Lamenting as a Way to Stay Human
And survive the overwhelms

I don’t know about you, but with so much hard news and truth distorted beyond recognition, I’d explode if I didn’t move or sing or offload what I’m carrying. This kind of overwhelm is dangerous––for all of us.

And when I hear someone say, There’s nothing we can do, my skin crawls with rage. Just what a dictator loves to hear.

Like many people, I read and listen to Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, Timothy Snyder, and others to help understand and name what’s happening, and not just in the U.S. but globally. They don’t only analyze, but offer actions we can and must take, no matter how small.

To stay engaged and keep our minds and hearts intact, we need ways to steady ourselves. Ways to care for ourselves so we can keep showing up and acting. This isn’t self-indulgence. It’s survival.

For me, besides walking, swimming, and dancing, another powerful tool is lamenting. There’s a difference between feeling sorry for ourselves and feeling our sorrow. The first comes with shame and collapse. The second carries permission to feel, express, and move what’s inside us. For instance, lamenting.

What angers me (along with everything else) is how rarely we’re taught to handle deep feelings or to seek the truth. Instead, we’re nudged toward lies and numbing. That drinking, overeating, endless scrolling, and binge-watching are all socially acceptable ways to get through. That taking care of ourselves and acknowledging the hard and uncomfortable without quick fixes can be considered foolish and uncool.

Giving ourselves permission to feel and see the truth is hard.

I was lucky to find a 12-step program when I was young, which helped me overcome a severe struggle with overeating and later with drinking. I don’t say it lightly; it saved my life. When I see someone clearly suffering in that way, I want to hold them in my arms.

Grateful for my recovery, what has stayed with me is that beneath compulsive behaviors lie unspoken feelings, often steeped in shame and rage. When these feelings have nowhere to go, they turn inward or sideways. They don’t disappear. Recovery as is change isn’t graceful. It’s a bumpy road of banging into walls and of falling and getting up again.

Giving voice to these feelings helps enormously. I love that lamenting doesn’t have to sound pretty. It can be ugly and rough and messy. But it can feel true. True to exactly where the world is. True to exactly where I am.

If I allow myself to lament, I have a chance to shift my mood, get my breath going and my blood flowing… to see more of what is around me, not just the hard things.

Duke Ellington once said something like, “Musicians get to play their misery.” In truth, anyone who learns to lament can do this.

My grandmother, who’d lost three children and never learned English––used to rock back and forth, wailing softly. She wasn’t singing. I suppose she was lamenting, though I didn’t know it at the time. And though it frightened me, it also pulled me in.

When I was forty, I visited the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo. At the time, I believed that being fully myself was dangerous and that sorrow had to be disguised or softened. I walked endlessly, trying to rid myself of myself. On one of these walks, I heard a powerful wail rise over the hills. I followed the sound to a small cemetery, where a woman, her long hair blowing wildly, knelt by a grave, making sounds like my grandmother’s.

At a safe distance, I began to imitate her. And I’ve been doing it ever since.

There really is something called lamenting. It’s an ancient, cross-cultural practice of sounding, toning, singing, and wailing. It allows grief, loss, and sorrow to move through us so these tough emotions don’t destroy us. These days, to be healthy and strong enough to protest, organize, and stand together (and just manage the overwhelm), we need all the help we can get.

Lamenting isn’t a weakness. It’s a powerful tool that connects us to the truth.

The original laments were sung in a way that named nothing directly, like gibberish. Today, with a deeper understanding of trauma and the importance of finding the root cause, practices such as lamenting and vocalization, 5 Rhythms, and ecstatic dance have become essential to well-being.

I grew up in New York City in an immigrant family, and I suppose my grandmother brought this tradition with her. I, an old soul always searching, felt instinctively drawn to sound without words. When I was little and alone, I sang freely, a way to express the raw feelings of being alive. It felt secretive, daring, almost magical. Yet as soon as someone appeared, I shut down, flooded with shame.

Over the years, I’ve helped many students move past that shame into a deeper place of surrender, of letting their voices free.

We can learn this willingness not to know. We can lament. We can move. We can sound.

Taking care of ourselves is not stepping away from the world.
It’s how we stay in it—together.