Grief as Praise

Prechtel teaches this through Tzutujil mortuary custom and his own grief, then explicitly invites modern people to adapt it. The doable core:

1. Give yourself permission to grieve out loud. This is the heart of it. Prechtel contrasts the “silence of Western grieving” with the keening and wailing of his village. He instructs: when the tears come, “let her loose, don’t hold back.” The grief must be, in his words, “unchoreographed and honest” — not composed, not dignified, not contained.
2. Use the whole body and voice. Grief in his tradition is physical: he describes himself “weeping, and shaking then singing” at a burial. Let the body do what it wants — sobbing, rocking, the involuntary wail. He explicitly validates what his Midwestern relatives saw as excess.
3. Weep specifically, for what was beautiful. The grief is for something — name it, picture it, let the loss of its particular beauty hit you. Prechtel ties true grief to recognising beauty: weeping “for the beauty of what they saw.” You are not grieving in the abstract; you are praising this lost thing by mourning it fully.
4. Let grief turn into praise, and back. As you weep, recognise that you can only grieve this deeply because you were given a life rich enough to love this much. Prechtel: by our “uncontrolled grief, wail,” we are “simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live.” The session naturally oscillates — sob, then a surge of gratitude/praise for having loved at all, then sob again.
5. Don’t rush to “closure” or be talked out of it. Prechtel rejects the idea that grief should be quickly resolved or hidden. “If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love.” Grief expressed is the work; suppressing it is the harm. (Sourcing note: quoted phrases are Prechtel’s, from The Smell of Rain on Dust and the Grief and Praise lecture/transcripts. Steps are a faithful distillation of his teaching for individual practice.)

Martín Prechtel (b. 1952) was raised on a Pueblo reservation, lived for years in Santiago Atitlán among the Tzutujil Maya, becoming a village shaman and head of a ceremonial house before the Guatemalan civil war forced his return to the US.

He now teaches at his school Bolad’s Kitchen near Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. The grief-praise teaching is most fully laid out in The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (2015) — a sequence of short teachings — and his earlier 1997 lecture of the same name. → (Prechtel entry).

It descends from Tzutujil funerary practice, not from any psychotherapeutic school, though it converges with modern grief research.

Keening / lament traditions — Irish caoineadh, Mediterranean and Balkan ritual wailing women, and many Indigenous mourning songs: structured loud public grief, structurally identical.

• Jewish mourning — shiva, Kaddish, rending garments: communal, embodied, time-bounded grief that is also praise of God/life.
• Tibetan & Mexican traditions — Day of the Dead, ongoing relationship with and praise of the dead.
• Modern grief therapy — “continuing bonds,” meaning-reconstruction, and expressive/emotion-focused approaches echo “grief is praise.” → (catharsis, expressive writing).
• Somatic release — letting the body shake and sob parallels trauma-discharge work (e.g. TRE).

Performing grief instead of releasing it. Prechtel’s word is “unchoreographed.” The point is honesty, not a correct-looking ritual.

• Stopping at the first wave. Real grieving comes in surges; let it return rather than shutting it down once “composed.”
• Grieving in total isolation by default. His tradition is communal. If possible, grieve witnessed — by a friend, a circle, or at least aloud rather than silently swallowed.
• Mistaking grief for mere sadness. Tie it to the beauty of what was lost; that link is what turns it into praise.
• Treating it as a one-time event. Large losses are metabolised over time; the practice is repeatable.