A Simple Somatic Practice for Grief

My starting point in working with a client or with myself is almost always the same:

The body.

Somatic or somatics is just a fancy way of saying: pertaining to the body, or soma.  

So when it comes to grief, like anything else, I start with Body.

This is a little counter to the tendency in dominant culture, where we're more conditioned to have thoughts and tell stories about our emotions to explain and contextualize them.

I think there's absolutely a place for this.

But without including Body in the process, often energy remains stuck even if we feel like we fully understand or have language to completely describe what's been happening.

And then sometimes there is no way to put words to the experience of grief.  Sometimes we don't know the fully story in a cognitive way.

That's when the Body can narrate in Body's on language: a tightening of the chest, breath shallow or short, an empty or full feeling in the gut...sensations like these, or even absence of sensation, are all cues and clues that point to the somatic blueprint of Grief--or any emotion, for that matter--in one's system.  

Through tracking these in our system, over time, we can familiarize ourselves with the places of flow or restriction, and slowly more malleable our emotional channels.  

In the video below we'll do a simple somatic practice to experiment with just that, and to get a little glimpse of the kind of thing to expect at the community Grief Practice (October 15, see details below).