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

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After my husband died I went to my local bookstore

After my husband died I went to my local bookstore. I was looking for the book that would make it all make sense. Books had helped me through every impossible moment until then. I came empty and left emptier.
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No one ever told me grief wasn’t just in my head. It was also in my body.
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Not only did I not know grief was in my body, I didn’t know that at the same time hope was in my body.
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I actually noticed the hope in my body first. A year or so out from my loss I had a clear felt sense that my body wanted to move and find ways to heal. My mind however would not allow it. It saw healing as the ultimate betrayal, and so I squashed down every attempt my body made at healing.
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Until I couldn’t anymore.
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The first time I was introduced to grief in my body was at a yoga class six years into my loss. The tears moving up and out “out of nowhere.”
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Hello grief.
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These experiences were like the back cover on the guidebook of my grief.
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The book I had yet to open.
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I first opened the guidebook to my grief when I started somatic therapy. This was a year or so after I had written my own book on grief in the body. (The one I was looking for in that bookstore almost 20 years ago.)
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All of my other practices had helped me move my grief, but therapy helped me feel my grief. I learned how to read the book of my body and speak to it in the language it understood. When to slow down, take a break, write it out, cry it out, watch it and listen to it.
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The beauty of our bodies being the guidebook to grief is that we can take our time and digest pieces of our experience that came in too fast and might still feel too big until we take it page by page, line by line, breath by breath.
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Little did I know I walked into that bookstore carrying everything I would ever need to heal and human on. There was nothing I could find in there that would tell me what my bones already knew…
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That I would make it. That I would do it my own way. That having to face death is how I would finally come alive.
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Breath to breath we go xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #yogaforgrief #traumainformedyoga

Unfreezing in grief can look like a yearning for m

Unfreezing in grief can look like a yearning for movement, among other things. The dorsal vagal immobilization response is so beautifully protective after tremendous loss. The world can feel unsafe for a long time for many valid reasons.
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Like ice that freezes in layers there can be a sense of thawing some parts but not others.
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Our eyes are an important part of this process, searching out what we need to support us (people, places and things) and scanning them for safety.
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Parts of our body that “always” feel cold or icy may shift temperature. This is a beautiful physiological response to the state of our nervous system. (I spent a lot of time going to acupuncture for this until I realized somatic therapy was what I needed 🙂
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I would love for you to know there is no rush and to give yourself permission to explore and lean into what feels right now.
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I often cross paths with humans months or years after their loss searching for movement that includes their whole experience.
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When listened to, the body often knows exactly what comes next, physically, emotionally, energetically and soulfully. It moves not because it’s told to, but because it’s ready.
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This particular involuntary and nuanced aspect to healing is beautiful to witness and every time reminds me of our inherent heroic healing energies and our ability to harness them.
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We human on xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #healing #yogaforgrief

Our stories of grief begin long before we lose. .

Our stories of grief begin long before we lose.
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They begin with the ways we were raised, loved, accepted or rejected.
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They begin with the ways we were taught to be proper or sane and the things we were taught to sweep under the rug.
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They begin with the silence in our homes and in our hearts about everything that ever mattered but was never spoken.
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They begin with the people who listened or turned a deaf ear to our early heartbreaks; the ones that taught our heart what it can expect from the world.
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They begin with the shame that was planted just under our skin. The kind that keeps us from trying or speaking, reaching in or reaching out.
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They begin with love. The unconditional, incomparable, unsurpassable kind that we were gifted as children or find as adults.
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They begin with us. Our stories of us shape our stories of grief.
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And although they are stories of how things ended, they are also stories of how we begin.
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Again, from here, with the hearts on our sleeves and the truth in our throats.
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There was a very important reason I chose this poem to be the first page of The Grief Practice book. Grief does not stand alone. Even though it's often treated as the ugly duckling that doesn't belong, it was born the moment we were and has grown alongside everything our body, mind, or soul has ever experienced.
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Yours in the homecoming xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody

The loneliness and isolation of grief, often cued

The way we humans organize our bodies around pain,

The way we humans organize our bodies around pain, physical and emotional, amazes me every time.
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Our embodied experience of grief has many layers. When one feels particularly dominant or overwhelming, bringing our attention to a different “station” can expand the literal space our experience flows through or change how we sense the pattern of our pain or shape of our grief.
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This is not a way around our grief. It’s actually a way to pulse in and out of our experience, to get a sense for the edges, texture, density and shape of our grief as it changes from day to day.
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Perhaps talking a lot about our grief or our story is keeping us from actually feeling our grief. What happens when we slow down our story and notice what emotion comes up during the pause?
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When we’re overwhelmed with emotion what happens if we move a little as we emote? Or is there a movement that flows from the emotion?
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If movement is a way we behaviorally try to escape feeling, what happens if we stop or slow down our literal movement and just notice the impulse or desire to move? What is it like?
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The images that come to us in our dreams or our waking life are also ways grief expresses itself.
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Bodily sensations can be big, like the whoosh we feel in our belly when we drive over a big dip in the road. Or they can be small, like a small patch of warmth on our face from the sun. What sensation do you notice as you pause your story or movement or recall your dream? Can you notice them without labeling them good or bad?
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The energy of grief wants to flow and there are many ways it can move through our experience.
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Slowing down and differentiating these pieces of our grief can allow us to digest things a little at a time that may otherwise feel impossible.
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Knowing there is more than one outlet for grief cognitively can invite us to explore these other “stations” in our embodied experience whenever and however feels best in the moment.
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Just like a real radio, it can take some time to get a clear station without all the static.
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Yours in the listening xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody

When my heart needs support I don’t go to the ex

When my heart needs support I don’t go to the experts.
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I go to the humans. The ones who know loss from the inside out, who aren’t afraid to name the unnameable with one breath and laugh with the next.
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I go to the humans who will call me in and call me out because they aren’t there to sugarcoat it or make me feel better. They are there to support how I feel without losing sight of what really matters.
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I go to the humans who have fallen apart, not the ones who have put it all back together beautifully.
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The ones who remember how soulful and soulless this life can be, who can acknowledge the angels and the demons and the limbo we can get stuck in trying to avoid both.
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I go to the humans who are daily dancing with their humanity, not the ones who have risen above it.
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They are the healers, the holders. The hands and the hearts that have held their own pain, they are the ones I trust with mine.
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May we all lean in and on each other as we count our blessings and losses in the same breath.
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We human on xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody

Loss that feels overwhelming often registers as a

Loss that feels overwhelming often registers as a threat to the body.
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When the body neurocepts a threat (real or perceived) it mobilizes energy to face that threat. To survive that threat.
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The loss of a loved one heretofore embedded in our survival often registers as a threat to our survival.
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This detours us into a different kind of loss, a different kind of grief.
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A kind where we have to survive before we can grieve.
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Traumatic loss is not determined by the way we lost.
Traumatic loss is the way our bodies respond to loss.
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When the energy mobilized in response to threat gets stuck on high or low it can prevent us full access to our grief because grief requires being able to feel, and being able to feel requires a certain quality of softness or safety, whichever is available.
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The time-sensitive response to overwhelm (aka trauma) often lingers in traumatic grief, sometimes making us feel like we’re doing it wrong or can’t move forward.
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It’s important to understand even though things may feel “wrong,” our bodies are doing everything “right,” responding to what they perceive and sense in the most intelligent and elegant way they can.
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As one woman once shared, “I knew I had to deal with the trauma before I could deal with the grief.”
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She was right on.
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Yours in all that is going right xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #traumaticgrief #somaticgrief #traumainformedyoga #yogaforgrief

Your story is not for sale. . You get to choose wh

Your story is not for sale.
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You get to choose who hears your story. And when. And how.
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Over the years I have shared many aspects of my story of loss publicly, in writing and in speaking engagements. Although I chose not to include my story in The Grief Practice book for many reasons, when it feels important to share new details publicly I lean into that. For me, not for others. For my healing and tending and organizing.
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Recently someone directly asked me about the loss of my husband. They named details I had not shared with them personally and commented on how they thought that made me feel.
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Physiologically I could feel myself freezing up, a default response of mine when I feel trapped and don’t want to be socially “inappropriate.” (Side note: I’ve been working on that and am getting better at being socially inappropriate! It’s so freeing to be me.)
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Instead of saying that I didn’t feel comfortable speaking about this with them right how, I just spoke in generalities until they stopped pushing.
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No matter how many times I tell my story or how long it’s been, it is still tender territory and deserves to be held with care, listened and shared respectfully. No matter how much I share I always have the right to not share again in any given moment, for no “good” reason.
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After this experience I noticed a lot of “angry” energy. Shutting down or freezing, as I did, can mask the tremendous amount of energy mobilized by us perceiving a threat in our environment. Once the threat was gone all that energy surfaced and I was able to let it cycle through so I could settle once more into all that is well.
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Sharing our story can be the thread that stitches together our embodied and cognitive experiences of grief, and in this way feel very healing. And because our stories are tethered to our embodied experience of loss it can be helpful to remember we are never obligated to disclose or open before we are ready.
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We human on with care and choice.
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Unapologetically yours xox-Monique
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For collective stories on how we human on visit thegriefpractice.com/our-stories
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #griefstories #healing

I’m sure there are many therapists out there tha

I’m sure there are many therapists out there that can speak to knowing a lot about grief and then, upon experiencing tremendous loss themselves, actually knowing grief.
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It’s different from the inside out, isn’t it?
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It is more like an unknowing than a knowing... an invitation to look into the mirror of our heart instead of a textbook or a prescription bottle, to forget what we “know about” and remember what we know.
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This knowing is made of skin and sinew and soul. It can stitch together generations of loss in a moment or string a community of hearts on a worldwide thread.
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When the words come they aren’t the bow that tidies up the box but more like a stairway to heaven, each one moving us deeper into connection with our own truth.
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We don’t wish this knowing on anyone, but when they know - well, then they know what they didn’t know.
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Then we speak the same language and there is nothing quite like meeting someone who speaks our language, sometimes without having to say a word.
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And so we human on from here, with the hearts on our sleeves and the truth in our throats, wrapped in our knowing that needs no fixing.
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Yours in the unknowing xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #healing

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