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

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Pet Loss. . I have a dog who is dying, so I wanted

Pet Loss.
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I have a dog who is dying, so I wanted to take a moment to name some nuances about pet loss I've noticed are easy to overlook.
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While clearly there is a difference of life value - a human life vs. an animal life - I have always felt that it's not about what or who we've lost. It's about how it feels for us.
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So many humans allow pets into their hearts in a way they never allow another human for the simple reason that animals feel safe.
Safe enough to love and safe enough to allow ourselves to be loved by them.
Their nonjudgement, steady presence, and forgiving natures are all things that the animal, instinctive part of us humans can't help but respond to. (This animal part of us is what I am often speaking about in many of the posts on this page when I refer to #griefinthebody.)
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My brother gave me my dog, Gigi, about 7 years after my husband died. Even though I had found some lifelines by then, such as yoga and the beginnings of a sense of community and hope, I was still isolating myself.
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Getting Gigi forced me to open the door to my third-story condo on La Jolla Blvd, furtively walk the ten steps to the elevator, cringing anticipatorily that I might see another human en route.
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Once down and across the street I could breathe the salty sea air a little easier. With a white furry bundle of energy in tow people seemed to appear out of nowhere, watering their lawn or walking their own lifelines and stopping me to ask questions.
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These random connections and the friendliness of these strangers was speaking to my animal brain and physiology, not just the four-legged one who trotted by my side. It would be years until I learned that to my body these interactions felt like love (thanks neuroscience!) It didn't matter that my mind didn't understand this.
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My body did. My grief was being spoken to in a language it understood... love.
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Part of being able to sit with the idea that Gigi would be dying sooner rather than later was understanding how my healing from the loss of my husband was coupled with her being in my life. (That tumbleweed concept we explored a few posts back.)
...Continued in comments...

I have been feeling this so deeply this week. How

I have been feeling this so deeply this week. How the wounds of loneliness and loss of this time sometimes can be accompanied by the written words of a stranger or distant friend and not by the people closest to me.
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How letting those people in (the ones closest to me) can be blocked or unavailable. How words on a page are granted a direct route to my heart, no passport required. How written words require less management, vetting and boundaries than real humans sometimes. And how much easier that is on my heart. How much more accessible, how much more is available, right or wrong, here and now.
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Maybe that’s why I put these words on the bookmarks that accompany The Grief Practice book. Written words can be the secret garden to the mansion of our grief. The place where no rules or judgments apply and where freedom reigns.
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Grief survives on quick fixes, bandages, tools, and vices a-plenty (aka self-regulation.) One day we land on solid ground and chuck the books, bottles, and benders that helped us survive.
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Even then, we human on with deep compassion for the ways we survive the splintering of a soul.
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #yogaforgrief #griefisapractice #healingisanart

If taking a yoga class has ever felt oppressive to

That’s how it was for me anyway. . The old rule

That’s how it was for me anyway.
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The old rules do not apply. (I also wish I had told the old me not to apply for the job of post-loss me. The learning curve was steep, unforgiving and the me that survived it had to eat the old me for breakfast.)
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But I digress.
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Every time I visit the land of loss it’s different. I’m different and my loss is different and nothing ever prepares me for it except for the fact that my bones know I can survive.
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Often the only way we can move onward is by exploring a new way inward. Which is just to say a new way to live with ourselves, to love ourselves, and to welcome back what feels unwelcome.
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That was today’s writing prompt in grief+yoga: What aspect of my grief feels unwelcome?
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The reconciling that happens when we get our truth out of our bodies and on to the page is sometimes just what our grief is aching to hear. Us noticing it, acknowledging it, and seeing if we can welcome it back, welcome us back to us.
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May we human on with compassion, curiosity, and unconditional love.
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#onwardcourageousheart #inwardandonward #griefinthebody #grief #yogaforgrief

Movement can change our experience of grief becaus

Unfelt grief, unexpressed or stifled grief, bypass

Page 166 of The Grief Practice book. Because somet

For many of us who have suffered tremendous loss a

For many of us who have suffered tremendous loss any meaningful future feels cut off or impossible, not just for a period of time, but forever.
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This is another nuanced distinction between grief and traumatic grief.
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The sense that time has slowed down or stopped is an important survival response our body-soul-mind recruits when it experiences overwhelming tragedy.
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Frozen time can be a mercy at first, blocking out some of the tremendous emotional pain that can flood us in grief.
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Our thinking brain (PFC), which includes parts responsible for words and time, can be taken offline when our experiences of loss are coupled with states of high arousal in our survival brain.
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For many of us this sense of frozen time or of no future doesn't begin to thaw on its own.
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The renewed sense of hope or energy for life that can flow from pieces of our frozen experience thawing can bring up new layers of grief, in addition to feeling the pain we couldn't take on at first.
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And yet the numbness and hopelessness that accompany the timelessness can keep us continually struggling to feel alive, to connect to ourselves and others.
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The blessing can become the curse.
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Thankfully thawing doesn't happen all at once the way our loss often did. A little bit at a time in the company of humans (and good therapists) who can support us and a larger container to hold our grief, which may not have been present at first, can allow us to integrate our experience so that we no longer feel cut off from any future.
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So that we can hold both the sadness of a future that does not have them in it and hope for what lies ahead without having to sacrifice our life and aliveness as well.
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #traumaticgrief #loss #yogaforgrief

It can be hard to believe, I know. That someone el

It can be hard to believe, I know. That someone else has wanted to die like you; that someone else has wanted to forget or never forget like you; that someone else has felt like they are lost like you, alone like you, misunderstood like you; that someone else has lost or found their faith like you, rejected heaven when they found hell like you, wrestled angels or cursed demons like you; that someone else has ghosts in their eyes like you; that someone else lives for signs like you; that someone else feels broken, undone or rages like you; that someone else wants to scream it at the top of their lungs like you, demand the world listen like you, can barely whisper it like you; that someone else feels guilty like you, should have said or not said those last words like you; that someone else stands at the edge of their sanity like you, wishes they could jump like you, turns around and dies again each time like you; that someone else hopes like you, finds clues like you, courage like you, keeps taking one more step, breath, day like you.
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Grief is lonely, but we are not alone.
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Let’s human on.
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #loneliness #griefinthebody

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