Feed The Stars
I recently came across a story about a Lakota ritual called “star feeding,” in which people who are grieving place stones representing their pain into a river. Supposedly, a 2019 Johns Hopkins study found that this ritual helped people process their trauma six times faster than conventional therapy.
It’s a beautiful, poetic ritual. The problem is: there’s no evidence the Lakota ever practiced it, or that the Johns Hopkins study ever happened.
There’s a deeper problem here than internet misinformation. The problem is our tendency to see the cosmos as existing for us. The sun exists to warm us. The earth exists to give us resources. Indigenous traditions exist to give us answers to our problems. There’s an entitlement, even in our grief. We think: I don’t like how loss feels. Give me a ritual to make it go away.
But hidden in this fake tradition is a real remembrance: we exist not just to extract from the cosmos, but to uphold it. We are responsible for caring for this world, for tending what has been entrusted to us, for passing along knowledge and traditions faithfully.
Grief isn’t just a burden the world ought to help us carry. It's something we have to learn to give back. Life gives us things worth loving, then takes them away. Our grief is how we pay our respects to what's been given. This is why, in the midst of pain, we have to learn to leave room for a joy that says, “And how blessed am I to have received this at all.”
Feed the stars. When you look at the sky, remember that you're not just witnessing the beauty of the world. You're participating in its creation with your thoughts, words, and deeds. Let even your sadness, then, become an offering. Let it testify to what was beautiful, what mattered, what you were lucky enough to love, if just for a moment.
As always, if you’d like to be held through your own process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.
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