Grieving Aloud: Keening And The Forgotten Power Of A Woman's Voice

Welcome To Grieving Awake

Guest · 0:00Welcome to Grieving Awake. I'm your host, Joya. This is a space for conversations about loss, love, consciousness, and the mysteries that change us. Together we'll explore what grief asks of us, what it reveals, and how even in the breaking, we can find a deeper way of being alive.

Speaker · 0:39I did not plan on it. I didn't rehearse it. And I was standing in a room full of people who loved me and loved him, and my grief became sound. A few days ago on Instagram, I posted a video of that moment. I had never even watched it myself, and Spirit told me to post it, so I did. And I, every time I watch it, I cry. It takes me right back, right back to that moment where there were no words to convey the love that I have for my son, and all I could do, all I could think to do was just sound it out. That video has received so many loving comments. Thousands of strangers watching it, watching a mother wail for her child. And the thing that they keep writing back to me over and over was a version of the same sentence that really touched me deeply. You've given me permission for something I intuited I needed to do. I never knew that was allowed. And that one right there, somebody messaged me and said, I never knew that was allowed. And I thought, why are there rules for this? And I haven't been able to put that sentence down because for most of human history, this was allowed. This was normal, more than allowed. It was expected. It was a right. And in fact, it was a job that belonged to women. And so today I want to explore a question I've been living with. And since I posted this video, it's come up again and again, even more deeply. Why did women keen for the dead? And who told them to stop? So this is Grieving Awake, and I'm Joya. And here we explore grief consciousness and the possibility of awakening through grief. And today it's just me and my drum and that question. And I'm going to take you deep into what happened on that day that I keened for my son, and then I'm going to share with you what I've learned since about the women who did this before me, the women in Ireland, the women in the Nordic countries where my blood comes from, and in Spain where the other half of me comes from. And I want to look clearly at the moment. In each of those places when somebody with authority decided a woman's grief was too loud and too dangerous. And we'll close with an optional practice using the voice and the drum. We're gonna just sound a name. You can do it with me. You can listen and just let it move you. So a note before we begin. This episode holds the sound of a mother grieving for her 18-year-old son recorded live. That's me. And if today is a day that you need something more gentle, I understand. Come back when you re when you're ready to listen to this. It'll be here.

The Moment The Wail Arrived

Speaker · 3:52So let me take you into that room. The week before my son passed, I had a feeling something terrible was going to happen, and I had begged him and begged him not to go on this trip that he went on. And his celebration of life, freeway exit number, was 14, which is a number that I have tattooed on my arm because it is so meaningful in my life. The last day I saw my son was on the 14th. So as we arrived at the place, I I brought my drum because all week long I kept trying to write something, but I couldn't find the words. And so all I could think to do was to bring my drum with me. And I just said, I'm just gonna drum and see what happens. And as I got up there, I don't even really remember it, to be honest with you. I just let the sound come out of how I felt. So I can't tell you that I decided to keen because I didn't. This came from 30 years of my own contemplative training, my own lineage in training in voice with countless teachers and drum teachers and sound healers. And none of those people were in the room with me at that moment. And none of that was in the room with me in that moment. It was just me and my feelings doing what I intuited was all I could do. And I started playing my drum, and I watched that video, and I just noticed how my head, I just threw my head back to open my throat and that whole channel of my body, and that sound came from my womb, which is where sound comes from when we're singing from the depths of our being. It's a whole channel. And now, through all of the singing practice that I've done and this breathing practices that I've done, I breathe into that space in my womb and I can feel it. So you can hear me singing and keening, and you could hear the emotion in it. This is the sound of a soul that's wrapped in skin that just lost its son. And I have a word for what you heard now. And I didn't have a word for it then. And in fact, when I hung up from that, uh hung up, I was on a, I had some friends who zoomed in, priestess friends, friends I had traveled with from around the world, wise women. And one of them messaged me and said, You keened for your son. And of course, I had heard the word keening before, but I had never heard keening. Because what really fascinates me now from where I'm at is that in all of these 33 plus years of trainings I've done in sound and emotional intelligence and spirituality and every single thing, spiritual psychology, countless certifications, somatic trainings, all of these things I've done to heal my own, my own trauma. Not one time was grief and loss ever mentioned. And that completely blows my mind. So I didn't have a word for it then. And in my body, it wasn't a word at all. It was the exact pitch of what was true. Here's what I understood in that moment. Nothing. I wasn't thinking, I wasn't performing, I wasn't wanting anything from anybody in that moment. I was being grieved through. My grief was moving through my body in a pure, raw expression. And here's what I know now. I have spent three decades studying what the voice does to the nervous system. And I know that a long exhale on an open vowel is one of the fastest ways that the body knows it's safe. And I know that a slow drum, just slightly under the pace of a heartbeat, is a regulator before it's anything else. I wrote that in my book, I teach it. And on that day, my body did it without me consciously. The oldest medicine that I instinctively wired into my DNA, knew what to do, came up on its own in front of everybody, because the body knows what the body knows.

Posting The Video And Permission

Speaker · 8:17600 and something days later, I posted that video. I hadn't even watched it. It's been on my phone. I didn't even know somebody filmed it. My friend sent it to me. And it's been on my phone for 19 months. And I finally decided to post it only after I heard that prompting from Spirit that said, post the video of you keening at Weston Celebration of Life. And I did not want to do it, let me tell you. And I certainly didn't expect the strangers to react the way they have. I didn't expect, I didn't know I was allowed to show up in my messages. I am definitely still inside of this. My grief for my son is still so fresh. And yes, I've had a very spiritual and mystical grieving experience. And I consider myself so fortunate and so blessed to have that and to trust that inside of me, to have that experience and know that it's real and it's true. There's a part of me that's proud that that sound traveled and has touched people the way that it has. And I'm so grateful if it gives somebody else permission to go do it. And there's a part of me that's raised by the same world you were, and raised the way I was raised, that still hears that voice in the back of the room that's saying, You should hold it together. That's not how you're supposed to grieve. And that voice is old, and that voice is ancient. But it turns out it's only a few hundred years old because the sound is way older. And I'm gonna tell you about it right now.

Ireland And Keening As Sacred Work

Speaker · 9:54And first we're gonna explore Ireland. And the word in Ireland is Quina. I hope I'm saying that right. Queena. It means to cry, to weep, and in English it's keen. In Ireland and in Gaelic Scotland, where they called it the Coranok, a woman's lament over the body, was part of how you buried someone. The written references to it go all the way back to the seventh century, and the story goes back further than that. In Irish myth, the first keen in the world came out of the goddess Bridget, standing over the body of her own son. And I've been to Bridget's well when I went to Ireland, and I didn't even know this story then. So I want you to sit with that for just a second in that correlation. The first Keene was a mother. And here's what I didn't know until I went looking for all of this information. Keening was not a woman losing control. It is actually a trained art. The Keening woman was skilled. She improvised poetry over the body. She praised the dead, she named their lineage, she spoke to them directly. And sometimes in front of everyone, she named what the living had done wrong to them. And she was paid for it. Not much, maybe a glass of whiskey or some snuff or a dinner, but she was paid, which means it was work, which means the community understood that it was necessary. And people believed the keen actually did something. They believed it helped the soul leave the body. That sound was a kind of a door. And so in that world, the woman wailing at the wake was not the one who had lost it. She was actually the one holding it together. And I find it interesting that in Ireland that tale is of that sound is helping the bot the soul leave the body. Because one of the first things, and I share in my book the story from one of my teachers is I was studying Kundalini vocaling Sanskrit, Sanskrit mantras, she called me and said, Play a call for your son. It helps usher the soul to the other side. And I kept that song on repeat on my Spotify. And I remember thinking in my mind at the time, this is going to be my number one song on my Spotify playlist at the end of the year. And it was. I played it like something like 9,600 times over and over and over and over, and it brought me so much peace in our home.

How Power Silenced Women’s Grief

Speaker · 12:35But who told the Irish women to stop? I'm sure you can guess. The church did. And it's on the record. The Catholic Church in Ireland ruled against Keenan in 1631, and then again in 1748, and then again in 1800. Three times over 170 years, men gathered in rooms and voted against the sound of grief. At one point, they even recommended that women should be excommunicated who kept doing it. Think about what that means. If you make this sound for your dead, you're going to lose your place at God's table. And I want to be fair because this is a show that stays honest. The church wasn't the only reason because the British were in Ireland too, and the Victorian idea of a composed, respectable funeral came with them. Travelers wrote home about the keeners, the way you would write about a strange local custom. And by the late 1800s, it had become something families were ashamed of, something that made you look backward, poor, pagan. So the mothers stopped teaching their daughters, and the daughters stopped Keening. And by the 1950s, it was gone. And the scholars who study this say one thing out loud that I want to say out loud too. And I will actually do an interview with a woman who I have found who has brought this tradition back, and I'll do a whole other episode about it. But the one thing I want to say out loud is that part of what the church objected to was that the Keener's were women with standing. These were women that the community needed. These were women who could stand over a body and tell the truth. And a woman like that, well, you know, we're hard to govern.

Nordic Silence And Finland’s Tears

Speaker · 14:20In my Scandinavian roots, I was curious about what happened in Scandinavia, what happens in Scandinavia. And so I went looking there and what I found was a silence. The oldest witness we have is Beowulf. When the hero's body burns, a woman stands by the fire and wails. The Old Norse poems have laments in them too. The most famous is Senodoric, which means the loss of sons. A poet wrote it after his son drowned. And then Christianity came north and the record goes quiet. The Nordic funeral became a matter of doing things correctly. The old Swedish stories are full of ghosts who come back because the funeral was done wrong. The coffin was crooked, the coin wasn't placed in the eyes. The unbaptized and those who died by their own hand were buried outside of the churchyard walls. The loud women at the graveside mostly disappears from the Scandinavian archives, and I've come to believe that the silence is the answer. It's what suppression looks like a thousand years later. It's not a ban you can quote, it's not something that was written about or talked about, it's just an absence. But right next door in Finland, the lament survived. They call it It Caverse, and it was sung by women. Nearly every woman could do it. There were no professionals because everyone's mother knew how. It was melody and words and gesture and crying and all at once in a register the researchers describe as almost shamanic. And it did the same job as the Irish keen did. It helped the living stay in right relationship with the dead. And here's the part that made me really put my coffee down and go, What? Finland is actually bringing it back. There are now teachers running courses where ordinary people come and make laments out of their own grief. One of the teachers said that crying is now seen as losing face and that Finland needs its tears. Finland needs its tears, and so does the United States of America, so does Arizona, so does Phoenix, so do you, so do I.

Spain’s Mourning Women And Their Return

Speaker · 16:31The other half of me comes from Spain, and Spain kept its mourning women the longest. They were called the Planaderis, women hired to weep and death in the Basque country, across the Spanish speaking world. Their weeping has been part of the rite. It spread the tears through the room. It gave everyone else permission to break too. In medieval Spain, there were also Jewish planadetes too, professional women who sang the laments, and the Shepardi women carried that singing with them when they were driven out all the way to North Africa. And who told them to stop? The same voices earlier. The Third Council of Toledo in the year 589 prohibited the common people's funeral songs. The church kept prohibiting them through the Middle Ages, and the Canary Islands held on to their sung laments into the 15 and 1600s, and then those went silent too, except they didn't entirely. In 2009, after the financial crisis, the singers came back in parts of Spain. Women were paid 20 or 30 Euros to cry at a stranger's funeral. I just find that so beautifully and unbearably tender. That that sound never left. It was hiding. It was being done in secret. So here's what I see when I lay my two bloodlines next to Ireland's. In every one of them, a woman's voice was the instrument. The keen did a job. It praised, it accused, it helped the soul go, it helped your grief move, and it gave the whole room permission. And in every one of them the same thing happened. A church wrote a rule. An empire or a rising middle class called it undignified. And all the women learned to be quiet. I wrote in my book Grieving Awake that ancient cultures knew the grieving woman was not hysterical. She was in sacred labor. I wrote it before I knew how many councils had been convened to stop her. The embarrassment is only a few hundred years old. The sound is thousands of years old. And what came out of me was on the side of sound.

Why Grief Has A Volume

Speaker · 18:58So the thread I want to gather is this. A woman making a sound for her dead was once a right, a job, and a door for the soul. And then it became embarrassing. And the embarrassment is so much younger than the sound. That's my interpretation. The historians will tell you the church was one cause among several, and they're right. Whether the keen actually opened the door for the soul or whether people believed it did, I can tell you that for sure, and I'm not going to pretend to. But I can tell you what I do know from inside of my own skin and my own experience. When the sound came out of me, my body somehow knew exactly what it was doing. And when thousands of people heard it, something in their bodies recognized it too. It's not a trend. It's memory, a cultural memory, wired into all of our DNA. And so it brings me back to our original question. Why did women keen? Because grief has a volume. And they were the ones brave enough to turn it up. And who told them to stop? People who found that volume hard to govern. Nobody is going to govern it in this room. We don't have to settle every question to spend a few minutes finding out what one sound does in the body. And that's where we're going to

Guided Voice And Drum Practice

Speaker · 20:30go now. I'm going to invite you into a grieving awake practice. You're welcome to participate, simply listen, or turn off the podcast. There's nothing you need to receive, feel, or accomplish. And if you're driving or doing something that needs your attention, come back to this practice another time. But I want you to just think of one person that you want to keen for. And we're going to make one sound. And the drum will hold the beat. You can hum, you can open the hum into a vowel. And if a whale wants to come out, it's welcome. And if it just stays a hum, then that's your practice. And if you only listen, you can keen in your mind. The Irish did it in a room full of listeners. And listeners are also a part of the rite. So, my beautiful friends, I invite you to make this a little ritual and pause and maybe light a candle. I have one lit behind me and place your feet firmly on the ground. Yourself settle in your body, feeling your feet on the ground. I will begin by just listening to the heartbeat of the drum with the intention that you are speaking, messaging the loved one who's transformed consciousness into a non-physical state of being. And make the intention simply be sending them love. Let's begin with a human. And I invite you now to just feel into your body, feel into your chest, feel into your stomach, feel into your womb, and ask what sound wants to come out. And give yourself permission to do it.

Joya · 27:33Shemia is the word for heaven.

Speaker · 27:36And so it's a way of resound, both ushering souls, if that's your intention, into heaven, or ushering part of yourself into the heavenly realm, and at the same time calling it into yourself, bringing it down into the body.

What Went Unsounded And Invitation

Speaker · 28:09Take a moment now, wherever you are, just to notice what you felt. And you don't have to decide what anything means, but maybe your jaw feels looser, or that knot that was in your chest is gone, or the knot that was in your stomach is gone. Or maybe you're annoyed. That's allowed to. One question to carry with you is what has gone unsounded in you? Not unsaid, I mean unsounded. And I'm going to leave you an invitation, and only one. If you want to grieve out loud, join me every other Sunday for Grieving Aloud live on Zoom. No charge. And you can sign up at grievingawake.com. The link is right there on the home page. I also have a free library there full of practices that I invite you to sign up for to help you move your grief. And grief isn't just about bereavement. Grief is the loss of anyone or anything that was foundationally meaningful in your life. But especially, especially bereavement when you've lost somebody. Moving this energy is such power. Thank you for being here. This is grieving awake, exploring what loss opens, what love continues, and what it actually means to awaken aliveness. See you soon.