This is the second of a 4-part series on navigating grief. This skill is all about physically feeling the grief. Grief is a feeling, so as hard and painful as it is, you have to FEEL it. If you struggle to feel your emotions, that’s ok! Somatic practices like guided breathwork, dance, yoga, and even walking are fantastic ways to connect to where the emotion lives in your body, feel it, express it, and process it. This takes the pressure off you to just “feel” and gives you a space to safely feel with instruction from beginning to end.
If you're struggling with grief, this video is for you. This is a four part series where I talk about four different coping skills for navigating grief. My second tip for feeling grief, and this is a really hard one, is to physically feel it. Let me know if this was helpful in the comments.
If you're struggling with grief, this video is for you. This is a four part series where I talk about four different coping skills for navigating grief, which is an emotion that I have struggled to process most of my life and I finally found some tools that are really helpful so I want to share them with you. This is the second tip, so if you haven't seen the first one, make sure you go back and check out that video first and make sure you see the rest on my profile. My second tip for feeling grief, and this is a really hard one, is to physically feel it.
Grief is a feeling. So as hard and painful it is, you have to feel it. You have to let it move through your body and out. Otherwise it will just get trapped and suppressed. Somatic practices like breath work or mindfulness or yoga or dance are really great ways for us to tap into our physical body rather than thinking our way through an emotion. Even something like putting on a sad song and dancing through it and allowing the emotion to come up can help us process that grief physically and let us actually feel it.
Breath work is also a fantastic way to do this. There are a lot of guided breath work practices. You can google guided breath work for grief and there will be a guided practice that kind of walks you through how to breathe and tap into your physical body and kind of discover where that grief lives. If you've ever been to a yoga class, you might get into a certain pose and suddenly feel like you're going to cry. That's great. That's because we hold emotions in our bodies and moving sometimes is a way for us to kind of go, oh, looks like I'm holding on to an emotion.
So sometimes moving our body in space allows us to start to feel something without having to try and force our way into it. Let me know if this was helpful in the comments and if you have any questions, please do let me know. And check out my other three videos on navigating grief.
