The Grief Practice - An Exploration & Explanation of Grief In The Body

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I’m perched on the edge of the green couch. An i

Slowing down our experience often allows what’s

Slowing down our experience often allows what’s really there to be seen and acknowledged, making feeling available. Sometimes the feeling we access feels supportive, sometimes it feels primal.
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The moments we start to feel some big energy or emotion can be the moments we think we need to “calm” down.
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Perhaps untidy or big emotions were never accompanied or acknowledged in our history, possibly we were even shamed for not “keeping it together.” Maybe staying calm or calming others is how we survived our childhood. All very valid reasons for why we might find calm optimal.
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And calm can mask what needs to be felt and bypass what’s really there, what needs to be acknowledged and felt.
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Tremendous e-motion (energy in motion) mobilized in response to our life experiences will continually try to find a way through our body. This is how biology can become pathology; a very useful biological response mechanism to the distress of losing a loved one can wreak havoc on our physiology when unaddressed and unexpressed.
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The big energies of grief are life energy. They’re the wind in the sails of our healing when we can explore them without being overwhelmed by them.
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There is no rush and no right way. Just the moment to moment showing up with curiosity and compassion for what we can do today.
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With big, untidy love for you and how we human on xox -Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #griefinthebody #grief

When my husband died I lived a few blocks from a s

When my husband died I lived a few blocks from a stunning beach called Wind'n'Sea. Outside my third-story window I could see the sun set every evening. I would often make a deal with the sun that if it got up the next morning, so would I.
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I didn't understand it then, but I was tapping into what's called an external resource to support my inner experience. The sun, the moon, and the ocean were all elements outside of me that I perceived as having the capacity to hold tremendous amounts of energy and movement, similar to what I was experiencing in my inner experience with the flooding and overwhelming sensations, emotions, and images.
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These aspects of nature were visual, even tactile resources I could "image"ine were able to hold the ugly and volatile feelings that were moving through me. They were also things, images, and experiences that no one judged. People would stand in awe at tremendous waves or a fading sunset. These same powers at work in my inner experience felt so judged, so untidy, so out of order for a human experience.
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What I didn't know how to do then was how to take this external resource and connect it to my inner resources, capacity, and ability to self-soothe and connect.
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Even with my life-saving connection to nature I continued to feel suicidal, lonely, hopeless and disconnected.
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This is one of the life-changing tools my Somatic Experiencing training and therapy has gifted me. A way to connect to my own healing potential without having to change anything, do a practice or move a certain way.
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Integrating our external experiences into internal somatic support for our experience of grief and being human sometimes takes more education or guidance. And our bodies are always doing the best they can, given what they've been through, the resources we have, and what we are bearing up under currently.
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We human on. (Check out @somaticexperiencingint to find a therapist near you.)
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody

Grief under our skin can feel heavy and fragile at

Grief under our skin can feel heavy and fragile at the same time.
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The weight on our bones and hearts can feel stronger than gravity. And the delicateness of our nerves, capacity, and hearts can feel like shattered glass that has not yet shattered.
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We can push through days full of ghosts and impossible feels and then collapse when an extra feather is added to our heart’s load.
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It can feel like we have to choose one over the other - being strong or being hopeless. In actuality we don't have to choose one or the other, but the energetic charge of hopelessness may drown out the strength we need to get through the day; just as the energetic charge of strength and surviving can leave little room for the more tender feels of grief that need gentleness, compassion, and permission to move slowly without judgement.
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Grief can feel itchy, smooth, rocky, bubbly, burning, constricted, paralyzing, sticky, strong, smooth, energizing, heavy, and more.
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These sensations under our skin and often in our organs are the roots of our emotional experience and feed into our psychological experience.
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As an example, if my grief feels paralyzing in my body, my emotional experience might be blank or numb, and the story that follows this physiological experience might be foggy or unclear. I might use the words "I don't know" or "I don't care."
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If my sensation of grief is energizing I could have an emotional experience of either hopeful or angry (or something else.) I might focus this mobilized energy into new ways to support others in their grief or look for a physical outlet for this energy.
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The Both/And concept can be so helpful here because we can't think grief away a n d we need our thinking brain to integrate and modulate the big and often overwhelming feelings.
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We cut ourselves off from important resources when we limit healing to just the body or just the mind.
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None of these experiences are right or wrong, good or bad. They all just ask to be Noticed, Acknowledged, and Welcomed.
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And so we human on.
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody

Accepting our loss can be like trying to stuff a w

We need both. It can be a toss of the coin in grie

We need both. It can be a toss of the coin in grief whether we find ourselves in families, communities and societies that can truly show up and accompany us through our grief or find ourselves feeling completely isolated even while surrounded by plenty of people (my experience was the latter.)
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Even when we have loads of external validation and support, being able to be our own compassionate witness to our experience of grief can create a level of care no one else can ever give us.
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We learn how to care for ourselves by how we are cared for (as children) and thus many of us do not know how this feels in our bodies. This is why it can sometimes feel easier to be hard on ourselves than understanding.
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After all, pushing through is often how we survive. (This is why for many people their grief is taking a backseat through this pandemic. The energy of grief often rivals the energy needed to get up every day and do what we need to do to survive. Single parents anyone?)
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Extending kindness to ourselves in grief often starts with acknowledging how hard it is, has been and may continue to be. How our bodies are doing the best they can given what we’ve been through, what resources we have access to and how we are feeling right now.
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Kindness, acknowledgement and compassion can often reveal aspects of our grief we didn’t even know were aching to be seen. We may not have the time or means to care for this aspect of our being right now which is completely fine.
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When the time presents itself kindness to ourselves can be the key that unlocks a different kind of healing.
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We human on.
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody

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