When I work with people who need help dealing with unprocessed loss, I virtually never try to “get them to grieve.” Our culture is particularly incompetent at receiving nuance at a deep level, especially emotion, and especially difficult emotion. It’s antithetical to everything American and progress-oriented. Yet, this is what’s required for grief work—to cycle backwards through body and psyche—to actually heal. No wonder society is sick and killing itself with superficiality, progress, and superfluity.
When we don’t grieve our losses, our little deaths, we generate secret death wishes and act out what literally kills us.
Grief work is about going backwards, spriraling back into the deep body that remembers and still feels. And it’s why, if you haven’t been through the process yourself, you might imagine that grief is something we do. In reality, it’s about allowing, when we sense the opening is there to allow the experience to overcome us. A lot of therapy, however, and unfortunately, is about learning to move forward and cope in the face of loss—finding joy, keeping up with work, getting out, getting over it with platitudes that deny the feelings. This can all be important on one level. But god forbid we should fall into the abyss of grief, or what seems to be an abyss looking in from the outside. I have found hearty, earnest, full-bodied grief to be the most cleansing, renewing bath—hard as it is.
Once you try to do grief, you get in its way, unless you’re really skillful about it, as in faking it till you make it. I elaborate on this and much more about grief in Climate Cure, but here’s a nutshell. Sometimes the river of grief needs a little nudging, but it’s really tricky. You can try to cry, or try to feel sad, careful not to get attached to the effort. But once real tears and the experience of grief begin to flow, you gotta stop trying, surrender, and let it flow.
What I find most important when dealing with unreckoned loss is holding space for someone to be themselves, to discuss the loss, to tell their story, to empathize with them. But in order to feel the feelings beneath the telling of it, one must make contact with the body. Sometimes grief itself creates this embodiment, if one is lucky enough to be able to readily feel deep sadness. This however is not often the case.
So, it’s usually best if one already has this grounding before beginning the process, which is why I recommend getting into yoga or qi gong or even meditation before trying to process significant grief, unless one is the recipient of such intense feelings naturally bubbling to the surface.
Grief flows in the trusted company of caring, authentically attuned others. And this empathy derives largely, and deeply enough, from having embodied my own loss and grief, as well as understanding how grief operates, how it thrives in order to heal our hearts through life’s perpetual stream of loss and disappointment.
Grief is the great giver, once it strips you of what you are not. We just have to trust the Yang for the Yin of the process.
Photograph: “Broomweed” by Ashley Bear
