A Somatic Guide to Grief and Heartbreak (II)
Part II: Perspectives
Following on from the first post in this series, today I want to explore some somatic and physiological perspectives on grief and heartbreak.
I will begin by emphasising that grief is a bodily, somatic experience. It cannot be fully experienced or healed without including the body in the process. Much of the time we try to think or will ourselves out of heartbreak by changing our beliefs, thought process or narratives about what we have lost. This can only really work when the body also accompanies such a change internally—otherwise it feels fragmentary, or the change won’t really land or penetrate.
From a somatic point of view, a shift in mental perspective will happen automatically as a consequence of body-level change. Therefore we work from the bottom-up (from the body into the mind), to better accommodate the body’s natural timing and instincts towards healing and restoration.
side note
This post will necessarily be somewhat descriptive, as I want you to have the fullest possible understanding and awareness of what is happening inside you (or inside your grieving friend), before we come to the guidance in Part III. I hope that the detail in my descriptions helps you connect the dots with your own experience, and feel seen and witnessed in however you’re going through your heartbreak.
The process of moving through grief begins with becoming aware and honouring whatever is happening inside us. We have to allow our bodies and selves to hurt before they turn towards healing. Otherwise, we risk bypassing the depth of our experience, and/or forcing ourselves into artificial methods of improvement.
Loss, and our response to it, is not a problem to be fixed. It is a part of life that we are called to accept, surrender to, even dissolve into… so that we can emerge from it transformed.
One caveat: it is possible (and even common) to get stuck within the grieving process or state. As a culture, we are both avoidant and ignorant of how to move ourselves and others safely and gently through a grief process. Therefore, we usually end up navigating it alone, bottling things up, having sudden and intense releases, or forcing ourselves to “move on” before we are ready. These may be natural responses, but—with the gift of understanding and some tools—we do not have to go through them blindly or helplessly.
physiological perspectives
your nervous system
Grief correlates with a physiological response of the nervous system called (variously) the dorsal vagal state, immobilisation, hypoarousal, dissociation, shutdown or collapse. The latter two refer to extreme cases, such as when we go into shock or suffer a severe, life-threatening trauma, and the body faints, collapses or literally shuts down in order to preserve life. However, regardless of the severity of the response, these modes share several common attributes:
a loss of vitality and energy
a feeling of heaviness, lethargy, stuckness or an inability to move (both the body and the mind)
a sense of fogginess or disconnection from the body/self and environment
a dampening of sensory perception such that colours seem duller, sounds feel muted or even distorted, touch feels distant or disconnected, and smells and tastes lose their richness and pleasure
a rounded posture that curves inward and downward, reflecting the overall downward orientation of the energy (towards the earth)
a shallow, jerky and/or irregular breath pattern that feels unsatisfying and may also contain inadvertent, long pauses—like the body has forgotten how to breathe fully and easily
States of the nervous system affect us on nearly every level of our experience. Here I have described mostly the physical/energetic side, but every state has downwind effects on our perception of the world, our beliefs and thought patterns, the way we feel, use and move our bodies, our social engagement, cognitive functions and much more. Thus you may also find yourself:
struggling to be coherent in thinking; thoughts come too slowly or not at all, or the mind feels foggy and uncooperative or stuck in unhelpful loops and spirals
unable to communicate clearly, feeling frozen when asked how you are or what you’re going through
burdened by a sense of fatigue, defeatedness or cynicism; able to see only the darkness or the chaos in things
able to get certain things done very functionally, but unable to do others or be present to more than the most basic of life needs
lacking enjoyment or pleasure in life, feeling drab, dull, monotonous and heavy; or checked out, floating around, spacey
somatically
Every body metabolizes grief differently, so you may notice sensations in any part of yourself at any point through the grieving process. Grief is also often accompanied by other emotions such as rage, betrayal and despair, all of which have their own pattern and signature in the tissues. The overall guideline is to attend to and work with whatever comes up, in the order and way that it comes up spontaneously, even if it doesn’t fit our idea of what we ‘should’ be feeling.
In general, however, feelings of sadness often lie in the chest, in and around the heart and lungs, and up into the throat. It can feel as if the heart or chest area:
has gone numb or silent, been deadened
is encased in steel (locked away in a box, shielded) or hidden behind a wall
has been carved out of the body
is an empty, cavernous, hollow space
is literally hurting: achy, throbbing, or piercing pain
has been torn or broken, is jagged, stretched thin
has been hammered, bruised, or stabbed by something external
has gone dark, foggy, is covered in shadows
All of these are metaphors but also literal qualities we can experience when we sense into this part of the body. I encourage you to spend some time exploring this for yourself, and to note down any connections or images that come to mind when you are with your own heart.
Because grief is a total experience, the rest of the body also participates, but sensations there can be more subtle. The overall feeling may be of heaviness and lethargy, or that it’s hard to contact and really feel the body, or that the life inside doesn’t feel pleasurable and is instead foreign or alienating. Attention might be pulled so deep within that the landscape of the body feels unfamiliar, disjointed, uncoordinated—or attention may not be able to penetrate beneath the skin at all, and we may feel like we’re floating somewhere on the surface or outside the body. The contours of the bodily self can dissolve such that we can’t tell where we begin, end or land.
When grief is unmet, it is often accompanied by hardness and bracing to keep all of these feelings at bay. Emotions get held (or suppressed) inside a container, the walls of which keep getting thicker and harder over time. If you’ve ever felt like you really want to cry but you can’t—this could be why. The holding within is so thick that it has dammed up the tears, so that we can only dry sob, without experiencing the full release and cleansing that tears bring.
In such cases, the way forward is to create conditions of safety, and very tenderly begin to unwind and dissolve the walls of the container, until we contact the essence of the feeling inside. Healing happens when that inner, fluid emotion is felt and allowed to breathe. As water brings life, being in touch with the movement of feeling through us begins the process of restoration. Waves of emotion start to pulse and flow, soothing us where we feel broken, softening the jagged edges of our pain, knitting together our wounds.
This process can be very difficult to go through on your own, which is why individual or group support is so helpful. Simply knowing that another person is there, and able to witness and hold you in a moment of pain or vulnerability, can be enough to allow you to enter into the healing process. At the same time, it is worth remembering that our bodies are always and forever orienting towards healing and restoration: it’s an instinct, innate to who we are. All we are doing is cooperating with that ongoing flow, and learning not to inhibit it with our fears and ideas.
elemental perspectives
ayurveda
In ayurveda, grief correlates with the energy of tamas. Tamas is one of the three essential qualities of all matter (the other two are rajas and sattva). The word tamas means: darkness, gloom, obscuration of the sun or moon in eclipses, mental darkness, ignorance or illusion. It is associated with the night, with the unconsciousness of sleep, and even with certain dimensions of hell. Elementally it is dark, heavy and cold.
You might find tamasic energy in an underground cave, or in something buried deep beneath the earth or at the bottom of the sea; or out in the farthest reaches of outer space, or in a black hole. Many of these places in the outer world parallel the energy of grief, and its cousin, despair.
In grief, we often find ourselves literally staying in the dark and avoiding the light. We might sleep much more, but not feel rested; or we might be able to function during the day but unable to sleep at night, as the dark brings forth all the feelings within us. We could feel cold or lack warmth in the body, or we might feel heavy and sluggish in our bodies and minds. There can also be a sense of disorientation, as when the ordinary course of events is interrupted during an eclipse and the world goes dark when it isn’t meant to.
tcm
In Chinese Medicine, grief is primarily associated with the Metal Element, and the lung and large intestine organs. The lungs present an obvious connection in that when we cry, our breathing changes. The lungs also give us a direct experience of cyclicity, in the way that we breathe in and out. Breath is our body’s way of participating in the natural flow of life, where things are born and die, or come in to our lives and then leave us.
Many of us, after a loss, notice changes to the way we breathe—that the breath doesn’t come as easily, doesn’t feel as full, is unsatisfying, becomes shallow or restricted, is stuck or jerky. Through these changes, our body is signalling to us a disruption in our relationship with the cycles of life. In order to heal, we need to unwind and restore the breath pattern to its full potential again (this may be accompanied by an emotional release such as crying).
The large intestine, on the other hand, is where we let go of whatever we have taken in (through food). Symbolically, it is the point of final processing, of saying goodbye to what needs to be let go of. On a physical level, grief can cause changes to the way we eat and nourish ourselves. Alongside breath, food is our main source of life. In the experience of loss and grief, the body feels and recognizes that some part of life has suddenly been taken away from us. It can therefore compensate by turning away from food (loss of appetite and taste), being unable to process food (indigestion, IBS), or by gorging to try to make up for the loss.
Emotionally and mentally, the lung-large intestine pair, when balanced, bring us a sense of clarity, lightness, and confidence. When things get blocked or imbalanced in this area, we can feel sluggish, heavy, confused, or stuck, and we may lose trust in ourselves or in life.
Other parts of the body can be affected by grief, especially when it is prolonged or unprocessed. These include the Fire element, or heart and small-intestine organ pair; and the Water element, or kidney-bladder pair.
The heart is considered the seat of the spirit, and the keeper of joy and sorrow. When the heart is unprotected by the lungs and the pericardium, it suffers with depression and a loss of vitality. Laughter and joy absent themselves from life for a time, and a weight settles in the spirit. It can be helpful and natural, during a grieving process, to return to or rediscover our spiritual connection and beliefs. Regardless of the specifics, remembering that we are part of something larger, and enacting a ritual to reinforce that connection (see Part I), supports the heart to metabolize sorrow and return to its innate balance.
The kidney and bladder are considered the seat of vitality, the place where our basic life force is stored in the body. They are also connected to feelings of fear. When, through grief, we become depleted in energy, or fearful of life, we are experiencing an imbalance in this organ pair and elemental quality. Due to their connection with the Water element, these organs can often be revived or rebalanced when tears start to flow, when we acknowledge and work through our fears, or when we reconnect with our natural biological rhythms (especially the circadian rhythm of light and dark).
In Part III, we move on to how to work with grief and heartbreak. Thank you for sticking with me (and yourself) this far. Let me know in the comments if anything struck you, or if you have questions.
Saw your post thought this might resonate - I serve the song beneath the traps—the bass that bombings couldn’t own. https://thehiddenclinic.substack.com/p/what-i-found-in-the-smoke-that-the
Beautiful exploration, so clear and thorough 💙