The Grief Practice - An Exploration & Explanation of Grief In The Body

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So this is how we say goodbye to the people we lov

So this is how we say goodbye to the people we love
to the people we’ve been
to the roles we played
to the lives we’ve lived

Stepping onto the stage of our life, knowing that sometimes
sometimes we get to say a proper goodbye with applause and an encore and a bow

Sometimes no one is there, in the seat reserved for them
but we say it anyway, as we hold their picture to the light
“thank you” and “I love you” and “where are you” and “come back” and “can I hug you one more time”

Sometimes we step onto that empty stage with our lines ready and our palms sweaty
and then turn around and run backstage, where we can weep our lines in private because we’re just not ready to share them with the world

Sometimes we can’t reduce it to a line or two or 50
so we don’t ever say goodbye to them, to us, to who we used to be

We just say hello to each new breath, each the moment, each new day.

🙏🏼It has been an honor to share space with you here for the last 5 years.

Every single word and image I placed here has been an act of healing for me. Perhaps you have also found some healing in them.

This page will stay up as a resource and reminder of your own heroic healing energies and your ability to harness them.

We can stay connected over at TheGriefPractice.com if you wish. I send out a monthly newsletter and will continue to offer gatherings, such as the retreat this October, as well as private sessions.

Thank you for being xox-Monique🙏🏼
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My next exploration is @essentialhumanity

Constellations of grief happen when there is enoug

Constellations of grief happen when there is enough space between it and us for us to see it is not us and how it lives with(in) us.

It may come as a relief. It may come as a new grief, to see our loss clearly and still be available of feeling it. We may turn away and continue on as if we didn’t see it because it is easier that way. More familiar.

All is fine.

And when grief constellates outside of us but inside of our awareness, we may see gradients of grief never before seen. We might clearly see its background, middle ground, and foreground. We might sense its depth and its denseness in tandem with our own lightness and spaciousness. What might be a contradictory experience as a human may feel like a complete experience as a human+being.

In particular, the pain we experience as a result of the self-punishment around how or when we hurt, heal or cope can often be seen as pre-existing the loss itself. Something patterned into us long before we had choice. Never ours to begin with, but intertwined into our loss as if it was.

New sadness or anger can flow from this and with us in a new way as we steady-heal ourselves with what-Is, even as we acknowledge-see what-Was.

In healing xox-Monique
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This Saturday: Move With Grief • The Monthly Class | Free+Online
Oct 5-8 • Move With Grief: The Retreat
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#wehumanon #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #grief #traumainformedcare #somaticexperiencing #nondualism #advaitavedanta

We get to choose if language supports or limits ou

We get to choose if language supports or limits our experience of being human.

Language is often used to try to pin things down into either/or, so that it can be known and squared away, decided.

My current experience of language is quite the opposite. It is more in the realm of intelligence than intellect. More like listening to a word than assigning it meaning.

I wonder how this kind of listening would change how we hold or approach grief.

If we don’t squish our experience into a word or a meaning, what might be different about it right now?

Is there any small part of you that is curious right now?

The science of healing is not about pinning things down and making them sure and predictable.

The science of healing is about understanding the mechanisms of our human biology enough so we can intentionally prep and support our systems to receive and recognize the many shapes and forms healing takes, from the obvious to the mystical, so that when we touch it we can allow for the knowing without understanding that is the hallmark of so much of what we call healing.

Yours in the questioning xox-Monique
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See you soooooon!💕
June 3 • Move With Grief: The Monthly Class
July 15 • Camp Widow San Diego | The Other Way to Grieve: Science, Soma & Soul
August 27 • International Overdose Awareness Day | San Diego | Healing Ceremony
Oct 5-8 • Move With Grief: The Retreat
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#wehumanon #griefbyanyothername #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #somaticexperiencing #traumainformedcare #polyvagaltheory #grief #hope #healing #griefsupport

Sometimes we lose the language of hope along with

Sometimes we lose the language of hope along with whoever or whatever we lost.

Even though Hope hops the same train of thoughts as grief and floats on the same sailboats of memory, it can feel very far away.

Even though Hope tracks the same route as grief, crawling-running-hiding-leaping through and under joints, skin and bones, merging-emerging with and in our inner and outer environments, it can feel like a stranger every time it flickers across our face.

Even though Hope has a face and arms and legs just like grief, it can feel scary to touch it, walk with it, see it or be seen by it.

It is not how they say, that hope is around the corner. Hope is born the instant the hurt is. It is with us always, side by side with our pain, silently bridging earth and sky, body and being, so that we can find our way from there to Here.

love xox-Monique
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June 3 • Move With Grief: The Monthly Class | Free+Online
Oct 5-8 • Move With Grief: The Retreat | Murietta, California
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#hopeinthebody #griefinthebody #grief #somaticexperiencing #traumainformedcare #griefsupport

I always thought the first time I met grief was wh

I always thought the first time I met grief was when my husband suddenly died in 2002, when I was 25.

Only recently have I realized I spent my entire childhood grieving, having grown up with the family disease of alcoholism. (Thank you @alanon_wso )

It is also possible I grieved in utero, growing into the same space my older brother would have had he lived.

These understandings are not new stories that push healing farther away. In my experience they are more like information that allow me to now grieve what I didn’t even know I had lost, making healing more accessible.

Abrupt loss or developmental loss can blur our literal and experiential vision, making it hard to see what is or was actually there or not there.

Locating our experience here and now often requires other humans’ presence and present to hold down and confirm the here and now as we look/reach back into the past and bring it forward to finally be seen and acknowledged in the present moment, the only place healing can happen.

This reconciling can be bittersweet, both painful and liberating. Finally seeing-feeling-acknowledging-freeing what was/wasn’t into the arms of what IS is a big part of healing. It takes courage. It takes community. No one heals without a witness.

I am grateful someone said those words to me recently just as I was beginning to see things I had never been able to see before: We can’t let go of what we don’t know we are holding onto.

Each loss or piece can feel like a new wound, as well as a new window through which to clearly see our wholeness, sometimes for the first time.

Impartially yours xox-Monique
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See you soon🌿
June 3 • Move With Grief: The Monthly Class
June 21 • Map Your Grief Summer Solstice class | Online
July 15 • Camp Widow San Diego | The Other Way to Grieve: Science, Soma & Soul
August 27 • International Overdose Awareness Day | San Diego | Healing Ceremony
Oct 5-8 • Move With Grief: The Retreat
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#onwardcourageousheart #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #grief #traumainformedcare #somaticexperiencing #griefsupport

Some normal physical experiences in grief are:
😶feeling numb emotionally
🫁difficulty breathing
😭uncontrollable crying
🥺lack of appetite
🍰increase in appetite
🥴muscular tension in new places
😵‍💫increased muscular tension in old places
😴lack of energy
🌥fogginess
🤔forgetfulness

⚡️The intensity of these (and other) physiological responses to loss can supersede the psychological ones, often greatly impacting the psychological scaffolding that takes shape as the landscape of grief comes into sharper relief.

🧐This is why listening to, supporting, and including the body in healing is so effective in grief. It is also why top-down approaches can sometimes feel inadequate or premature.

🧠Our physical responses to loss flow from our unique, instinctual biological response to loss, which operates subcognitively.

👀Our healing also initiates at this biological level, which we can contact in very simple ways, using the intelligence of the body to first look outside of the bodily experience, allowing for support and safety to be felt and confirmed so that the embodied container for our grief can expand.

💔The societal response to grief is often ostracizing, invalidating or rushing both our physical and mental experience in the wake of loss. This crack in the natural communal container for our grief makes us have to work harder to find communities that are not afraid of our experience and can welcome and support it.

📞Reaching out to others is a natural first response to tremendous loss. Only after this effort and need goes unmet over and over does that reaching out turn into a collapsed giving up or protective pushing away.

🙌Physically both of these actions, reaching out and pushing away, happen through the arms. We'll explore this somatic piece together in our next monthly online gathering.

love xox-Monique

ps. (A great place to look for community grief support is your local hospice center. They often have free grief-support groups for all kinds of loss.)
📸©The Grief Practice
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Oct 5-8🧡Move With Grief: The Retreat
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#polyvagaltheory #somaticexperiencing #grief #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #traumainformedcare #griefsupport

Listening is holding out our hands to catch whatev

Listening is holding out our hands to catch whatever falls or leaps from our hearts.

Listening is medicinal, reparative, and a foundational piece healing grows from.

Listening is not fixing, changing, or transforming.

Listening is courageously contacting, witnessing, and presencing our truth in this moment, whatever form it may take... a thought, an image, a sensation, an emotion, a behavior.

Listening is leaning into what can be known without having to understand.

Listening doesn’t just happen with our ears. Our eyes can listen. Different parts of our body can listen.

Listening is a beautiful exchange between what we hear and who is hearing it. A dance between awareness and experience.

Listening is resting into our inherent wholeness.

Listeningly yours xox-Monique
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Upcoming Events:
May 6 • Move With Grief: The Monthly Class | Free+Online
June 21 • Map Your Grief | Summer Solstice class
July 15 • Camp Widow San Diego | The Other Way to Grieve: Science, Soma & Soul
August 27 • International Overdose Awareness Day | San Diego | Healing Ceremony
Oct 5-8 • Move With Grief: The Retreat | Ojas Retreat Center | California
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#onwardcourageousheart #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #grief #traumainformedcare #somaticexperiencing #traumaticgrief #listening

Movements in grief can be similar to musical movem

Movements in grief can be similar to musical movements, both in their complexity, interconnectedness and beauty.

Right now, together, we can consider two movements together:

1️⃣ The movement that happens when part of our experience of grief is named out loud, validated or externalized (written, drawn, spoken, noticed…)

Taking something that existed implicitly and making it explicit renders it into a thing that can be seen and understood differently. Once it is perceived outside of us in some form, there is a biological energy transfer from the way it was bound inside of us to this new form. Here it can shapeshift, grow or shrink, reorganize in some new way or finally move up to our face and be expressed. In short, something *different* both happens in our experience and can be noticed by us, the experiencer.

2️⃣ The movement that happens when we physically move our bodies and that moves through our bodies when we invite both intuitive and intentional movement and noticing.

Intuitive movement and body-oriented practies are uniquely qualified to reorganize our biological state because, as humans, our nervous system is the main sensory means through which we experience the world.

When we use the mechanisms of the nervous system and our bodies to make contact with the current moment, the body automatically begins to reconnect to itself in ways that support healing.

Because our mental story follows our biological state, the result is often new information unique to our experience and what feels next or needed for us.

Because grief often feels overwhelming, this way of moving with it allows it to move more slowly and with more support so that it doesn’t feel so scary.

My friend Nya and I are exploring these ways of supporting grief in community every month in our free community class.

Grief can be lonely. And we don’t have to do this alone.

love xox-Monique
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May 6 • Move With Grief: The Monthly Class
Oct 5-8 • Move With Grief: The Retreat | California
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#wehumanon #griefinthebody #hopeinthebody #somaticexperiencingint #yogaforgrief #griefsupport #griefyoga #nervoussysteminformedyoga #grief #polyvagaltheory @somaticexperiencingint

Thankfully we are both Human and Being. When we c

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