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

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For the children who have died in our bellies, arm

For the children who have died
in our bellies, arms or schools
from oppression, violence, or their own hand

For the parents left behind
losing their breath, mind, or spirit
as the world goes dark every morning they wake up without them

For the families and communities who stand together
tethered to hope and humanity
who find their own way through and to the hinterlands of loss and life

For the classrooms and churches we live and die in
the teachers and gods we trust in
who hold our human and our being in times of joy, terror and sorrow

For the yous and the mes
who want to run and hide like they would have if they could have
who instead will live and rise
because we can
because we must.
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#wehumanon #grief #childloss

This idea of presencing ourselves and our grief.

This idea of presencing ourselves and our grief.

That as we stay aware of, attune to, and acknowledge our self and our experience of grief, a kind of permission is granted. From us, to us. To be ourselves. To grieve freely. To be loved for it and through it and by it.

To not have to let them go or exile the part of us that doesn’t know how to live without them, that will always choose the past over the present and hell over healing every time because it’s closer to them.

That we can care for and carry forward that part of us. Tend to it tenderly, meet it and love it like only we can. For as long as needed. Perhaps one day we go looking for it and it’s not there anymore, separate and separated from us. It’s been absorbed back into our wholeness.

So that instead of having to do more to escape ourselves or our feeling, our own presencing is a kind of undoing of the layers of patterning that keep us from grieving.

A way of being that does not require leaving, but does require arriving, heart in stitches, in tow, or falling off our sleeve, to this moment right here and now, the only place that can hold them and then with the grace they and we deserve.

Yours in the caring and carrying xox-Monique
_______
#wehumanon #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #grief #griefsupport

Tonight I honor the mother I am and the mother I

Tonight I honor the mother I am and
the mother I thought I’d be
the mother I had and
the mother I wish I had.

I stretch my heart over the cavern of then and now, them and me (the four lost babies and the one I kiss on the forehead tonight) with a guitar-string kind of tenuous-tautness. I am not the cavern or the strings. I am the vibration that rises in between.

In the movement I find my self. Not the one that lost or the one that found, but the one that holds my human and is my being.

This, this is what feels true this year.

The noticing, acknowledging and welcoming-naming of my experience. The setting it free to flow through me, beyond me, to shape-shift and return to me in whatever form is needed now.

May our hearts be met with every kindness needed to heal, mourn, and human on.

More clearly yours xox-Monique
______
#ihadamiscarriage #actuallyihadfour #mothersday #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #speakyourtruth #traumainformedcare #grief #healing #miscarriage

Baring our hearts helps us bear our hearts, with a

Maybe something would be different if we didn't ha

Literally pulsing. Expanding, contracting. Physica

We don’t conquer grief. We befriend it. Perhaps

We don’t conquer grief.
We befriend it.

Perhaps more accurately, grief befriends us.

Sometime after its unknown shape, weight, size and depth triggers our innate threat response to fight it, run from it or freeze in the face of it; after an *indeterminable* time to get acquainted with our new post-loss environment (walls, windows, hallways, doorways, alleys, skid rows and viewpoints); upon searching for or stumbling upon what healing means for us individually given our history, loss story and belief system, we sometimes find ourselves reconsidering whether grief is the enemy it first appeared to be. With our weathered and wiser eyes we consider grief as maybe the only thing that has stayed by our side every moment along the way.

At the piercing moment of loss, the many painful moments and choices that followed, the loneliest depths we didn’t think we’d survive and the moments we found hope - grief was always there beside us, trusting we would and could make it through to right here and right now.

And here we are, reading these words, taking this next breath in or out, reaching out or reaching in, and humaning on.

Breath to breath we go xox-Monique
_______
#griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #grief #traumainformedcare #healing #polyvagaltheory #neuroception

Many of us are or have been burdened by invasive i

Touch+Grief. If we are grieving a loved one we ha

Touch+Grief.

If we are grieving a loved one we have lost the ability to touch them. To be touched by them physically.

If we are grieving the loss/absence of our childhood a big chunk of that is often safe touch.

There are many ways kind relational touch has either never been there or is taken from us.

We often think of grief in a vacuum, as a singular experience separate from what happened before we lost them or it or ourselves, when so often what happened before overlaps and informs what happens during loss.

For example, if we never “felt” accompanied during overwhelming, uncomfortable or scary feelings/sensations as children, either by a caregiver’s presence or actual containing touch, the experience of grief can feel similarly unaccompanied, unsupported or lonely even when from the outside it appears we have support or community.

Safe relational touch affirms our existence. Without words it confirms whoever the “other” is knows we are here right now.

Touch bypasses many of our automatic defenses and speaks to the body in a language it understands even if our cognitive minds don’t.

In so many ways touch is both the first and the final frontier of healing. It can repair what was never there and soothe what is no longer here.

For many considerate reasons touch is often excluded from trauma-informed care. And when titrated and safe touch can dock our hearts like nothing else can. It is part of nervous-system informed human care in my opinion. After all, so often as humans we are faced with unfixable pain, in ourselves and others. When we can't hold each other up, we can hold each other and ourselves.

We’ll be exploring this in my virtual Grief+Yoga training (yes, this work does not need to be in person.)

Hugs xox-Monique
_______
#wehumanon #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #somaticexperiencing #grief #griefsupport #traumainformedcare #traumainformedyoga

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