Embodied Grief
Embodied grief will carry you to both your core wound where you find your deepest longings and lessons, and the cave of your heart, where all things are possible.
The bad news is grief never ends. The good news is, grief never ends. We just begin to recognize that it is a reservior that will carry us to our cosmic longing, that is the ocean of love for which we came to experience.
Grief is less about letting go and more about creating a sustainable connection that feels nourishing and healthy for you. THis includes the relatinship to the child in you as much as the person who is no longer there physically in your life. This takes time.
The effects of any trauma get stored in the body. There is a literal phsyical pain associated with loss, and our nervous system draws us upward, away from our lower body where sexual energy and digestion take place out of survival. It’s A beautiful function of our animal body, one that can eventually cause us suffering as adults if we don’t learn how to work with it.
This is why it is so powerful to do somatic work when processing grief of any kind.
As yogis we learn that without seperation, there could be no union. And definately no intimacy. Yet when we have lost someone we love, either through death or even the heartbreak in a breakup, we are confronting every loss that came before.
Embodied grief is when the nervous system has the space and guidance to complete the cycle of stuck energy in the body. This will take you to greater a resonance with your sou,l and the earth, and a more regulated state of being and relating.
Author Martin Prectel writes in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust that “Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
The experience and resolution of bereavement is best understood through embodied metaphors that conceptualize ones understanding of relational intimacy.
This is why any embodiment, relational or intimacy work must include grief. Even the happiest of times and changes require us to let go of who we were before.
With so little training in our culture, the death denial delusion many of us were raised with, it makes sense we have to learn how to be with it. How to create the space to make meaning, not out of what happened, but out of how are lives will go on and the really good effin’ reasons why.
Disembodied grief is only from the neck up, and is natural, just not sustainable for our mental health and wellbeing.
Grief needs presence, to not be changed or fixed, but given the space to just be. That tender. That broken (open,) that willing to love. It is the feminine way and no amount of explaining or teachings will help us transform the way someone who truly knows how to truly listen can.
If you want to move the grief pattens you find yourself looping in, then you have to address the fear below the anger and the love below, above, and inside the grief.
This happens from the neck down. A bottom up approach, as Peter Levine calls it, where the story doesn’t matter as much as the affect it has on your system and therefore your perception of yourself and the world.
You can change the ways you relate. Loss and abandonment can become a reminder of all you are already worthy of, and always were. You can experience even greater pleasure and joy even amidst great loss.
It’s the difference between trying to run away from something you don’t want, and turning towards what you do, even if it scarier. We are used to running and numbing, the turning towards requires just a different mindset and heart muscle, but together it becomes easier to be here, even amidst what’s difficult.
We cultivate greater meaning and more positive experiences that heal the past in the present. We open to love again and again and we see that death is not something to fear, but a portal to the Mystery.
As yogis, we practice dying before we die, because we know the supreme satisfaction can only be tasted when we return to a space of unknowing—where the Mystery can meet us and reveal to us what’s next.
From there we do our best to follow and have faith that in time, more will be revealed.
That the visions in our hearts planted like seeds, pushed into us on the tips of the arrows from the Divine ones who already have lived and died.
Who already know how much we have, how blessed we are, and how much more is possible than we could possibly imagine.
PS. If you want support on your path of grief or want to get certified to support others in this area- our coaching program Make The Shift begins end of January 2022. Click here to read more and book a free consult call!
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” ~ Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
