Understanding and Releasing Grief: A Holistic Bodywork Approach

As a collective, we are all experiencing grief and suffering to some subtle degree. To be human is to know suffering. To know suffering is to know enlightenment. These two energies cannot exist without each other. To know love and light, we must know contrast: darkness, grief, depression, and suffering. From a holistic bodywork approach, how can we possibly help to end suffering and release grief? This is a very convoluted topic that we will do our best to break down anatomically and energetically.

What is Grief and How Does it Manifest in the Energetic Body?

Grief is an emotional state activated when we have lost something, such as a partner, a loved one, a cherished pet, or a stage of life. Grief exists within our emotional energetic body. It is always there but can be activated through deeply impactful, life-altering experiences. If you have ever perceived loss, you have known grief. Grief is the byproduct of loving something so immensely that it feels debilitating to let it go and allow change— which is the nature of all things—to occur once more and take place.

Grief manifests in your emotional body through the activation of your perceived loss and is often held within the lungs. Without allowing this emotion— which is simply energy in motion—to flow and move as it truly desires, it can become entrapped in the emotional body and condense into your physical body. This happens through a lack of movement and not flowing with life. When we cling to things, people, emotions, feelings, or objects, we become trapped.

How Does Grief Physically Manifest in the Body?

Grief manifests physically in the body when we have not somatically or energetically released it. Through the condensing of your emotional body and the stagnation of this emotion, it has now manifested in your physical body, in your muscles, joints, and tissues. To truly access how grief physically manifests, we have to look at the body holistically: the energetic body, the emotional body, and the physical body. For simplicity, we will keep it to these three bodies and do our best to simplify this information.

Example: You are in a loving relationship, and everything is flowing smoothly and effortlessly when suddenly your partner decides to uncouple. This shatters your emotional body, and you go into a state of dysphoria. You are now operating in your emotional body, which is no longer in a state of harmony and homeostasis. It is out of balance, and you are experiencing life from that specific point of reality. You experience deep loss as the reality you had once envisioned has now come to a close. This process can be extremely painful emotionally and physically. As you grieve the energetic and emotional loss of someone you deeply loved, your physical body now has to catch up and adjust to no longer directly experiencing their energy. The two energy bodies that were once in close proximity are now energetically separating, causing emotional (and in some cases physical) pain. This is what heartbreak truly is.

Where Grief is Held in the Physical Body

Through the condensing of these energies, grief typically manifests in the physical body in the lungs, muscles in the upper back, shoulders, chest, in some cases the stomach, and most commonly known in the heart center. Grief can affect the entire body, but we will focus on these specific areas. Often, when we first receive the news that we have lost someone we deeply love, our body freezes, and our breath stops as well. We go into a frozen state if even for a split second, and our breath goes along with it, or it becomes very shallow, or in some cases, we lose our breath entirely, hyperventilating and completely losing touch with our connection to our breath. In that instant, our body stores that memory, and our body constricts every time we recall it. Through the loss of our connectivity to our breath, we breathe more shallowly, and our posture becomes compromised. The body is trying to release the emotional pain.

As we move through life, we begin to hunch forward, caused by the weight of our disembodied grief. Our grief is now physically holding us down. Through the forward hunching or forward rounding of our physical bodies, we are collapsing our rib cage, which puts a strain on our back muscles, which are trying their best to keep us erect and upright. Through the collapsing of the rib cage, we compress our diaphragm, and this is how we lose touch with our breath. Because now we have physically impaired our capacity to breathe. Through the forward rounding of our thoracic spine, we collapse forward, putting a strain on our upper back muscles, i.e., the erector spinae, the upper trapezius, neck muscles such as our scalenes, and even muscles located in the front (or anterior side) of our body. Muscles like our pectoralis major, platysma, and our abdominal muscles, which are now in a constant state of contraction, and this is just to name a VERY few.

Releasing Grief through Emotional Release

How do we release grief? It is through the applied holistic knowledge of anatomy and energetics that we can guide you through a healing session of release. Whether you are being led through this guided release with us at Bodywork by Star or if you are guiding yourself through this emotional release, it begins with self-acceptance. Accept where you are in the grieving process, whether you just experienced your loss yesterday or if you are years into the journey. The grieving process is not a linear path. The sooner we accept and make peace with this truth, the easier our reality will be.

At Bodywork by Star, we would begin by creating a safe space for you in our treatment room. This can still be done in your self-guided emotional release. Create a space that you feel safe and comfortable in. Now that you feel safe in the space you have cultivated, take the time to truly accept that grief is a teacher. It is here to stay and to teach you more deeply about love. Grief is a profound teacher, teaching us so much grace and compassion. The next step is to feel into your body and listen for whatever arises. If you have the thought to touch your heart center, listen to its guidance. To truly heal and be present with our grief, we have to get out of the mind and listen to our sacred bodies. Our bodies are highly intelligent, I might even say more intelligent than our minds. Follow your body's intuitive guidance.

Feel into your sacred heart space. What comes up? Take your time with this process and validate all of your emotions. Do not suppress a single one of them. Feelings of guilt, shame, and anger may come up. Whatever comes up for you is completely valid, and you are not bad or wrong for having these feelings. It is okay to be mad that the person or thing you lost is no longer here. It is okay to be angry that you won't have more time with them. Sit with all of it, and if you need to release vocally, allow it to happen. If you need to release physically, you can grab a pillow and hit it. This helps release the energy that is now physically trying to move through you. Allow it to happen with no judgment. I have a video that I’ll release showing you an example of what emotionally releasing grief looks like for me personally.

If you do not feel comfortable or confident in your ability to hold sacred space for yourself in this capacity, you can see a professional who specializes in emotional release and bodywork.

Conclusion

The grieving process is not linear, and there is no one path. All paths are valid. Grief looks different for everyone, and life can be very dense sometimes. We all will be touched by grief at some point. We will all know loss because the universe is ever-changing. Nothing is promised, nothing is finite, and safety is an illusion. Grief is a profound, healing teacher that, if we just open up to it and allow ourselves to unfold, will teach us compassion for all life. Everybody we encounter will know grief and therefore know pain and suffering. Through that, we are all united. We are all one. May we extend compassion to others because we never know what someone is going through.

Our bodies are inherently intelligent, and to release trapped emotions, we have to become embodied and stop running from feeling deeply.

Thank you for reading.