Grief is always here. From the first time it touches you, it’s here. No matter how subtle or how completely soul-erupting its visits may be.

Perhaps like you, my relationship with grief started early. So early that sometimes I wonder if it came into this life with me — it seems that familiar.

In this lifetime, it started in the way we generally think about it. Loved ones died, sometimes by means that weren’t talked about, reverberating in the heart as a complete undoing when grief is silent.

When grief visits, it brings along all of its previous avatars. It’s not as though one gets completed and then it’s done. Each one builds on those that came before, assembling in aggregate and when there’s a new one, we get to re-visit the ones previous.

Have you also been finding that’s true?

Grief is not only the loss of loved ones, but loss of opportunities, dreams and parts of ourselves, tarnished ideals and role models, the abuse, subjugation and disrespect thrust on friends, neighbours and fellow people…  and on any beings, natural systems, lands and waters. 

There’s a grief that comes with tolerating all that is less than what is fundamentally right.

These days, we collectively have a lot to grieve.

Contrary to what society might tell you, there is no period of grief, no cycle, no expiry date. It is unmeasured, ‘incalculable’, unbounded. Some may say undefinable.

There can be a knowing why we grieve, for whom and for what. And there can be not knowing.

In my experience, the not knowing kind is a grief buried deeper, layered in and amongst the grief we’re aware of but in stealth mode. When the unknown seeps into our bones and cellular structure and DNA, we often grieve silently and alone because there are no words to help someone else comprehend what we do not ourselves understand.

But the truth is if your heart is aching, even if you don’t understand why, there’s good reason and the reason needn’t be found. It simply is. We humans often want to understand why but the why is not the salve. The feeling is here to show us what otherwise we may not see — the ‘what’ underneath.

You see, your grief can’t be reasoned. It’s not a problem to solve, an analysis to complete, an equation to crack. Your grief is not of your mind so it can’t be solved there. It must be met where it is held, which is in your heart, your bones, your cells.

Sometimes grief announces itself clearly. More often, it arrives in the body before it has a name.

A heaviness that settles in the chest. A tightening in the throat making it hard to swallow. Limbs loaded with concrete or a fatigue that sleep doesn’t touch. Breath so shallow it’s willing itself away.  An ache without clear origin.

People carry these sensations for years, sometimes attributing them to stress, burnout, or ‘just being tired.’ The body, without words, is holding something that the mind doesn’t know how to find.

This is the realm of the soma, the body. Unraveling and unwinding what we do not consciously know is there, but the body does. The body always knows.

So we listen. We listen at the deeper level where it’s stored. We attune to it. We adapt ourselves to listening at its vibration and frequency in order to bring accord with it — gently, sensitively — dare I say tenderly, as is the tempo of the heart.

In somatic work, listening takes a specific form. Rather than asking grief to ‘make sense’, we invite the body to show us where it lives. A tightening here. An ache there. An impulse that was never allowed to complete itself. We move slowly, and we follow the body’s lead rather than the mind’s agenda.

Grief, met this way, tends to move. Not away, but through — which is, it turns out, the only direction it was ever asking to go.

When we do so, we invite grief to reveal its secrets in a more organic way. A way that does not require all the words, timelines and narrative. In a way that simply unravels.

And in the doing we invite knowing in our bones, the gift that is the tribulation — the transformation of your grief into something of value.

Your grief is what reminds you what deeply, profoundly touched your life. An honouring and reverence of what your soul remembers and yearns for. Not to be pushed through, buried, disdained but to welcome as you would your oldest, dearest friend — the one who is truly honest, raw, and devoted in their love for you.

It is in accepting its invitation that we find relief from our grief. Each visit, sacred — your soul’s invitation to know itself, to connect more intimately to life and to teach what we cannot teach ourselves.

Heretical perhaps, but your grief might just be the most divinely inspired gift that life has to give.

🕊🤍💫

If you are carrying grief — known or unnamed — and feel curious about somatic work, I invite you to reach out. A free 20-minute conversation is a gentle place to begin.