Grief

Grief is a complex state. You can grieve the loss of a loved one. You can grieve the loss of your own innocence if it was taken from you too young. You can grieve how a traumatic experience changed you from the person you were before to the person after. You can experience multiple forms of grief in one lifetime.

Here is one of my grief experiences I feel compelled to share in this moment.

When my mom passed away people would tell me so often while she was sick “the universe has a plan” or “God only gives you what you can handle, so this just means you are a strong person” I get that people don’t know what to say in difficult times, but my gosh how are these phrases helpful at all?! Who gives a shit about feeling strong when I am watching one of the most important people in my life suffer and ultimately never get to talk with them or feel their hug again? I would happily appear as the weakest human on earth if it meant she got to live a longer healthy life. If she got to meet my future kids, and my husband could have had a chance to know her and her quirky humor. How is perceived strength some sort of consolation prize?

Grief is such a complex state. It started nearly 20 years ago while she was sick as I worried if she would survive, I grieved the future. It hit hard with the deafening finality of her death, looking ahead in my own life and knowing she would never be a physical part of any of it. Today, nearly 20 years later, it still hits me, grieving all that has happened without her here. Time does not heal all wounds, but it does change it.

It was not until I discovered somatic work that I realized how much I had held all of these stages of grief in my body. Every year around the anniversary of her death, I am not quite right. I get irritated easily, I am quick to anger, and get into a negative thought spiral daily, everything seems to piss me off. For years I would not connect the two until the actual date came and I would realize that maybe that was why I was in a funk. When I started practicing somatics in my own life, I thought that all the work I had done would just heal that part of my trauma, and that time of year would be easier once it rolled around. What I came to find out was that, no, that trauma had not really been released from my body yet, but with the skills I practiced it did make me more aware earlier on. I was about one week away from the anniversary, and I was snapping at everything, my mind was bringing up everything that had ever made me angry or resentful, and it was (as usual) not a fun place to be in. I was reminding myself of tools I had, be my own client, and I made myself sit and listen to my body and what it was trying to tell me.

 As soon as I got quiet, my mind popped up with what date was approaching. I stayed quiet and listened. I noticed a heaviness on my chest, a heaviness I knew all too well, but in years past had just pushed past, not wanting to deal with it. This time I did not push away, I sat with it. I breathed into my chest, into the feelings of missing her, the feelings of resentment that I could not have her here still. I felt my knee jerk reaction of sucking up my tears, but also felt a deep sense of just wanting a hug. I leaned into the hug feeling, and wrapped my arms around myself. Tears began to fall. I kept breathing slowly and intentionally into my heart space, wrapped tight in my own arms. I allowed my body to start swaying, as my mom likely did with me when I was a baby, my body remembered. It was not a conscious thought or choice, I was just letting my body guide me to what it needed. As I swayed back and forth, the tears fell harder into more of a sob. I kept breathing into where I felt the grief in my body. I stayed this way until soon I no longer felt the need to sway, then I let my arms drop from my self embrace. I felt the need to shake my arms, so I did for a bit. I felt the release. I felt covered in love and light and dare I say a bit of joy. I felt appreciation for my grief, for my mom, for my life I still get to live. My body felt raw. I felt the exhaustion and the lightness that you feel when you’ve been carry something so heavy and then finally get to let go and put it down. I reminded myself that it is ok to allow grief to come and go, after all grief comes from love. Either love for yourself or love for another, you can’t feel grief if there was never love.

Grief is a complex state. We all handle it or avoid it in different ways, but I hope that in my sharing a bit of my path walking with grief, that it can shine a bit of light into the darkness. Somatic work has improved my life in ways I can never fully verbalize, and I want to encourage you to start some type of somatic practice for yourself. Reach out if you need help 💛

The answer in front of you

I’m telling you, kids movies have it figured out. Take a minute and think through a handful of kids movies and the themes they have. Peter Pan, Christmas movies, Mary Poppins, so many of them, especially around the holidays, focus on “just believe”. 'Don’t focus on the how or the why, just believe that something good is meant to be, just trust the magic. And the kids do it! I know so many adults that feel a sense of longing for that child like wonder, and carefree attitude. As adults we get bogged down by responsibility and expectation, and feel there is no time for wonder. But the answer to our stress is exactly that! These movies have been telling us for years, just believe, what would happen if we did just that? What would happen if we opened ourselves up to the highest good that the universe has waiting for us? It sounds a bit scary because it feels as though we are giving up control somehow, but you can’t view it has giving up control, it can’t be viewed as a battle between you and the universe.

Each of our lives is in partnership with the universe (or God or mother nature, or any other name you give to the power higher than yourself). Just as in kids movies, everyone must work together to make the good happen, everyone needs to believe that the universe has our highest good in mind and be willing to accepting the good it is always trying to show us. Allow yourself the child like freedom of being open to the good.

Healing takes listening

In recent years there has been much more focus on “being heard” and being “seen”, and for good reason. When we feel that someone actually hears us or actually sees us for who we are or what we are experiencing, it validates that experience or feeling. We feel relief with that validation, like yes someone is getting it!

Now lets flip this to our bodies. Our bodies are always talking to us, through all sorts of ways. It can be sore muscles when we have worked out, it can be tense shoulders when we are under too much stress, or tummy troubles when we are nervous for something. Our bodies speak and feel, but are we listening, or are we just brushing off what it says because we are too busy to deal with it? I would venture to guess we often treat our bodies as if it’s a nagging person- yeah yeah I heard you, I’ll get to it! But more often than not you don’t get to it, and the nagging gets louder, and then you are just annoyed by it more, and the cycle goes on.

Now imagine if you could listen to your body as if it were a child in need of care? If a child is hurt or needs help, we will often get quiet, get down on their level and listen to what the problem is. We want the child to feel heard and supported so that they will continue to trust us with their care.

This is somatic work. We learn tools to take the time to get quiet and listen to what our bodies are saying as if it’s a child. If we treat our bodies like the nagging person, our bodies don’t stop nagging, they just start talking louder which is often in the form of disease and injury. If we can treat our bodies like the innocent child in need of help, we listen and validate the feelings it expresses, our bodies will feel seen and heard. And when your body feels the relief of being seen and heard, that is called self healing, and it is beautiful.

Luck

The problem with feeling lucky is it means that a part of you doesn’t feel you belong. I was watching a show with my kids, and one of the characters made this statement and it has echoed in my mind for days now. Luck is always thought of as something magical and a thing to be envious of, and maybe this is why. If you flat out earn something, you feel that you fully deserve it, you can embrace it because you worked for it. If you feel luck was involved at all, I wonder does that take away some of that satisfaction?

As I look back on times I have felt “lucky” there was absolutely a sense of instability to it. Like how did I get so lucky to have this thing or do this thing, I also very much felt the weight of worry for when it may be taken away. I think we also use luck as a way to discredit others’ accomplishments. If we say “oh she is so lucky that happened to her” aren’t we kind of saying “yes great for her, but maybe she doesn’t really deserve it.”?

I do think that there is an element of luck that floats about the world, or perhaps you can call it fate. Certain things are meant for certain people. But I also very much believe that this physical world has trained many of us to close ourselves off to possibilities, and therefore close ourselves to this luck. We are inundated constantly by advertising and social media, telling us what we should want. What if we allowed ourselves to open our minds and hearts to what the universe has in store for us specifically? Life is not a one size fits all model, it is a blank canvas experience that each of us have been given, and each of us has the ability to influence. Perhaps that is when luck steps in, when we allow ourselves to open up to the possibilities for our specific life. And perhaps that is why it feels so much as though we don’t belong when it happens, because so much outside influence constantly tells us we must fit a certain mold, but our true selves know that we cannot all possibly fit the same model. What a boring world exerience that would be if we were all the same.