holding all we grieve

I’ve been thinking about grief and loss a lot these days.

the way my own grief has been pushed aside, the way grief is interwoven into all the healing work I do, yet it goes unnamed much of the time. the way grief work felt suffocating when I was trying to survive my own intense fear of death during the pandemic. remembering the grief that was weighing me down and had nowhere to be released because it was grief that had no landing space.

for some time I found myself recoiling from anything griefy including my work with pregnancy loss and birth trauma. I hadn’t at the time, made the connection to my own untended pain.

although I didn’t stop working with pregnant and postpartum women entirely, I closed out my pregnancy loss support groups and began to limit my work related to pregnancy and postpartum experiences. this distance allowed me to tend to my own birth traumas and what my womb and sacral energy center was needing. this was my grief work. unraveling the embodied energies from buried stories. grief held in my womb space. intergenerational trauma, birth trauma, a wounded inner child, and mother wounds carried in this space for decades and finally seen, held, loved, and released.

we benefit from expanding our view of grief to other life experiences that also create this emotional response

although we may see grief, grieving, and loss as related more to the emotional suffering due to losing a beloved person this is an incomplete definition.

the emotional suffering associated with experiences like trauma and abuse, relational break ups and divorce, losing a business, losing a home or displacement, motherhood, abortion, losing an artistic or creative venture, losing anything significant to you, inner child work, intergenerational traumas, and healing, are grief too.

all loss and all experiences that leave us feeling wounded are worthy of holding, tending to, understanding, and unraveling. we grieve when we’ve lost something. we feel deeply and those emotions and stories need a tender space to land.

we hold our grief like we would a wounded child

with gentleness, compassion, curiosity, love, and cariño. allowing grief to have it’s own pace and space no matter it’s roots is one thing we can do for ourselves and our grieving corazónes.

so take your time. hold all you grieve, send some love to your wounded parts and allow your own story to get untangled. this is how you heal. this is how we all heal.