On Grief

  • Grief is a physical, emotional, psychic, and/or spiritual response to loss, deprivation, or trauma. It is a sensation of heaviness that arises and accumulates in the physical and subtle bodies.

  • Yes! Any loss, deprivation, or trauma, big or small, can cause grief to arise in the body. This can include ending relationships, changing careers, personal transformation and growth, birthdays, anniversaries, relocating, graduating, setting new boundaries, finishing or beginning anything, and so much more.

  • Yes. Grief can be acute, chronic/long term, ancestral, generational, collective, temporary, anticipatory, land based, and beyond. Different kinds of grief can have different qualities and be experienced differently in the body.

  • No, grief will not get smaller or go away on its own. Even chronic or long term grief must be released, as it will continue to arise in the body sometimes throughout our entire lives.

    Over time, unreleased grief will embed itself in the body and become compacted, making it more difficult to release. Unreleased grief can cause the body to feel sluggish, impact brain function, create pain, and lead to depressive episodes and other mental, physical, and emotional dysfunction.

An ideal way to meet grief is to recognize it and turn toward it as it arises in the body and, as much as possible, experience it in the body, thereby releasing it. Instead, many of us are socialized to stuff grief down when it arises, or to cut it short if we can eek out a few sobs in between things.

There will always be more grief to experience and release, whether from unexpected changes, the unhealed traumas of our ancestors, or be it collective grief from global atrocities unfolding day to day. It is deeply resourcing to be regularly moving grief out of the body and making space for inevitable griefs to come, as well as for joy and pleasure to arise in the body. A steady and gentle way to support ourselves to do this is with a regular grief practice.