what we love. Because when we're honest with ourselves,
1:19.3	we actually love this world. Wow, he's amazing. Many of you will know Francis Weller from his
1:25.7	incredibly moving conversations about grief with Anderson Cooper.
1:30.0	Francis worked as a psychotherapist for more than four decades, and he has written some of the most beautiful books on making sense of the human experience.
1:39.2	One of his best known books is The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
1:42.7	And then his newest book, which is exactly what I think
1:45.8	we need right now, is called In the Absence of the Ordinary, Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty.
1:52.2	Today, we talk about the wisdom and vitality that our grief can bring forth if we resist
1:57.1	the impulse to go numb. Francis talks about, as he says, keeping our grief company.
2:03.6	It's not about shaping the outcome of our grief, but about allowing it to stay soft,
2:08.7	allowing it to keep moving so that it can become what it wants to become.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lemonada Media, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Lemonada Media and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.