When Grief Becomes a Teacher: Allowing the Body to Lead Us Through Loss

Ever experienced a time in your life where you felt like you were in a boxing ring with Life and it felt as if Life continued to pummel you without the opportunity to get up and fight back? Well that was last week for me. It was a really tough week for my family and I, and for really close friends of ours. Grief came knocking loudly and fiercely... I am still feeling the shock waves of each experience. I want to take a moment to acknowledge my family and friends that have had to let go and grieve the loss of a loved one. I am dedicating this to you all and sending love, peace, strength, and openness.

Grief has a way of bringing us to our knees. It cracks us open in places we never thought could break, and at first, it feels unbearable—like a punishment, like life has turned cruel and unforgiving.

But here’s the truth most of us were never taught: grief is not here to punish us. It is here to teach us. I am not simply talking about the loss of a loved one. It could be the loss of a dream, the loss of a relationship… Any loss is painful and can feel tragic. 

However, if we allow ourselves to fully feel grief—rather than numbing it, rushing it, or intellectualizing it—it becomes a profound invitation. Like a portal, if we stop fighting and surrender to what is, to transformation. I use the word "transformation" deliberately, intentionally, because it is exactly what feeling grief and letting go can do for us.  

Grief resides in the body, not the mind. It waits for us in the chest, the throat, the belly—asking to be witnessed, not silenced.” — Francis Weller

The Body Keeps the Score of Grief

We often think of grief as something that lives only in the heart or mind. But grief doesn’t just sit in our thoughts—it lodges itself in our body.

The tightness in your chest. The heaviness in your stomach. The lump in your throat that refuses to move.

These sensations are your body speaking to you.

Grief moves through us like a tide. When we resist the wave, the pressure builds, leaving us stuck in cycles of pain. But, when we surrender—when we let the sobs come, when we shake, when we breathe into the ache—we begin to see grief for what it really is: an energy that wants to move, to transform us, to show us differently, what can be.

Grief as a Sacred Teacher

Loss forces us to confront the deepest truths of life: impermanence, love, meaning, and our own capacity to endure. I have been considering each of these a lot this week and here is what I am learning and being reminded of first hand.

If we can soften into it—just enough to listen—grief shows us:

• Where we are holding on too tightly.

• What truly matters to us.

• How deeply we have loved.

• And most importantly—that even in heartbreak, we can expand rather than contract. It’s our choice when we move out of one and into the other. One can keep us in perpetual suffering while the other, still feeling pain, will allow us to change and adapt to what is. It’s a similar process to how nature will find a new path when it encounters a problem. This is the opportunity that expansion can offer us while we are grieving. A new way to look at life… at ourselves

Grief doesn’t come to destroy us. It comes to re-shape us.

In this reshaping, something new is born: resilience, wisdom, compassion, and a heart that, though broken, has grown larger.

You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

The hardest part is that society tells us to “get over it,” “be strong,” or “move on.” That pressure makes grief heavier, because it forces us to carry it in silence. This sense of isolation breeds trauma. Why do we continue to perpetuate more pain, more dis-ease, more disconnection?

What if you didn’t have to carry it alone? What if you could sit with someone who understands how grief lives in the body—and how, through somatic work, breath, and compassionate presence, you could begin to move it, release it, and let it transform you?

That’s the work I do. And it’s the deepest honor of my life—to sit with people in their grief and in their trauma, not to take it away, but to help them discover the medicine within it.

An Invitation

If you are moving through grief right now—whether it’s fresh, or like an echo years later—I invite you to take this step for yourself.

Book a session with me. Give yourself the space to feel. Let your body show you that grief isn’t your enemy—it is your teacher.

Because when you allow grief to move through you, you don’t just survive it. You emerge from it…a little differently.