This Is How You Grieve

Sleep in and take your time drinking coffee and making breakfast. It’s a rare treat to have a morning without meetings or deadlines. Download a good novel onto your phone for a long drive and head out the door. Go for a hike and enjoy the clear blue sunny skies and the warm sunshine on your face. 

Adventures, especially ones that are physically challenging, are therapeutic. Moving meditation. Feel your heart pounding, legs and lungs working, hearing the heavy breathing and feeling sweat pouring down your face and body. The mind is focused only on the task at hand, aware of being alive and the blood pumping through every vein. There’s no better way to reframe the mind and move all the stuck energy around and out.

It takes something to make space for sadness. Just because someone isn’t grieving or mourning in the way you think they should doesn’t mean that they’re not grieving. Everyone has a different way of processing, whether it’s through crying, lashing out in anger, withdrawing, turning to food or substances, or moving the feelings physically through the body.

By learning how to process events in a healthy way, so much empathy can be gained for how others show up and how you show up for others. Grace, space, and an ear (and a hug, let’s be honest) are the most valuable gifts to give. Aside from becoming great at giving to others, make sure you’re treating yourself the same way.

It’s not cold and heartless, it’s compartmentalizing and dissociating. Grieve out loud or don’t, but grief shows up however and whenever it chooses to, and when it does, it’s important to embrace and sit with it to heal… whether it’s with friends or family, in the shower, on a mountaintop, or in a corporate bathroom stall. Instead of viewing crying as a weakness, view it as a recalibration of the nervous system.

If there is progress and processing occurring, you’re doing it right.