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 💛