How to carry grief

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief lately. How we hold and carry it. How it can reshape our inner landscape and make its home in us.

And yet, this is so hard, isn’t it. It’s hard when we are in grief to even consider that this experience might, if we allow it, shape our becoming in some way.

Because to feel the deepest grief touches every loss in our lives going back to childhood. So we avoid this pain—we bypass, we keep busy, we pretend and keep our distance. We struggle to find the words.

But one truth I hold is that grief doesn’t need to be fixed and it won’t fully overtake us, even when it feels like it. Grief wants to be held and be witnessed. And it wants to move through us, like a stream at times and a raging river at other times, until it has reshaped our inner river banks and beds. The path before us, then, is to discover ways to stay present to this experience and allow it without being pulled under.

Companions and Containers

What’s needed in times of grief are companions who join us in our suffering, not expecting us to be any way other than who and where we are. They lovingly hold space while we move through our pain and loss. This can be the companion of a friend, community or a therapist. It can be the company of a beloved pet.

Companions also take the form of journaling, massage, a spiritual practice, music, long walks and even longer drives. These “containers” offer something deeply safe and soothing, and they do not ask us to be any way other than how we are.

They also carry a beginning and an end—the beginning of a page or melody, or an ending as we return home from a drive or walk. These ritual beginnings and endings signal to our nervous system that something has occurred and that we have been held in it. This registers as safety and containment to the body. We have felt the feeling of being held.

A sanctuary of pines

A few years ago, I began a practice of moving my body daily. I committed to a small amount of time. So small, in fact, that when I sometimes shared it with others, I could sense that they wondered why someone would even bother at all. What benefit would it have in fitness or strength or body composition, they asked? But all of that was beside the point. I simply felt a desire toward movement and began small so that I wouldn’t scare myself out of it with a goal that was too big or complicated.

Over time, though, this daily movement began to be primarily walks on the trails near my home. A container was taking shape and I began to crave the earth under my feet, the company of trees and the light dappling through to the forest floor.

And what struck me as time passed and I kept walking is how the constancy of the woods met me in the simplest ways, allowing me to show up however I was that day. Some days it was slow and heavy, other days with a podcast or friend. At times, I showed up desperate for the deeper woods and made my way over feet of snow to get to the trails.

What I thought was simply a container turned out to also be a companion. Without really meaning to, I developed a relationship with this landscape and came to rely on her care. My shoulders settled and breathing deepened as each footfall was met with the strength and dignity of earth herself.

This relationship deepened across the seasons as I grew to know the rhythm of the trees, every bend in the trails, and each knotty root as I traced and retraced my steps day after day.

What had been supporting me all these years was the felt sense that the earth would not give way. That no matter what, I would be held. My walks became the sanctuary in which not only was grief held, but where I experienced the presence of God in soil, roots, compacted earth and pines. It was here that I came to feel at home again in the world and in myself.

The invitation of grief

In our culture, we’ve largely lost the rites of passage for grieving. Yes, we have funerals and other services at the time of a loved one, but we rarely have other rites for ongoing grief, loss of dreams, relationships, illness and passages.

We are learning to create these for ourselves and I often encourage anyone grieving to consider ways to bring companionship and containment to their grief, as ways to begin to safely hold it. We need help in this and absolutely cannot do it alone. When we are alone in our grief, we become stuck in it and instead of the supportive rituals of companionship and containment, our behaviors become ritualized in the form of compulsions, avoidance or performing.

The invitation of grief is not to feel it all at once, but to gently and compassionately learn to be present to loss. To stay with grief long enough to allow it to reshape our interior, enlivening and enriching us so that we are made truer, deeper and more able to be present to ourselves and others.