My best thoughts come to me on my nervous system walk. It allows me to process through everything I feel and the words just start to flow in a way they don’t when I am just sitting. I’ve been reflecting a lot on how we are not taught how to grieve. There isn’t a handbook or an Idiot’s guide to grieving. The reality is that grief is just a part of life. We look at it as something that comes and goes, but what happens if we just allow it to be a part of life like any other emotion. We spend so much of our lives resisting feeling that things that are painful and uncomfortable. They are uncomfortable fora reason. Even if we know how to sit with them and feel them, it doesn’t make them less painful, we just learn how to sit and hold space. We learn how to listen and feel. I spent so much of my life thinking that I was feeling when really I was just intellectualizing. Let me tell you, actually feeling emotions hits different. It is overwhelming at times, but those emotions don’t go anywhere if we don’t feel them. They stay in our body, they send us signals. Grief is one of those things that until we give space for it to be felt, it remains there. Sometimes it’s quiet, but sometimes it is loud and when it is loud, the things that you learned to do to tune it out aren’t as effective anymore. There comes a time when we either choose to get very honest with ourselves, sit in the grief, feel it, cry it out, scream it out, punch it out or we continue to push it down. The things is, when we continue to push it down it also stunts our ability to feel other emotions in their full capacity. This includes joy, excitement, the depth of love.
When we give ourselves space to grieve, we also give ourselves space to be messy, to be human, to experience the beauty of how love has had a place in out lives. I hope that this episode helps you to reflect on your own grief process.
