A Somatic Guide to Grief and Heartbreak (III)
Part III: Container
This is Part III of a series on grief and heartbreak. Read Parts I and II.
In the next part of this series, we will explore various ways to offer ourselves and others support through a grieving process. I have laid these out across multiple posts in (my own) order of importance, but this may differ for you. Take what serves. In brief, we have: creating a container, holding space for feeling, reawakening to pleasure and beauty, working with the unseen world, and rediscovering meaning.
Each of these areas is intertwined with the others in a mosaic of healing. If you find that attending to one doesn’t seem to be working, you may need to switch to another one in order to indirectly support the original issue you’re facing. For example, you may be facing issues with food or sleep, but what needs addressing is actually your level of stimulation, your ability to hold space for feeling, or your sense of meaning in life.
Please remember that grieving is a non-linear, often cyclical process. There is no timeline for it, as it brings us out of ordinary conceptions of time and space. Throughout your grieving process, you may find yourself cycling between periods of lightness and recovery, and other periods of darkness and depression. Even many years after the initial loss, you may find yourself re-experiencing deep emotions and fresh pain. This is entirely natural, and not something that needs to be corrected.
The skill in navigating grief is to allow yourself to be unmade and rebuilt in your own way, respecting the intelligence of your life force, even when it doesn’t match your desires or ideas of what should be happening. If you are able to listen and attend, you may find that at different points, different parts of you need attention and support. Please accommodate yourself as best you can, and know that you are following an invisible thread that keeps calling you onward, through your grief.
container
In the midst of a loss, the structure of ordinary life can fall apart. We might struggle to function and execute basic tasks like feeding ourselves, sleeping, or cleaning the house. This is partly due to the state of shutdown in the nervous system, asking us to conserve our energy; and partly because of subconscious emotional associations and beliefs we have about the loss itself.
Regardless of the specifics, during such a time it is more important than ever to lean on supportive and nourishing habits and routines that keep you anchored in reality. For the body to be able to recover from grief, it needs good fuel, deep rest, light movement and gentle sensory stimulation. These form the container, or the foundation, for any further processing to happen.
While the specifics in each of these areas may change through the grieving process—for example you may change what you’re eating, when you’re sleeping or how you’re moving—the essentials remain the same. And if all you can do is focus on the very basics of living for a time, that’s fine. Please accept that you are living in a smaller sphere of life, temporarily. Eventually your energy will return and you will be able to expand again into a broader landscape.
It is also common for loss to unbalance our routine: we might be unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to move, or unable to process stimulation. In such cases we need to find a way to support the body back into its natural processes and instincts again.
When grief is unprocessed and lingers somatically, the body experiences chronic or low-grade disruption to its basic functions and rhythms. For example, sleep might never quite be the same, or we develop certain sensitivies around food and eating, or our breath pattern becomes impeded in some way and therefore affects energy and cognition. We may also develop a ‘secondary’ condition such as anxiety, which persists even after the initial heartbreak goes away. These kinds of remnants or imprints likely need to be addressed through a combination of steps in this post and the next.
Here are some suggestions for healing approaches in each of these areas:
food
prioritise comforting, nourishing foods that feel hearty and wholesome to your body (this may vary by culture and climate, but in general: warm, moist and balanced meals)
if you are in shutdown, spacing out or dissociating, include earthy, grounding and naturally sweet foods (onions, leeks, carrots, white and sweet potatoes, honey)
if you are feeling understimulated, dull or lethargic, try slightly spicy foods—nothing extreme, just enough to stimulate rather than overwhelm your digestive fire (ginger, garlic, pepper, chilli, paprika, herbs, spiced curries and stews etc.)1
avoid cold or raw foods and drinks like salads and smoothies, as these are harder to digest and usually don’t bring a feeling of safety or comfort to the body
as much as possible, anchor yourself in a routine of eating regularly (rather than fasting, binging, forgetting to eat, losing track of your appetite, or gorging)
in the initial period after a loss, this is usually the hardest thing to do, so give yourself time to come back to this—it’s not something to enforce, but a support structure
if eating is hard, support yourself by creating an atmosphere of safety and pleasure around meals: attend to the preparation, choose foods you enjoy eating, put on some music, eat with someone else who helps you coregulate, slow down and take a few breaths before and after you eat…
don’t force anything—if none of this works, trust your instincts and/or seek help
movement
the most important thing is to honour your actual energy levels
if you have a lot of energy, are restless or jittery, or feel like you’re stuck in your head/overthinking, find a physical outlet that helps you discharge that excess energy
if you are in a low energy state, prioritise rest and very gentle, fluid movement like walking, jogging, swimming, yoga, taichi
the purpose of moving at this time is to move the energy in your system, remember you are alive and rediscover the pleasure of embodiment; not to lose weight, gain muscle or anything else that may have been your goal before
moving a little bit, at regular intervals, is the most helpful way to go. movement that brings you pleasure, ease, joy or satisfaction is the best.
don’t overcomplicate things; find something simple that feels good to you and keep doing it
if you have access to it, move outdoors or in nature, as this has a stabilizing and reanimating effect on the body
rest & sleep
Getting good quality rest is one of the most important and underrated aspects of recovery from grief. In sleep, and especially in dreams, our psyche is unmade and remade in response to our loss—in other words, sleep is the ultimate form of (subconscious) processing and adaptation.
if it appeals to you, track and explore your dreams as guides from the unseen world.
nightmares can also be worked with, but you will likely need to seek help
If sleep is a challenge, give yourself other forms of rest: yoga nidra, deep meditation, hypnosis, or other activities that feel restful to you like soaking in a warm bath, listening to music, lying under the stars, sitting in a rocking chair or by a fire…
When going through grief, you may need much more sleep/rest than you ever have before. Remember that your body’s tolerance for activity and stimulation is drastically reduced during grief. It is natural to need to rest for multiple hours in a single day, or many times over the course of a day, even when you have slept at night (and especially if you haven’t). Find ways to give this to yourself, as much as you can. It might not look like anything is happening, but beneath the surface, deep inside yourself, subterranean shifts are taking place.
sunshine
A crucial element of recovery and sleep is connecting with the rhythm of day and night (internally, our circadian rhythm and externally, the solar rhythm). The tamasic energy of grief can keep us stuck in darkness, both metaphorically and physically. It is incredibly supportive in times of heartbreak to go outside and be under the sun as it is rising or even high in the sky.
In bright, natural light, with the warmth of the sun on our skin, the body remembers what it is like to have hope and be uplifted.2 The sun restores us to our true, vital energy and reconnects us with the ongoing motion of the cosmos all around us. It reminds us that we are part of that alive, ongoing movement from darkness to light, even when we have forgotten what it feels like.
The alternation of deep rest in darkness + activity in warm, natural light is what ultimately restores us to our natural rhythm in the flow of time.
stimulation
There is a sweet spot of ‘just right’ when it comes to stimulation. In grief, our tolerance for external stimulation usually reduces, as much of our energy is being taken up in invisible, internal processing and realignment. Allow yourself to withdraw from whatever is not a priority, but be careful not to reinforce shutdown in your system.
Everyone’s version of this will look different, so only you can know if you are honouring where you are or stuck. In the latter case, you may need to deliberately stimulate yourself more than you want to, to come out of that pattern of stuckness.
If you do this, and you can recover afterwards, then it’s a sign that your nervous system still retains some flexibility.
If, on the other hand, you stimulate yourself and struggle to recover afterwards, you’ve gone too far and need to slow down.
More often than not, the issue is that we are unable to fully surrender to whatever level of stimulation is around us: we can’t handle more, but also can’t seem to drop into less, or we carry that too-much/wound-up energy into quieter moments too.
In these cases, deliberate understimulation is the way to go, through a sensory withdrawal practice like meditation or yoga nidra. This is a form of training to recover flexibility in your nervous system, ie. moving between states of destimulation and stimulation. With repeated practice, we will learn to reset our baseline level of and tolerance for stimulation back to a healthy level.
These four areas—food, rest, movement, stimulation—create a container that will either get us through the grieving process on its own; or which will form the foundation on top of which we proceed with further processing. More on the latter in following posts.
There is a ‘folk’ belief in some Asian cultures that eating spicy food is good when you’re feeling sad, as it makes your nose and eyes run, the way they would when you cry. I suspect there is some truth to this, as, according to Chinese Medicine, spicy foods stimulate the lung and large intestine organ pair (which relate to/hold grief).
This is an example of a natural pleasure that we can reorient to, in order to bring us out of the dorsal vagal state (more on this in subsequent posts).
Lots of good practical advice/suggestions. Btw there's a film showing online "the eternal song" along with various panels all week until Monday, many about healing from Original Peoples' experiences/perspectives www.eternalsong.org/