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

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Healing is the want, the whimper and the wail. .

Healing is the want, the whimper and the wail.
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Healing is in the carrying on and in the being carried.
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Healing is the forgetting, the remembering, and the fogginess in between.
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Healing is the warp speed and the two-steps-back.
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Healing is the people on the way to the thing, around the thing and through the thing and not so much the thing itself.
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Healing is our first breath after their last one and the pause where we teeter between life and death.
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Healing is the calculated reach and the desperate leap.
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Healing is letting the joy in and the pain out.
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Healing is out there and in here and the pixie dust we buy from the gypsies we meet in between.
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Healing is the belief and the disbelief and having a foot in each world.
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Healing is when our presence and their absence sit side by side and finally feel acknowledged.
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What is healing to you?
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We human on xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #healing

Tell anyone who will listen. Labeling grief in thi

Tell anyone who will listen. Labeling grief in this way is exactly what creates the stigma and the shame and makes a normal human experience feel like an abnormal one.
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Words matter and the Tone of words matters (even in writing.)
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Pathologizing or threatening tones cue our human nervous system that something (in this case, g r i e f) is unsafe or dangerous or a threat to the rest of us.
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Maybe this is why we sometimes get the feeling people who haven’t lost are afraid to “catch” our grief? The avoidance or looking for “what went wrong” in the way our loved ones died attempts to ensure it couldn’t happen to them.
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When really it happens to us all. We love, we lose, we survive. Grief is painful, hard, and we’re not meant to endure it alone, but it is not a public health crisis.
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The grief around covid is real. Like covid, we cannot pretend it’s not there. AND people were grieving long before. It was just easier for the world to look away.
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Let’s not look away. Grief finally has secured a seat at the table of public life and you can be sure it has something to say and probably not so politely.
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Actively yours xox-Monique
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(I was inspired by the words of grief warrior @cortherapist to add my voice to this important mislabeling of grief. Check her out for courageous, clear-eyed grief support.)
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #griefsupport #healing

This retreat was created by a mother who lost her

We don’t grieve and then heal. The grieving is t

We don’t grieve and then heal. The grieving is the healing.
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Healing is not always robust, progressive and fully reparative.
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Healing can be sly, sluggish, skittish, tentative and pull at tangential wounds.
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Some wounds of separation may never fully heal and still we can reclaim our wholeness (that includes our broken parts.)
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The idea that when we’re done grieving we are “healed” or over it attempts to separate hurting from healing, forgetting that sometimes healing is hurting.
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Healing does not need to be a goal. If you are grieving, you are healing.
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Yours in hurt and hope xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody

For a long time I didn’t want to rise above grie

For a long time I didn’t want to rise above grief. I wanted to sink into it, wrap myself in its acknowledgment and live forever in its fourth dimension where the hearts of humans who are no longer living still beat as loud as ever.
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It was as if, if I left its womby environment I wouldn’t be able to breathe or stand on my own two feet without my story of loss feeding me, the proof of it in everything I touched, breathed, felt and thought.
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For me grief imploded my very existence, untethering every identity, belief and hope I ever knew. I was still alive but all the parts didn’t have a place anymore, or at least I didn’t know what to do with them.
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A heart? What good is that after loss like mine I thought.
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A stomach? I don’t want to and can’t digest anything anyway.
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Slowly I started to grow into the story of my loss, to attach myself to it and learn how to move my new arms, legs, see through my new eyes and live with a broken heart.
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The more I explored the world in this new way the more I started to find new limitation and expectation.
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My story of loss defined me and preceded me wherever I went.
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This new body of grief allowed me to re-enter the world with a label (25-year-old widow) and a face (sad and pissed off) and a heart (with a few inches of armor around it to keep love and pain away.)
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It allowed me to remarry, have a child a decade after all my friends had had their first children, and even find peace through mindfulness and movement.
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One day I wanted more. Nothing was wrong but something was still not right. That’s the day I went back to therapy in a new way, from the bottom up. It was the day I decided I didn’t just want to spend the rest of my life resting in peace. I wanted to spend it fully alive and happy, regardless of the condition of my body or what I would find or lose again.
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True story! Yours with heart and soul xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #griefinthebody #grief #hope

Grief is the only conductor big enough to hold the

Grief is the only conductor big enough to hold the tremendous psychological and emotional charge from our personal and collective tragedies.
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Grief defies society, standards and expectations. It is the part of humanity that retains its wildness and cannot be tamed and this is why it has the teeth for a level of pain no one else can swallow.
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Grief is a master conductor of the painful orchestra of loss. We often find ourselves in awe at the piercingly beautiful creations that were once disorganized chaos.
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Grief is always the first to greet us at the front lines of death, loss and tragedy because it provides a way through to the other side, enlisting every resource we ever had and never had to help us survive.
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Grief is the voice we turn to when all the rational ones fail to soothe our broken hearts.
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Grief understands the pain of losing and the pain of healing and that we must survive and can survive. And this is why we can’t scale it or escape it or get the cliffnotes or buy or pray our way out of it. It is the way through.
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Right here, right now, ready or not, grief tolls its bell for you.
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With a heavy heart for the lives lost this year and tonight xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody

When I started exploring grief in the body several

When I started exploring grief in the body several years ago I wasn't even sure grief was in the body. I had been so out of touch with my body before and during the depths of my grief I hardly even recognized the way it wiggled, exploded and collapsed from my neck down.
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The first time I noticed grief moving through my body was at the end of a yoga class when it felt like all the emotions I had been holding in for years finally had permission to flow.
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Over time I became really curious about these healing-like experiences I would have in yoga once or twice a week and why I had never felt any of this movement in my decade on antidepressants and talk therapy.
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Well you know how curiosity goes... it’s like the song of the sirens no one can resist.
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I didn’t find anything satisfying, specific enough or comprehensive enough in the literature that was available at the time so I started following my hunches and connecting the dots ever so slowly.
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The science drew me in at first because it felt like finally something that could pin grief down. It took a long time for me to realize I was trying to add 2+2 when grief in the body is more like love+infinity.
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It was only when I stopped reducing my experience to a science (or a body for that matter) that I was able to appreciate the true depth and potential of grief in the body.
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That’s when things started making sense in a way that doesn’t make sense at all (I just love when that happens!)
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There is the territory of grief in the body (informed by neuroscience, emotions science and movement science) which can be quite helpful to understand when we find ourselves face to face with it. And then there is the way grief travels through our unique body, which no one can predict and requires true listening to follow, explore and piece back together.
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I love how both these generalities and specificities often reveal pockets of hope that have been with us all along, even as we survived the unimaginable.
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May we all human on with infinite love.
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Curiously yours xox-Monique
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ps. Yoga Teachers: the next grief+yoga YTT will be in the fall, keep an eye out!
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #yoga

Did your throat want to scream NO at the top of yo

Nighttime was the hardest time after my husband di

Nighttime was the hardest time after my husband died.
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For years I slept with the hallway bathroom light on (the room I found him in.)
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It felt safer somehow. At least I would never have to turn on the light and find him again at five in the morning, even though that moment would play itself over for years until I thought the only way I could escape it was to die.
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I didn’t know it then but I was tapping into a source of support (the light) to help me bear what felt unbearable.
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Every night I would play the same Gary Jules album for years. His simple strums, honest lyrics and prosodic tone was the anchor I would hold on to as all the ghosts and demons I had been running from and dodging all day came crashing down the hallway and into the darkness.
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I didn’t know it then but I was tapping into another source of support (prosodic human voice) to help me bear what felt unbearable.
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On balmy summer nights I would sleep with my third-story window open and hear the skateboarders and dog walkers rolling by on the sidewalk below. The normalcy of their anonymous voices seemed to be able to reach through the layers of my grief and soothe my heart in an unexplainable way.
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I didn’t know it then but I was tapping into another source of support (imagined connection) to help me bear what felt like unbearable loneliness.
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The list goes on. In retrospect I am amazed at how many seemingly odd, aberrant or desperate choices I made were ways my body was able to get what it needed during that time to feel supported, connected, and less alone, even just the tiniest bit.
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To survive.
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There is no judgement about how we survive the aftermath and aftershocks of our tremendous losses.
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Yours in hope xox-Monique
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#onwardcourageousheart #grief #griefinthebody #hope

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