Essays

Why Grief Makes You a Stranger to Your Own Body

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:00:32 GMT

Your body feels less familiar to you after you’ve experienced loss because your system restricts how much it lets you feel, and there’s nothing’s wrong with you. That distance builds in four protective steps: your body experiences the loss, your attention becomes more narrow, you begin to sense less and the distance becomes a habit.

Every step was your system trying to get you through, which also means the way back can be

gentle.

Why do I feel disconnected from my body after loss?

Because the emotions associated with your loss were bigger than you could experience at once, so your body reduced the amount of sensation you could feel. My clients describe it in different ways: outside of their bodies, observing themselves in their own life, going through the motions on autopilot, or feeling like their body belongs to someone else.

In my last two essays we looked at the first pieces of this. Your Body Knew Before You Did explains why your body responds before your mind understands what happened, and The Intelligence of Numbness explains why your body reduces sensation when the full amount is too much for you to experience. This essay puts those pieces in order so you can see how they connect.

Step one: your body registers the loss

Before you have words to describe what happened, your body has already responded. Your breathing changes, your stress hormones rise and your system shifts into survival mode (remember: fight, flight, freeze or fawn?), which is exactly what it’s designed to do when something this big happens. At this point you’re not disconnected from your body at all, you’re feeling way too much and it can become overwhelming.

Step two: your attention narrows

Then, you have to start handling arrangements: you have calls to make, people to feed, forms to sign and a face to put on, so your attention moves to everything outside of you to all of the things that have to be handled today. Your body’s signals (hunger, tiredness, tension, the ache in your chest) get pushed into the background because there’s no room for them on your to-do list. You aren’t doing anything wrong here, you have to shift your focus because it’s how most of us get through the first weeks, and it works. The cost of doing this shows up later.

Step three: you start to feel less

This is the numbness described in The Intelligence of Numbness essay, and it doesn’t only lower the painful sensations. It turns down the whole dial, so hunger, warmth, touch and desire get quieter too. Research on stress and trauma points the same way: a 2025 scoping review found that reduced awareness of bodily signals was reported more often than heightened sensitivity, and that avoiding or disconnecting from the body can work as a protective strategy, even though it can weaken self-awareness over time. That’s the mechanism behind what we’re exploring. Your body’s ability to receive its signals has been reduced to protect you.

Step four: the distance becomes a habit

If your sensation remains low for weeks, your system gets used to it. You may notice you’re thinking about your body instead of feeling it, or that you only become aware of it when something hurts. This is why understanding your loss doesn’t help you feel more in your body. Insight lives in one place (your mind) and sensation lives in another (your body), so no amount of analyzing will reconnect you to your body. And while the way back is through your body, it must be in small doses that it can handle.

Why more attention isn’t always the answer

It might seem like the fix is to tune into your body more, but that can backfire. A 2024 scoping review of interoceptive awareness in people with PTSD cautioned that simply increasing attention to physical symptoms could be harmful for trauma survivors, and pointed to body awareness paired with a mindful, accepting stance as more promising. That research is about trauma, not grief specifically, but it matches what I see with the women I work with: contact works best when it’s small, brief and optional. So the goal isn’t to feel everything, it’s to give your body a few safe moments of contact so it can learn that sensation is safe, and it’s okay to allow it back in.

Gentle ways to come back to your body

Look first: Let your eyes move slowly around the room and land on three things, noticing their color and how far away they are. This tells your body where it is right now.
Warmth and weight: Rest a hand on your forearm or your heart, or hold a warm mug in both hands, and notice the temperature for thirty seconds.
One sense at a time: Taste one bite of food slowly, or listen to one song all the way through, and let your attention stay with that single sense. Be present.
A small pleasure: Choose something that feels good and costs nothing, like sun on your skin, a soft blanket or a favorite scent, and let it be enough. Small pleasures give your body something safe to receive, so small is the right size.
Stop early: End each practice while it still feels okay. Leaving a little unfelt helps your body keep trusting you.

Think of these as small invitations you repeat, and over time your body will feel more and more safe.

When it needs more support

Feeling disconnected from your body is common after a loss, but it deserves more support if you feel cut off from the rest of the world most of the day, if it’s getting in the way of caring for yourself or others, or if you’re having thoughts of harming yourself.

Please reach out to a licensed mental health professional or a crisis service in your state/country. Grief can also cause real physical symptoms, so if something in your body worries you, see your doctor . Needing support means you deserve care that meets you where you are.

One thing to notice today

Set a timer for thirty seconds. Notice where your body touches the chair, the floor or the bed, and find one place where you can feel pressure or temperature, even if it’s faint. You don’t have to change anything, just let your attention rest there until the timer ends. Small moments of contact like this are how the connection gets rebuilt.

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to feel disconnected from my body after a loss?

Yes. Feeling disconnected from your body is a common protective response to significant loss.

Why do I feel like I’m watching my life from the outside?

When your body reduces feeling/sensation, you can feel like an observer of your life instead of a participant. Clinicians sometimes call this detachment or dissociation, and most people start to feel more sensation as their body feels safer. If it’s constant or scares you, a licensed professional can help.

How long does the disconnected feeling last?

There isn’t one timeline. For many women it shifts gradually with safety, rest and support, and it tends to come and go before it eases up. If it’s intense, constant or getting in the way of daily life, talk to a licensed professional.

Can pleasure help me reconnect with my body?

Small, safe pleasures give your body gentle sensations to receive without asking you to feel everything. They don’t replace support when you need it, but they’re a good place to begin.

Start here: P.U.L.S.E.™ is my short, free resource for reconnecting with your body in small, safe doses. Explore P.U.L.S.E.™

Next: “ You Know Danger Like the Back of Your Hand. Now Describe Safety ,” on what safety actually feels like in your body once the alarm quiets, and why most of us were never asked.

Amber Wood is a Certified Trauma-Informed Loss Practitioner and the creator of PleasureProtocol™ and LiberationMethod™. She helps women reconnect with their bodies, pleasure, and themselves after loss through Pleasure-Based Grief Integration. This essay is educational and reflects a somatic coaching practice. It isn’t psychotherapy, medical advice or a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.

The Intelligence of Numbness

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:45:00 GMT

There’s a certain kind of panic that can happen when something significant changes, or someone you love dies, and you feel… nothing.

You may not cry like you expected, and you’re probably observing yourself in your day to day while also feeling disconnected from yourself. Then you start judging yourself and asking: What is wrong with me? Why don’t I feel anything? Let that sink in.

Nothing’s wrong with you.

Numbness is a protective mechanism that restricts how much sensation your body is able to receive. It’s your nervous system turning down sensations that feel like too much because the full strength of them (at least, for now), is more than you have the capacity to receive.

Remember, this is intelligence.

Why don’t I feel anything after a significant loss?

Because something very large just happened, and your body made a decision to survive.

Most of us expect our grief to come on strong: sobbing, releasing anger or some other big reactions, but grief doesn’t always make a lot of noise. Sometimes it gets very, very quiet. Now granted, that silence can be real loud. But quiet, nonetheless.

During those times, your body hasn’t forgotten how to feel. It’s just deciding how much feeling can come through at once.

In my last essay Your Bo dy Knew Before You Did , we explored how your body can begin responding to grief and loss before your mind fully processes what happened. Numbness is the next part of that conversation because once your body knows, it may decide not to let all of that “knowing” in at the same time.

What numbness actually is

Numbness is a reduction in sensation or feeling, but it doesn’t mean they’re gone permanently or you can’t get them back. The sensation, emotion and meaning are still there, but your body is keeping them at a distance it can manage, if that makes sense. Think of a dimmer switch, not an off switch.

Feeling numb after a death is common , especially early in grief. It might allow for you to make phone calls or text, complete paperwork, care for your children or simply get from one hour to the next.

Honestly, sometimes numbness is the reason you’re able to keep moving when your life has just been divided into a before and after .

Why numbness isn’t selective

Here’s what surprises most women: when your body turns down the volume, it rarely lowers only the pain.

It gets harder for you to find joy in things, the taste of food can change, you stop wanting things and sometimes it’s hard to laugh or feel affection. All the things, basically. That’s why numbness can be so alarming. You’re not only having trouble experiencing the grief, you may also feel like you can’t even reach yourself .

This is part of what I mean when I say Grief Doesn’t Get Smaller. You Get Larger . Your capacity can expand, but numbness may be how your body protects it when the experience: your loss, your grief, is still too much to take in all at once.

Why you can’t argue your way out of it

Numbness lives in the body, so thinking harder about it usually doesn’t impact it at all. You can’t shame yourself into feeling, and forcing a cry doesn’t necessarily make it a release.

Pressure can even cause your body to double-down on the protection because your body experiences it as one more demand. What helps is usually the opposite: safety, slowness and small doses of sensation. The invitation isn’t to drag yourself back into trying to feel everything. Girl, that’s likely why your body dimmed the lights in the first place. The invitation is to help your system discover that it might be safe to let something in.

When numbness helps and when it overstays

Early in grief, numbness can feel like you’ve been rescued. It can carry you through the funeral, the decisions, paperwork and those first impossible weeks when everybody needs something while you’re still trying to understand what happened.

The dual process model of coping with bereavement describes grief as movement between engaging with the loss and turning toward the work of living. Your attention isn’t meant to stay focused on the pain every minute of every day because sometimes your system needs a break.

Numbness needs more attention however, when it stops feeling like a pause that feels like relief, and becomes your body’s only setting. Months pass, daily life becomes difficult and nothing, including pleasure or connection, seems to help.

That doesn’t make you, your body or your experience “defective.” It may mean the protection hasn’t been given enough safety, time or support to relax yet. If your grief has also been dismissed or ranked against someone else’s, The Hierarchy of Loss can make the numbness even more confusing.

Gentle ways to invite sensation back into your body

Warmth: Take a hot bath, wrap yourself in a warm heavy blanket or hold tea in both hands.
Small, slow sensation: Notice a soft fabric, one good bite or the sun on your arms for two minutes.
Movement (without a goal): Stretch, sway to one song or take a slow walk.
Company (without demands): Be near someone who doesn’t need you to talk, explain, perform or reassure them that you’re okay.
Permission: allow yourself to be numb today. Grief and pleasure both tend to come easier to receive when you’re not placing any demands on yourself.

These are reminders that sensation can return without it being so overwhelming that it swallows you whole.

When it needs more support

Emotional numbness is one symptom clinicians may consider when assessing prolonged grief disorder .

For adults, that diagnosis requires more support. If numbness interferes with your ability to care for yourself or comes with thoughts of not wanting to be here, please contact a licensed mental health professional or a crisis service in your country. Needing support doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. It means you deserve care that meets you where you are.

One thing to notice today

Find one place in your body where you can feel something , even if it’s faint, and just acknowledge it.

Don’t try to change it or turn it into something it’s not; just notice that the sensation is there. This means your body is learning that feeling something may be safe, one small moment at a time.

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to feel nothing after a death?

Yes. Numbness is a common response, especially early in grief, and it doesn’t mean the loss mattered any less.

Does feeling numb mean I didn’t love them?

No. Numbness reflects how much your system is protecting you, not how much you loved or cared.

How long does grief numbness last?

There isn’t one timeline. For some people, it shifts over weeks or months. If it remains intense or disruptive, professional support may help.

Can I make myself feel again?

Forcing yourself usually creates more pressure. Safety, warmth, supportive company and small doses of sensation tend to be more helpful.

Start here: P.U.L.S.E.™ is a short, free resource that helps you notice what your nervous system is doing, one sensation at a time. Explore P.U.L.S.E.™

Next: Why Grief Makes You a Stranger to Your Own Body , on why loss can make your body feel unfamiliar and how to get reacquainted with her again.

This essay is educational and reflects a somatic coaching practice. It isn’t psychotherapy, medical advice or a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.

Your Body Knew Before You Did

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:25:39 GMT

Your body doesn't wait for your mind to understand a loss before it starts responding to it.

Your breathing changes, sleep habits get weird, your appetite can change or disappear completely. Your chest can feel heavy, and ordinary things start requiring more energy than they should.

This happens because your body registers rupture faster than language can explain it. The physical response happens first, and understanding comes along later.

Why did my body react before I understood what happened?

Most women can tell me exactly where they were when they received the news, but many of them can't tell me what they felt it that moment. What they remember is physical like my legs gave out, my hands were freezing, I couldn't hear properly, it felt like the room moved far away, or I felt sick to my stomach. Sometimes I hear “I was completely calm. I just stood there arranging things on the counter.” The emotional part comes later, sometimes much later, and by then everybody else has stopped asking how you are.

The delay sometimes confuses women because we expect grief to happen a certain way. When it doesn't, you start wondering whether you cared enough, whether you're in denial or whether something is wrong with you.

It doesn't mean any of those things. It means your grief registered in your body first, which is exactly what’s supposed to do based on our design.

What's actually happening inside your body

The first response is chemical

Significant loss isn't only an emotional event, it's physiological.

In the acute period after a loss, measurable things can change inside your body. Stress hormones rise and may stay elevated longer than they would after you have a bad day. Your sleep can become disrupted, which isn't the same as simply not sleeping. You can be in bed for eight hours and still get very little of the deep, restorative rest your body needs.

Cardiovascular and immune function can shift too. Researchers have documented changes in blood pressure, heart rate, inflammation and immune response following major loss. That's why bereavement is studied as something that happens to the entire body, not only the mind.

None of this requires you to understand what happened first. Your body responds whether you've found the words or not.

The next response is protective

After the immediate shock, your body may start reducing exposure.

Your breathing stays shallow because a full breath moves your chest, and moving your chest can move whatever is sitting there. Appetite lessens because digestion requires energy and your system is prioritizing your survival. You’re getting less sleep because a body thats sensing danger doesn't fully relax into rest.

Your range even starts to narrow. Sounds can feel louder, light can feel brighter than usual and “people-ling” can feel like too much.

This is your body’s way of saying, “We already have a whole lot going on in here, so we're cutting down on all the extra stimulation.”

Honestly, it’s fair because the body is extremely protective. The problem comes when a response designed to help you survive becomes the way you live long after the experience.

Why you couldn't read your own signals

The part most people don’t talk much about is that you have a sense called interoception , which is your ability to notice what's happening inside your body. Things like hunger, thirst, temperature, your heartbeat, tension in your jaw and that physical feeling that you experience before you have language to describe the emotion.

It's how you recognize that you're anxious before you've finished thinking the anxious thought. It's how you know you need food, rest or distance from the person who walked into the room with an energy you ain't got time for.

After loss though, you don't have the same mental access to those signals. That's why women say things like, I don't know what I'm feeling, or realize they've been holding their breath all day only after somebody says take a deep breath with me.

So now two things are happening at once: your body is producing an enormous amount of information, while your ability to receive and interpret that information has diminished. Does that make sense?

It’s like the response is loud, but your ability to understand the response is quiet.

What this can look like during an ordinary week

Women usually describe some of the same physical experiences across completely different kinds of losses. The experience happening in their chest is a big one. It can feel like a weight, a band or something that restricts deep breathing and won’t release.

Then there's intense exhaustion. I never felt exhaustion the way I felt it when I was grieving. You sleep for nine hours, wake up tired and everybody keeps telling you to “get some rest,” as if you haven't been trying. And all you can think is, the rest is not currently resting.

You may even notice tension in your jaw, stomach or lower back. You might get sick more often, catch everything going around or be easily startled by things that never bothered you before.

Why understanding doesn't automatically change your body

This is the part that frustrates high-achieving women the most. You can understand your loss completely, and you still experience all of these physical changes.

Understanding and physiology are different systems that respond differently to grief. Insight lives in one place, and the held breath exists in another place. Your body doesn't automatically reset itself because your mind finally has an explanation of what’s going on.

That's how someone can spend years talking about their grief and still consistently brace themselves (waiting for the other shoe to drop) as she did in the beginning. She's better informed, but her body is still preparing for impact.

This is also why my work moves through the body first instead of trying to think its way out of it.

What can help your body begin to soften

Small, ordinary and repeated actions - nothing dramatic.

Let your exhale last a little longer

You don't need an elaborate breathwork technique. Breathe in for however long feels comfortable, then let the breath out a little more slowly. Repeat that a few times without forcing yourself to take an enormous breath. A longer exhale can help signal your nervous system to settle, and it can happen quickly… you may notice a change within a minute or two.

Give your eyes somewhere to land

Look slowly around the room and softly gaze at a few objects for several seconds each. Notice their color, shape and distance from you. This kind of orienting gives your body current information to take in. Sure, the terrible thing happened, but it isn't happening in this room at this moment. Sometimes your nervous system needs help understanding the difference.

Move something

Walk to the end of the street, shake out your hands, roll your shoulders backward, sway from side to side, or do some deep stretches like hip openers (my favorite thing to do when I’m experiencing intense grief). Movement gives some of that activation happening in your body somewhere else to go.

Add warmth and weight

Wrap your hands around a warm mug, let warm water run over them or place one hand gently on your sternum. Warmth, pressure and steady contact can offer useful sensory information to your body during a time that its ability to receive has been reduced.

Practice before you're in crisis

These tools tend to be more useful as regular communication with your body than as an emergency rescue. Ten seconds a few times throughout the day may do more than demanding an extended period of time when it’s urgent. The goal is to help your body experience small moments of safety often enough that it doesn't have to work quite so hard.

When physical symptoms need medical attention

I want to be direct here because we can’t blame every physical symptom on grief and call it a day. Some symptoms really do need medical attention.

New or severe chest pain, pressure or tightness, especially when it comes with shortness of breath, nausea, sweating, fainting or pain that travels into the arm, back, neck or jaw, requires emergency medical care. Please don't sit at home trying to decide whether it's your heart or your grief.

Intense emotional stress can trigger a genuine cardiac event sometimes called stress cardiomyopathy, and its symptoms can resemble a heart attack. Let a medical professional make that distinction.

Unexplained weight loss, persistent fever, significant changes in breathing, fainting or symptoms that continue worsening instead of fluctuating also deserve a doctor's attention. If you aren't functioning, you're relying on substances to sleep or cope, or you're having thoughts of harming yourself, contact a licensed mental health professional or crisis service in your area today.

Somatic work belongs beside appropriate medical and clinical care, never instead of it. You should never have to choose.

One thing to notice today

Set a timer once today for thirty seconds and ask yourself one question:

What is my body doing right now?

Not “How do I feel?” That question goes straight to your mind, and it’s important that you ask what your body it’s doing. Do a body scan from the top of your head to your jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach, hands and breath. Notice temperature, pressure, tightness, movement or the absence of sensation.

And you don't have to change anything. The assignment is simply to notice, because the absence of sensation starts to restore itself the same way any other sense does: by using it. You may even discover something you didn't realize was there.

Frequently asked questions

Can grief cause physical symptoms?

Yes. Significant loss can be followed by measurable physiological changes, including elevated stress hormones, disrupted sleep, changes in cardiovascular and immune function, appetite changes, exhaustion and muscle tension. Your body can begin responding before you've emotionally processed or fully understood what happened.

Why do I feel numb instead of sad?

Numbness is often a protective response, not an absence of feeling. When your system is managing something so big, it may “turn down” incoming sensation to reduce the amount it has to process. Unfortunately, the body doesn't always lower only the painful sensations. Pleasure, desire and connection can become quieter too.

How long do the physical symptoms of grief last?

There's no universal timeline. Many people experience the strongest physical effects during the first weeks or months, with symptoms becoming less constant over time rather than disappearing predictably. Any symptom that's severe, worsening or interfering with your ability to function deserves medical evaluation, regardless of how recently the loss occurred.

Start here: P.U.L.S.E. ™ is a short, free resource for noticing what your nervous system actually needs.

Next: “The Intelligence of Numbness,” on what your body may be protecting when it stops letting you feel and why you can't negotiate with a system you've mistaken for a malfunction.

This essay is educational and reflects a somatic coaching practice. It isn't psychotherapy, medical advice or a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.

Identity Is the Second Loss

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:34:51 GMT

Loss takes what you had, but it can also take who you were.

That second loss doesn’t always get acknowledged, so it tends to show up as confusion instead of grief. You start to realize that you don't know what you like anymore. You can't tell whether you've become more private or simply stopped wanting to be around people. You don't know who you are without the role you held, the routines you followed or the future you assumed was waiting for you.

And because nobody warned you that grief could do all of that, you start wondering whether you're falling apart.

You're not. You lost two things, but only one of them got acknowledged.

Who am I now that this happened?

Women don't usually come to me saying, “I'm grieving an identity disruption.” They say they feel like they don’t know themselves anymore. They know what happened, they've talked about it ad nauseum , read about it and can explain it clearly to anybody who asks. Yet a simple question like What do you want for dinner? feels oddly difficult to answer.

Then comes the part I also hear all the time:

“I don't know who I am anymore, which is ridiculous because I'm still the same person.”

You're not, though, and I mean that gently. Something happened that changed the way you understand yourself, your relationships and possibly the future you thought you were going to have. Expecting that woman to emerge unchanged is asking a whole lot of her.

The first loss and the second

What disappeared

The first loss is the one people are most aware of. Someone close to you died, you got divorced, a pregnancy didn't continue, you lost your job, got a diagnosis, or a friendship quietly stopped.

Those losses have a name. Sometimes they come with paperwork, and occasionally even get a ceremony.

Who disappeared with it

The second loss is the woman who existed in relation to what ended.

You weren't simply a person who had a marriage. You were a wife, and that identity came with a whole structure: how your mornings went, who you texted when something happened, what you assumed about the next twenty years and who you were in a room when your partner was in it with you.

You weren't simply pregnant. You were becoming somebody's mother, and that becoming had already started shaping the way you moved through your day and imagined your future.

You weren't just employed. You were the person everybody called when something broke, and being needed that way may have become part of how you knew yourself. When some things go however, she can go with it and it’s often not acknowledged by others.

This isn't a personal failing

I want to be clear here because too many women assume this part is evidence that they're not grieving well.

Identity disruption is a recognized part of intense grief. When prolonged grief disorder was added as a diagnosis, one of the symptoms researchers included was a feeling that part of oneself had died. That language came from bereaved people describing the same experience, over and over.

So when you say it feels like a piece of you is missing you're describing something grief research has documented well enough to include in diagnostic criteria.

What you're experiencing has a name. It just may not be the name you’re aware of.

Where identity loss hides

Identity loss tends to hide inside three ordinary parts of your life.

Roles

Some roles disappear, while others come out of nowhere. A woman loses her mother and suddenly becomes the person the entire family calls. Nobody sat her down, discussed the “job description" or asked whether she wanted it. The role just transferred, maybe because she’s the oldest sibling or the most responsible.

Now she's grieving her mother while also becoming the family historian, emotional support person, therapist, mediator, holiday organizer and information keeper. That's a lot of identity rearrangement happening while people are usually asking whether she's “doing okay.”

Routines

Who you are is largely made up of what you do on regular days.

When loss takes you out on a regular day, the “self” you’ve built around them can start to feel shaky. That's one reason the ordinary weeks sometimes feel harder than the anniversaries. On the anniversary, you expect your emotions to feel close to the surface. On a random Tuesday, you grab your phone, drive the familiar route or notice that nobody needs you to do the thing you've done for years.

And there you are… unsure of what to do.

Reflections

This one is real and hit me especially hard when my daddy died: some part of who you were existed inside another person's attention... phhhew. They knew your stories, laughed at the specific way you told them and remembered who you were at twenty-six.

They reflected a version of you back to yourself that nobody else could.

When they're gone, that reflection disappears too. That may be the loneliest part of identity loss, and it's also the part women don’t often talk about. You aren't only missing them. You're missing who you got to be with them.

Why “getting back to yourself” is the wrong assignment

People who love you will often say, “You'll find your way back to yourself.”

I understand what they mean, but there's one tiny problem: there is no “back.” The woman you were before the loss didn't know what you know now. She hadn't carried this, survived it or learned what you learned at three in the morning about what you're capable of living through. You can't return to her exactly as she was. Honestly, you might not even like all of the things she liked anymore.

Grief researchers describe this process as meaning reconstruction . The work isn't about retrieving your previous self. It's about building a "self" that can account for what happened - construction, not retrieval, and that distinction changes everything.

If the goal is to go back, every day that you don't feel like your old self starts to become evidence that you're failing. If the goal is to build, those same days are simply part of construction, and construction takes time, materials and a whole lot of noticing.

What identity is actually made of

This is where identity connects to everything else I write about.

Research on non-death losses repeatedly points to role centrality , which is how much of a person's identity was connected to the role or relationship that ended. The more central it was, the more disorienting its loss may be. That's why the end of a career can dismantle a woman more than the death of a relative she barely knew.

That doesn't mean her career mattered “more”; it means more of her identity was connected or attached to it. Identity isn't something fixed that you either have or lose. It's how you arrange your attention, time, desire, relationship, responsibility and repetition. When one of the load-bearing pieces is removed, the arrangement has to change.

That's just architecture. And if your identity was built through what you repeatedly experienced, valued and chose, it can be rebuilt through those things too.

How do you rebuild your identity after loss?

Well, you can't think your way into a self. Trust me, I’ve tried it. Identity is built through repeated experience, so that's where you begin.

Start with preference, not purpose

Purpose is enormous, and she can wait a minute.

Preference is smaller and more accessible. Do you want the window open or closed? Something salty or sweet? Silence or music? Company or ten uninterrupted minutes where nothing is expected of you? Every preference you notice gives you one piece of information about who you are now.

Let your answers be different

This is where a lot of women get stuck. You used to love crowded restaurants, and now they exhaust you, so you assume something is wrong. You used to be everybody's person, and now you want relationships that don't require constant access to you.

Maybe nothing is wrong. You may simply be a different woman with a different nervous system, new limits and preferences that make more sense for the life you're living now. You're allowed to stop using your former self in comparison to who you are now.

Follow what your body says yes to

This is why pleasure isn't a luxury in this work.

Your ability to receive sensation is one of the most honest instruments you have for recognizing who you're becoming. Your mind can keep reminding you of your old life, your old routines or your old version of success. Your body is also less interested in keeping up appearances.

Your desires tend to tell the truth before your mind catches up to them. Pay attention to what allows you to soften, interests you, pulls you closer or makes you curious. Those are the responses that give information about how your loss changed you.

Give the current “you” somewhere to be witnessed

Identity is partly social and it always has been.

You need at least one place where you don't have to perform as the woman you used to be because everyone is more comfortable with her. One person who is willing to know the current you can do more than a month of journaling about who you think you should become.

Let it take the time it takes

You're not behind and there’s no schedule. Some days you'll recognize yourself. Other days you'll feel like three different women trying to make a decision at the grocery store. That's still part of it.

When it may be more than identity disruption

Some of what I've described can overlap with depression, and that distinction matters because the support you require may be different.

If you've felt no sense of yourself for months, you're struggling to work, maintain relationships or care for yourself, or you’re experiencing confusion with persistent hopelessness, please speak with a licensed mental health professional. Intense grief following a death that causes significant impairment may meet the criteria for grief disorder, and a licensed professional can provide the support you need.

If you're having thoughts of harming yourself, contact a licensed clinician or crisis service in your area today. Somatic and capacity work can support you alongside clinical care, but they aren't substitutes for it.

One thing to notice today

Answer one question honestly:

What do I want in the next hour?

Not what you should want, what would be productive or what a “better” version of you would choose. Just think about the next hour. It could be silence, somebody's voice, cold water, a closed door, a blanket, twenty minutes outside or a decadent dessert.

If nothing comes, that's okay and it’s still information because it tells you where your capacity currently sits. Every time you notice a preference and honor it, you're introducing yourself to the woman you're becoming.

Frequently asked questions

Why don't I know who I am after a loss?

Because loss can remove more than a person, relationship or role. It can also change the version of you that existed in relation to your loss, including your routines, responsibilities, expectations and the way you were reflected back by other people. Identity disruption is a well-documented part of intense grief, not proof that something is wrong with you.

Will I ever feel like myself again?

Many women do feel like themselves again, but it may be a revised self rather than an exact return to the woman they were before. You've now experienced something she hadn't, and that can change your preferences, tolerance, priorities and desires. Expecting a rebuild is often much more expected than demanding a return.

Is identity loss normal after divorce or job loss too?

Yes. Research comparing bereaved, divorced and unemployed adults found that the centrality of the lost role helped explain the severity of grief across all three groups. Meaning, the more of your identity was connected to what ended, the more disruption you may experience afterward.

Start here: P.U.L.S.E. ™ is my short, free resource for noticing what your nervous system actually needs.

Next: Your Body Knew Before You Did , on why you may experience physical symptoms before you fully understand what happened and what it reveals about where grief lives in your body.

This essay is educational and reflects a somatic coaching practice. It isn't psychotherapy, medical advice or a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.

The Hierarchy of Loss Is Real

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:15:29 GMT

Grief isn't identical across every kind of loss.

The severity and duration can differ, but they aren't predicted particularly well by the category or type of loss either. Your body doesn't pull out a little grief-ranking chart we've all somehow inherited and say, Death? Devastating. Divorce? Very unfortunate. Career loss? Girl, you'll find another job.

It responds to something else entirely.

The body responds to three things: how deep the attachment ran, how little warning there was, and whether anyone witnessed the loss.

Depth. Suddenness. Witness.

None of those reliably follow the ranking we were given, which means some of the losses we're told should devastate us don't and others that barely register to the people around us can rearrange our entire lives. There is a hierarchy of loss. I just don't think we've been measuring the right things.

Is grief the same for all types of loss?

There are two standard answers to this question, and personally, I don't think either one gets it right.

The first is the ranking most of us absorbed or just accepted. Death sits at the top, and underneath it is a descending order of losses that receive progressively less leave, less ritual, less support and, eventually, less patience. Death of a loved one. Divorce. Career loss. Estrangement. Diagnosis. Infertility. Friendship loss. The future you expected. The version of yourself you were before something happened to you.

Most people know exactly where their loss sits on that ladder because of how the world responds. Sometimes it's explicit. More often, it's revealed by what doesn't happen, like nobody calls, brings food or asks about it three months later. There's no ceremony, bereavement leave and no culturally approved sentence that communicates, Something significant happened to me and I'm not okay yet.

Then there's the second answer, which emerged as a compassionate correction to the first: all loss is equal. Grief is grief. The body doesn't differentiate.

I understand the intention behind that, and I appreciate it. Nobody wants to become the grief police, standing around deciding whose devastation deserves a seven and whose only qualifies for a four, but saying every loss affects us equally isn't accurate either.

Grief responses vary enormously in severity and duration. Pretending that it doesn't may sound inclusive, but it doesn't hold up well when we look at either the research or actual human experience. The truth is more interesting than either answer.

There is a hierarchy. It just isn't built out of categories.

What your body is actually measuring

If category doesn't reliably predict how deeply a loss affects us, what does?

Three variables consistently help explain the difference: depth, suddenness and witness. And once you start looking at grief through those three variables, some experiences that previously seemed confusing start making a whole lot more sense.

Depth

Depth is about how structurally central the attachment, relationship or role was to your sense of self.

This variable has strong support in grief research. In bereavement studies, the closeness of a relationship is one of the strongest predictors of prolonged grief. Losing a child or partner, for example, carries substantially greater risk than losing someone with whom you had a more distant relationship, right?

In research involving non-death losses, a similar idea appears as role centrality : how much of your identity was organized around the role or thing that ended. That distinction matters because human attachment doesn't arrange itself according to social titles. Your career that you spent twenty-five years building can affect you more deeply than the death of a relative you saw twice a year. A friendship can be more structurally important than a blood relationship, and a marriage ending can dismantle more of your identity than a death in your extended family.

That doesn't mean the career, friendship or marriage mattered "more" according to some cosmic system. It means more of you was organized around it, if that makes sense . That's what the body is responding to. And honestly, the body has never been really interested in what looks appropriate from the outside.

Suddenness

The second variable is suddenness: Did your system have any opportunity to prepare for what happened?

Unexpectedness appears repeatedly in grief research as an independent predictor of prolonged grief. "Independent" matters here because it means suddenness contributes its own effect apart from how close you were to the person or how central the loss was to your identity.

What's especially important is that suddenness isn't determined entirely by the objective circumstances. It's also subjective, meaning a person can be sick for years and their death can still feel sudden to someone who wasn't emotionally prepared for it (I learned this when my daddy died in 2016). A marriage can be struggling for a decade and one person can still be completely blindsided when the other says they're leaving.

Technically knowing something could happen and your body being prepared for it aren't the same thing. If they were, we'd all respond a whole lot better to change.

Witness

The third variable is witness : whether what happened was seen, named, acknowledged and treated as something real by other people. Grief researchers have especially useful language for this.

Kenneth Doka coined the term ' disenfranchised grief to describe grief that isn't socially recognized, openly acknowledged or adequately supported.'

Pauline Boss's work on ' ambiguous loss describes losses where there's often no clean ending, certainty or ritual. The person may still be physically present but psychologically changed.' A relationship may be over without feeling finished, or someone may be absent without the kind of closure we identify with or acknowledge.

Witness is probably the variable that most obviously refuses to follow category. Some deaths receive enormous witness and some receive very little. Meanwhile, an enormous amount of non-death loss receives almost none. You can lose your marriage, fertility, career, health, friendship, sense of safety, family structure or the future you'd spent years building toward, and depending on the circumstances, the world may essentially respond with: Wow, that's crazy.

Then, everybody goes back to work. Your body, however, is still carrying what happened.

What the research shows

One of the most useful studies for understanding this compared three groups of people: those who'd been bereaved, those who'd experienced divorce and those who'd lost their jobs.

A subset of people in every group showed symptoms of prolonged grief. Not just sadness or stress looking like grief, but grief appeared as something statistically distinct from major depression and post-traumatic stress.

What helped explain differences in severity across the groups wasn't which category someone belonged to. One important factor was how central the lost role had been to that person's identity. If you only remembered one piece of research from this entire essay, I'd want it to be that. Because it puts the divorced woman, the bereaved woman and the woman who lost the career she'd built her life around into the same category and doesn't pretend their experiences are identical.

It gives us a much more useful question than What did you lose? It asks: How much of you was built around what you lost?

That's a very different assessment and in my experience, it's often the one that finally makes a woman's grief make sense to her.

Why the loss nobody acknowledged can hurt more

This is where the three variables become especially important, because a socially recognized loss often comes with something many other losses don't: infrastructure.

People come, someone organizes a meal train, there may be flowers, phone calls, cards and/or a ceremony. Your employer might have a policy (however inadequate... story for another day haha). There are culturally understood things people know to say, and there's usually at least some period of time when nobody expects you to act completely normal.

Let’s be clear, none of that removes the grief, but all of those things provide witness . They're repeated external confirmations that something real happened, it mattered, and that your response to it makes sense. Now compare that with a loss the culture doesn't recognize.

Ain’t no leave, ritual, meal train, or card section at Hallmark for ' Sorry the future you spent ten years imagining just disappeared.'

And on top of carrying the loss itself, you may take on a second job you ain't apply for: continually proving to yourself that there's something worth grieving in the first place.

And that second one is expensive . It’s also rarely on anyone's radar when they assess how you're doing. So when a woman tells me the end of her marriage hit her harder than her father's death, I don't hear that as some shameful confession. I get curious about the variables.

How central was the marriage to her identity?

How prepared was she for its ending?

How much was she witnessed in her grief?

Maybe she loved her father deeply, but she'd spent twenty years building a home, routines, friendships, businesses and finances, future plans and an entire sense of who she was around a marriage that ended without a single warning. Then, while she was trying to figure out who she is now , everybody around her treated the divorce like an unfortunate administrative change.

Again, depth.

Suddenness.

Witness.

Her body isn't confused, but our hierarchy is.

If your loss was never recognized

If you've been grieving a loss that no one seemed to understand, there are three things I want you to know.

Your body was never consulted about the ranking system. It responded to what actually happened: the depth of your attachment, the absence of warning and the amount of witness available to you afterward. Your response is information about what the experience cost you. That distinction is important because we get real good at using other people's reactions as evidence against our own bodies. Tell me I'm lying, sis! We tell ourselves all kinds of lies like:

Maybe I'm overreacting.

Other people have been through worse.

I should be over this.

Meanwhile, your nervous system is like, Ma'am, I have been submitting documentation for eighteen months.

Believe the data because your body knows.

The absence of witness is itself a burden. When your loss isn't acknowledged, you don't just carry the grief. You may also carry isolation, self-doubt and the exhausting work of minimizing your experience enough to make everyone else comfortable. And that's exhausting AH!

That's why unacknowledged grief can linger in ways that surprise people.

And finally, you can supply witness deliberately. Of the three variables, witness is the one you can still directly act on after the loss has occurred. You can't make the attachment less deep and unfortunately, we can't go back and give ourselves more warning, but we can decide that what happened will no longer remain unnamed.

That might look like creating a ritual, telling one trusted person the whole story and explicitly asking them to not minimize it, and to sit with you. It might mean writing down what happened in full without editing it into something more socially acceptable.

Maybe you mark the date.

Maybe you name what ended.

Maybe you acknowledge what that ending cost you.

I'm not interested in pretending this retroactively provides the support you should’ve received, but there's something powerful about no longer requiring your loss to remain invisible simply because other people fail to see it. Sometimes witness begins with someone else saying, I see what happened.

Sometimes it begins with you.

When to seek more support

Intense grief from any kind of loss deserves attention when it significantly interferes with your ability to function.

If intense grief following a death has persisted beyond a year and substantially affects your ability to work, maintain relationships or care for yourself, it may meet criteria for prolonged grief disorder, which is treatable. It's also important to know that the current diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief disorder are framed around bereavement following a death. If your loss wasn't a death, you may recognize parts of your experience in that description without meeting the "formal" diagnostic definition.

As I mentioned, that's a limitation of the classification system, itself. It doesn't mean the distress you're experiencing isn't real or doesn't deserve the right support. A good clinician should treat the person and experience in front of them, period. Full stop.

If you're depressed, unable to function, using substances to cope or sleep, or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact a licensed mental health professional or crisis service where you live.

Somatic and capacity work can support you alongside clinical care, but they aren't replacements for it.

Frequently asked questions

Can you grieve something that isn't a death?

Yes. Grief following non-death losses has been studied quite extensively. Research comparing bereaved, divorced and unemployed adults found symptoms of prolonged grief across all three groups, with grief appearing as distinct from depression and post-traumatic stress. Divorce, job loss, estrangement, diagnosis, infertility and the loss of an identity or expected future can all produce significant grief responses.

Is my loss valid if nobody treated it as serious?

The social response to your loss and your body's response aren't the same thing. A loss can receive very little acknowledgment from other people and still deeply affect your identity, nervous system and daily life. In fact, the absence of witness can add another burden because you're carrying both the loss and the experience of having your loss go unrecognized.

Why did a “smaller” loss hit me harder than a “bigger” one?

Often, the answer is some combination of depth, suddenness and witness . The loss that looked "smaller" from the outside may have been more central to your identity, happened with less warning or received less acknowledgement and support. Sometimes all three are true at the same time.

The size of a loss from the outside doesn't tell us what it'll cost to carry from the inside, and maybe that's the hierarchy we should've been using all along.

Not: What did you lose?

But: How deeply were you attached? How prepared were you for it to end? And who witnessed what happened to you?

Those questions don't rank grief.

They help us understand it… which I believe is the whole point.

Keep reading: Check out the Library section of this site for more research, reading lists and practices, all free.

Also today: Grief Doesn't Get Smaller. You Get Larger and I Focused So Much on My Healing That I Forgot to Live , both can be found in the Essays .

This essay is educational and reflects a somatic coaching practice. It isn't psychotherapy, medical advice or a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.

Grief Doesn't Get Smaller. You Get Larger.

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:13:32 GMT

Grief doesn't shrink with time. What changes is the size of your life around it.

Early in grief, your loss can occupy nearly everything. Later, it may only occupy a smaller proportion of a life that's become larger again. This is one reason telling someone "it gets better" doesn't feel like a possibility when grief still hits with the same force. And I think we've spent far too much time trying to shrink the wrong thing.

Does grief get smaller over time?

Most people are told that it will. Time heals, the pain fades, it gets easier.

Then years pass, a wave hits with almost the same intensity, and people quietly start wondering whether they've failed grief.

Shouldn't I be over this by now?

Why does this still hurt?

What is wrong with me?

Maybe nothing. Maybe the promise was wrong.

Ask someone who experienced a significant loss five years ago and you'll often hear some version of, it's not smaller. It's just not everywhere anymore. You may experience waves of emotion less frequently, they may leave faster, and you may know what they are when they arrive, but when grief wells up it can still feel remarkably similar in size. What changed wasn't necessarily the grief.

You just developed more room around it.

That distinction is the foundation of what I call Capacity Theory .

The contraction nobody talks about

Before we talk about expansion, we need to name what actually gets smaller after loss... It's your life. That contraction tends to happen across three layers.

In your body

The first contraction is physiological, and it can happen quickly. In your chest, your breath, sleep or appetite, your tolerance for stimulation shifts, and the range of sensation your body is willing to receive narrows toward whatever feels manageable at that time.

This is your body’s way of protecting you.

Your nervous system is essentially saying, We already got a lot going on here, so we're going to reduce incoming traffic for a while.

Honestly? Fair. Your body is sooo intelligent. The issue is what happens when a temporary protective strategy quietly becomes second nature.

In your behavior

The second contraction starts showing up in your choices, and because the changes happen gradually, they're easy to miss. You decline an invitation you ordinarily would've accepted. You stop trying new restaurants, take the familiar route, stop reaching out or stop starting things. You choose predictability because predictability asks less of your system.

And let’s just be real, grief and trauma are so uncertain and dysregulating that you start to think a little predictability ain’t never hurt nobody. Each decision makes sense on its own, and that's what makes contraction sneaky.

No single choice looks like, Today I've decided to make my life smaller.

Of course not. It's more like, I don't feel like going tonight. Then again next week, and the week after that, until eighteen months later what began as protection has started masquerading as personality.

In the size of your life

Eventually, all those smaller choices add up. By the time contraction becomes visible, people may describe it as who you are now.

"She's more private."

"She keeps to herself."

"She doesn't really do much anymore."

Or my personal favorite: "She's handling it so well."

That one deserves some attention because a woman whose grief has made her quieter, less demanding and more self-contained often gets praised for being strong. And why wouldn't she? Her grief is convenient because it asks so little of anyone around her.

We have to be willing to question a culture that celebrates grieving women most when their grief becomes invisible. Your small life can look incredibly well-managed from the outside, but that doesn't mean it feels like living from the inside.

The model that got it half right

The idea that grief remains while life expands around it isn't new. In the mid-1990s, grief counselor Lois Tonkin described a model inspired by a bereaved mother who illustrated her grief as remaining the same size while her life grew around it. It's a powerful image, and I think it gets something profoundly right: grief doesn't necessarily shrink, but life can expand.

When I encountered that model, though, the chemist in me immediately had another question. Okay, but how ?

"Your life gets bigger" describes a particular outcome, it doesn't explain the mechanism. Does expansion happen because enough time passes? Because you talk about the loss? Because you process it? Because one morning life apparently decides to add an extension onto itself? What variable actually changes?

That question matters because if we can't identify the variable, we can't intentionally work with it.

That gap is where Capacity Theory begins.

What capacity actually means

Here's the definition I use: Capacity is the amount of experience one's body can currently receive and hold.

Not tolerate or survive. Receive and hold.

Capacity isn't resilience; resilience describes your ability to withstand and adapt. Capacity also isn't recovery because recovery suggests returning to a prior state, and after most losses, there is no prior state to return to. You aren't necessarily going backward.

Capacity is a present-tense measurement of your range. How much sensation can you receive? How much connection, curiosity, rest, desire, pleasure, uncertainty and possibility can your system currently allow?

Bacially: How much life can your body let in right now without needing to contract against it?

That's capacity. Three things make it particularly important in grief.

Capacity is observable

No, I'm not suggesting putting you in a lab, though given my background, don't tempt me ( LOL !). Capacity isn't measured by an instrument, but it can be observed honestly. What do you currently want? What can you taste? What do you look forward to? What sensations register? What are you willing to say yes to? What still moves you?

Ask a woman those questions directly and you can learn a lot about the size of her current world.

Capacity is trainable

This is where things get interesting. You can't “effort” your way out of grief. You can't achieve your way out, and you can't perfectly journal your way into never missing someone again. Grief doesn't care about your productivity.

Capacity, however, responds to practice. That distinction changes the assignment.

Maybe the goal isn't How do I make the grief disappear?

Maybe it's How do I expand my ability to hold life alongside it?

Now we've got something we can actually work with.

Capacity is the variable we've been missing

When someone says she's "doing better" after grief, what has actually changed? In almost all cases I've observed, her loss still matters, she still misses them, the memory still hurts, and certain dates still hit hard. But she can also make plans, laugh, travel, create, rest, desire, love, be curious and imagine a future.

Her grief may not have changed nearly as much as her capacity did . If we name the wrong variable, we'll keep trying to solve the wrong problem, and ain’t nobody got time to repeatedly run an experiment while measuring for the wrong thing.

Why healing practices often don't expand capacity

This is the problem I ran into personally. Most support offered to grieving people is designed to help reduce distress, process the story, regulate the nervous system, understand triggers, manage anxiety or develop coping skills. These are legitimate goals, and they matter, but those aren't the same as expansion. You can become exceptionally skilled at managing distress inside a life that remains very small.

Ask me how I know.

I spent years studying grief, trauma, nervous system regulation and embodiment. I had tools, language, education (formal and informal) certifications, experience (personal and professional) and insight. Sis, I can regulate with the best of them! And still, at one point, I couldn't answer a simple question about what I was enjoying in my life. That's when the flaw in my hypothesis started becoming obvious.

I'd been measuring my ability to manage pain instead of my ability to receive life. Those aren't the same thing. You can spend four years learning to manage distress and emerge well-regulated, well-informed, well-moisturized, well-hydrated and still living a very small life. That's the part I'm not exploring. Grief research has also shown that grieving naturally involves movement between loss-oriented experiences and restoration-oriented living. If all our practices point toward the loss, we may be addressing only one side of the process.

Processing matters, but so does participation.

How to rebuild your capacity

Expansion is much more ordinary than people expect. There usually isn't one enormous breakthrough where your whole life blows open and violins start playing in the background. Thank God, because who has the energy? Capacity expands through repeated experiences of receiving sensation and discovering, i t’s safe to let this in .

Start where your capacity actually is

Don't begin where it used to be, where your family thinks it should be or where Instagram says it should be. Begin where it is today.

If taking a walk feels impossible, stand in the doorway. If dinner with friends feels like too much, sit outside for five minutes. If joy feels crazy to even think about, don't start with joy. Start with warmth. Expansion meets you where you actually are.

Use sensation, not activity

Activities come loaded with memory and expectation. Sensation is simpler. Temperature, texture, weight, sound, taste, light and movement all give your body something it can receive without requiring you to recreate your old life. That's important because grief can change your identity. The woman you're becoming may enjoy things the woman before the loss never did. You're not necessarily failing to return to yourself. You might just be meeting yourself again.

Keep it short enough to succeed

Thirty seconds of genuine receiving can be more useful than an hour of performed enjoyment because your body knows the difference. You can take yourself to brunch, order the cute little mimosa flight, smile for an IG picture and be completely absent for the entire experience. That’s what I call attendance, not pleasure. Capacity grows through receiving, and sometimes thirty seconds counts more.

Repeat before you increase

We're accustomed to believing transformation requires intensity, but the nervous system often prefers repetition. A small experience, received safely, again and again, until what once required effort becomes part of your available range. Expansion isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it's so ordinary it’s almost offensive. Then, one day you realize your life contains something it didn't contain six months ago.

Track what your body says yes to

Ask yourself: What are three things my body is saying ‘yes’ to today? Not what you should enjoy and not what you enjoyed before you experienced loss. Today. Maybe you have three, maybe one, maybe none, and none is still information. This is a measurement, not a test, and measurements tell us where we're beginning.

When contraction is something more

Some of what I've described can overlap with depression, and distinguishing between them matters. If nothing feels pleasurable for weeks or longer, you can't work, maintain relationships or care for yourself, or your functioning has significantly declined, you should reach out to a licensed mental health professional. Similarly, intense grief that persists beyond a year and causes significant impairment may meet criteria for prolonged grief disorder, which is a recognized and treatable condition.

If you're having thoughts of harming yourself, contact a licensed clinician or crisis service in your area immediately.

Capacity work belongs alongside appropriate clinical care, never instead of it.

Frequently asked questions

Does grief ever go away?

Grief may change over time, but many people don't experience it as simply disappearing. Instead, waves of grief may occur less often or pass more quickly while still feeling powerful when they show up. What often changes most is the amount of life surrounding the grief.

What does it mean that my life feels smaller since the loss?

Loss can create contraction across the body, behavior and everyday life. You may tolerate less stimulation, withdraw socially, avoid novelty or stop wanting things you once enjoyed. These responses can begin as protection but become patterns over time. A smaller life after loss doesn't have to become a permanent one, though.

How long does it take to expand capacity?

There's no universal timeline for expanding capacity, and anyone promising one is guessing. Capacity is individual and can change based on the nature of the loss, your nervous system, available support and your current circumstances. What matters more than a deadline is consistent practice because, unlike grief itself, capacity gives us something we can actively expand.

That's why I believe we've been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, When will my grief finally get smaller? I'm much more interested in asking, How much more life can I learn to hold alongside it? Your grief doesn't have to disappear for you to live fully again, nor should you want it to because how long would that take if it’s possible? There can be sorrow here and pleasure, memory and desire, love for what was and curiosity about what's coming. Maybe the goal was never to become the woman you were before grief. Maybe it's to expand into the woman capable of carrying what happened without making what happened the boundary of her life.

Grief doesn't have to get smaller.

You get to become larger.

Also explore: Pleasure Is Not the Opposite of Grief

Coming soon: The Hierarchy of Loss Is Real. It Isn't the One You Were Given.

This essay is educational and reflects a somatic coaching practice. It isn't psychotherapy, medical advice or a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.

Pleasure Is Not the Opposite of Grief

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:13:51 GMT

Yes, you can experience pleasure while you're still grieving.

Let's get that out of the way first because pleasure and grief aren't opposites. They're separate capacities, and your body can hold both at the same time. Feeling good doesn't mean your grief is ending, it doesn't mean you loved less, and it doesn't mean you're forgetting or betraying whoever or whatever you lost. I need to make that clear because women ask some version of this question all the time.

Is it okay for me to enjoy this?

Should I be laughing already?

Why do I feel guilty when I have a good day?

How can I enjoy my life when they can't?

Underneath all of those questions is another one: Do I still have permission to feel good now that something terrible has happened?

Yes.

But I think the more interesting question is why so many of us believe we need permission in the first place.

Can you feel pleasure while you're still grieving?

Yes, and if that answer makes you flinch a little bit, put a pin in that feeling. It's worth paying attention to.

Most of us inherited an idea of emotion that works something like a dial. Sorrow exists at one end, happiness sits at the other, and there's one little needle with one position at a time.

If that needle starts moving toward pleasure, laughter or joy, we assume it must be moving away from grief, like a pendulum. Under that model, every ounce of pleasure gets subtracted from sorrow.

And whew, grief guilt loves this arrangement because now you aren't simply grieving. You're somehow responsible for continuously demonstrating how much your loss mattered. The model feels intuitive, too. There's just one problem: it's wrong.

Our bodies are far more complex than that.

Where the idea of opposites came from

The “one-feeling-at-a-time” story

Think about the question How are you? We usually answer it with one emotional state: good, sad, fine, angry, tired.

Grief gets absorbed into that same language. Instead of grief being something we carry, it becomes something we're in , and if we're

in grief , culturally we're expected not to be in much of anything else.

Our bodies don't work that way, though.

You can be exhausted and unable to sleep, love someone and be furious with them, and desperately want something while being terrified of getting it. You can miss who you were and love who you're becoming.

Two things can be true at the same time, inside the same body. Sometimes five things are true before breakfast, chile.

So why would grief be the one human experience allowed only one emotional lane?

Suffering as the proof

The second inheritance is heavier.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that continued suffering proves continued love. The deeper the grief, the deeper the love, which can quietly become: If the pain decreases, maybe the love did too. Now, pleasure doesn't simply feel inappropriate. It starts feeling disloyal.

I understand why. Grief is filled with helplessness, and there's so much you can't change. Suffering can begin to feel like one of the few things you can still do for the person, relationship, dream or version of yourself you lost.

If suffering equals love, remaining in pain becomes a way to continue participating in the relationship.

But that's a bad instrument. It doesn't accurately measure love, it has no ceiling, and that bill is due every single day. Your suffering isn't a receipt proving how deeply you loved, so you don't have to remain miserable to remain loyal.

What grief researchers actually found

The research moved beyond this idea decades ago. Culture ( bless her heart ), is taking a little longer to catch up.

One important grief model describes healthy grieving as oscillation . Instead of grief being a straight path where you process and process until one magical day you're finished, people naturally move between being oriented toward the loss and being oriented toward living.

You remember, and then you engage. You ache, and then something makes you laugh. You cry in the car, and then you stop for tacos. Human beings are gloriously inconsistent like that, sis. I know you feel me ( LOL! )!

According to the research, this movement isn't evidence that you're doing grief incorrectly. The movement itself is part of grieving.

Time spent living isn't stolen from your grief, it's actually structural to the process. Another major shift in grief theory challenged the idea that successful grieving requires severing your bond with the person who died. Relationships can continue in altered forms, and love, connection, and memory can all remain, and none of that requires your life to remain frozen at the point of loss.

Put those ideas together and the entire pleasure-versus-grief equation starts falling apart. Your pleasure isn't being subtracted from your love because love isn't a finite quantity you're spending. Your time spent living isn't stolen from grieving because living is part of how grief becomes integrated.

We've been charging people, and especially women, an emotional tax none of us were required to pay.

What pleasure actually is

When I talk about pleasure in grief, I'm not talking about performing happiness. I'm talking about something much more fundamental.

Pleasure is the capacity to receive.

To receive warmth, taste, beauty, sound, texture, connection, curiosity, rest, laughter, joy, touch and desire. Pleasure is a physiological event in which something feels good, nourishing, interesting or satisfying and your body is able to let it register.

Pleasure is not happiness

This distinction matters because happiness is a mood. It's evaluative, meaning it says something about how your life is going. Pleasure doesn't make that claim.

You can be nowhere near happy about your circumstances and still notice that warm water feels good against your skin. You can miss somebody so much and still love the song playing in the restaurant. You can be angry about what happened and still taste some mac and cheese. Your body receiving one pleasant sensation doesn't constitute an official review of your life. That's exactly why pleasure can be available alongside grief even when happiness isn't.

Pleasure doesn't require you to declare, Everything is okay now. Sometimes it simply says, This feels good.

Period.

Pleasure is not escape

This may be the distinction people get wrong most often.

Escape generally reduces sensation. Think about the second glass of wine you didn't really want, the fourth episode playing while you stare through the tv, or scrolling for an hour and barely remembering anything you saw.

Escape turns the volume down and moves you farther away from what you're experiencing.

Pleasure does something different because pleasure increases sensation . It draws you closer. You taste, feel and notice more, and you're usually more present afterward - not less.

What's fascinating is that from the outside, escape and pleasure can look exactly the same. Two women could be on the same sofa, under the same blanket, having what looks like the same Friday night while completely different things are happening inside their bodies.

So instead of judging the activity, ask yourself: Afterward, am I more present or less?

Your body usually knows the answer.

Why this matters specifically for grief

Grief contracts. Your chest tightens, breathing changes, sleep and appetite shift, your tolerance for stimulation narrows, and the range of sensation your body is willing to receive becomes smaller because your system is already managing something huge.

That's protection, and trust me, the system running all of this is intelligent AH .

But protection has consequences because numbness isn't selective.

Your nervous system doesn't have a neat little control panel where it can turn down heartbreak while leaving pleasure at full volume.

Girl! Wouldn't that be convenient?

Instead, when your body braces against sensation, your nervous system may brace against sensation . The loss and the warm water. The ache and the music. The grief and the joke that almost made you laugh.

That's why the return of pleasure matters. It isn't because pleasure proves you're "better," but because your capacity to experience it tells us something about how much your system is currently able to receive.

This is one of the central ideas behind pleasure-based grief integration: Your capacity for pleasure isn't separate from grief integration. It can be one measure of how much your life is reopening around what happened.

What this looks like in practice

Because philosophy is lovely until all of a sudden your body wants absolutely no parts of it, here's where I'd start.

Follow sensation, not activity. Don't begin by asking what you used to enjoy. That list belongs to a version of you with a different capacity, a different nervous system and possibly even a different identity.

Instead, ask what feels good to your body today. Temperature, texture, weight, taste, sound, light and movement should all be acknowledged.

Begin below the threshold of resistance. If a walk sounds exhausting, don't force yourself to walk because some wellness article told you nature is good for grief. Stand in the doorway and feel the air. That's enough.

Your capacity expands from where it actually is, not where you believe it should be.

Let it be brief. Thirty seconds of genuinely receiving something pleasurable can be more meaningful than an hour of performing enjoyment. Your body knows the difference, and frankly, she been keeping the receipts.

Notice the flinch without obeying it. Something pleasurable happens, and then comes guilt or the thought, Should I be enjoying this?

Notice it without shaming yourself for it, but don't assume you have to follow it either. Sometimes that reflex is simply your nervous system asking, Is this safe now?

When you can't feel pleasure at all

Everything I've described assumes there's at least some capacity for pleasure, even if it's tiny. Sometimes there isn't.

A persistent inability to experience pleasure from anything, including experiences that once felt really good, is called anhedonia and can be a symptom of major depression.

That's different from simply having less capacity for pleasure during grief.

If nothing has felt pleasurable for weeks or longer, you're struggling to function, or having thoughts of harming yourself, please speak with a licensed mental health professional or contact a crisis service in your area.

Somatic work can complement clinical care, but it isn't a substitute for it.

Frequently asked questions

Is it wrong to laugh after someone dies?

No. Laughter after loss is common and doesn't indicate how deeply you loved someone. Your nervous system can experience moments of relief, connection, humor or pleasure while grief is still present. One doesn't cancel the other.

Does feeling pleasure mean my grief is ending?

No. Grief and pleasure are separate capacities and can coexist. The return of pleasure may indicate that your capacity to receive sensation and engage with life is expanding. It doesn't mean your grief is resolving or your connection to who or what you lost has weakened in some way.

How can I enjoy anything when they can't anymore?

This is one of the more cruel bargains grief-guilt tries to make with us because it suggests that withholding something from yourself somehow honors what was taken from someone else. But your withheld pleasure doesn't transfer anywhere. Your laughter can't be exchanged, your joy can't be donated backward, and your suffering doesn't return what was lost. That doesn't make the guilt ridiculous. It deserves tenderness. It just doesn't make the equation true. You can carry love in one hand and pleasure in the other. Your body was built with room for both.

Go deeper: What Is Pleasure-Based Grief Integration? explores the complete framework behind these ideas... stay tuned.

Explore next: I Focused So Much on My Healing That I Forgot to Live .

Amber Wood is a Certified Trauma-Informed Grief & Loss Practitioner, the creator of the PleasureProtocol™ and LiberationMethod™. She helps women reconnect with their pleasure, bodies, their joy and themselves after loss through pleasure-based grief integration. This essay is educational and reflects a somatic coaching practice. It isn't psychotherapy, medical advice or a substitute for care from a licensed clinician.

I Focused So Much on My Healing That I Forgot to Live

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:14:23 GMT

My work is expanding as my life experiences evolve.

What I learned inside pregnancy loss turned out to be true of loss itself, so I'm following the work where it’s been leading me for a while now, under a name it didn't have before: pleasure-based grief integration .

Before I tell you where I'm going though, I need to tell you how I got here because somewhere in all those years of trying to heal, regulate, process, understand, release, integrate and become a better version of myself, I forgot to live.

And whew, that was an inconvenient thing to realize for a woman who had gotten very good at healing.

If you came to me through baby loss, nothing about that part of my work is being erased or retired, but I'll come back to that later because you deserve to hear me speak about that directly. First, I want to talk about what changed.

What's changing

For years, my work lived almost exclusively inside pregnancy loss. That's what I experienced, it's where I trained, the women in this community are who I sat with, and it's where almost every idea I’m now teaching was first tested, questioned and explored.

But eventually I had to admit that the work didn't just belong there.

Your body doesn't check the category your loss falls under before responding to it. It doesn't say, Oh, this was a divorce, proceed with this practice. Death of a parent? Nervous system dysregulation is down that particular path. The body responds to attachment, rupture, shock, meaning, witness, safety, identity, what disappeared, what changed, and what the loss required you to become afterward.

Those things don't always follow the hierarchy we've inherited, where death sits at the top and every other kind of loss waits somewhere underneath waiting for permission to actually count for something.

So my work is expanding to meet women grieving the losses that changed them, including the ones that never received a ceremony, a leave of absence or, sometimes, even an acknowledgment. Underneath that expansion is something I had to learn the hard way about my own grief.

The years of doing it right

I came to grief the way I'd learned to come to almost everything before it: as a chemist.

A background in analytical chemistry and more than fifteen years in healthcare will give you a particular relationship with problems. You read the literature, develop a hypothesis, control what you can control, isolate the variable, run the experiment, examine the results and adjust.

It seemed to be an excellent way to think, and for most of my life, it worked.

So when loss entered the picture, I did what I knew how to do. I studied it.

I read books on grief, trauma, and studied the nervous system. I became a certified trauma-informed loss practitioner, holistic practitioner, Reiki master, breathwork practitioner and herbalist because each discipline seemed to hold another piece of the puzzle. I found practitioners, received the work, learned the work, practiced and lived the work.

Lisssen, when I tell you I was committed to healing, I mean I had credentials for my credentials.

None of it was wasted. Every certification taught me something, every skilled practitioner and mentor who held space for me gave me something I still carry, and every practice helped me understand myself differently.

The problem wasn't that I'd done too much healing. The problem was that, without realizing it, healing had become the organizing principle of my life.

Everything pointed toward getting “better,” and that's surprisingly difficult to recognize from inside your experience because it looks a whole lot like commitment.

But there ain’t no graduation ceremony for healing. There's no little woman with a clipboard waiting at the end saying, Congratulations, girl. You've sufficiently processed your trauma. Here's your certificate. Please proceed to living.

Nothing tells you when you're finished, and I had entered the process with the full force of a woman who doesn't like leaving things incomplete.

So I kept going.

By the fourth year, I could describe what was happening inside my nervous system with a precision that impressed clinicians. I could identify my triggers, track sensations, regulate, process and understand what was happening in my body.

What I couldn't have told you was the last time I'd deeply wanted something. That should've told me everything I needed to know, but it didn't. Not yet.

The noticing

What’s interesting is there wasn't a dramatic breakdown. No rock-bottom moment, no cinematic scene where I suddenly understood the meaning of life. There's a cultural appetite for those stories, but mine wasn't one of them.

Mine was much quieter.

Someone asked me what I'd been enjoying lately. Not what I was working through, what I was healing, what I'd learned or even how I was doing. She simply asked what I'd been enjoying... and I didn't have much of an answer.

That bothered me because I should've been able to answer the question. And because apparently the chemist in me never clocks out, what stayed with me afterward was the accuracy of the question.

It was a good instrument, and babyyyy... it measured something real.

I'd spent years restoring my capacity to function, regulate, understand and sit with what happened. Those were real capacities and I'd genuinely restored them. But in all that time, almost none of my attention had gone toward restoring my capacity to receive, desire, anticipate, enjoy, be surprised or feel good without immediately questioning why.

I'd gotten very good at surviving my life. I wasn't nearly as practiced at actually participating in it.

What grief does to the size of your life

The contraction

Grief contracts and it usually begins in the body. Your chest tightens, your breathing gets shallow, sleep and appetite change, your tolerance for stimulation shifts, and the range of sensation your body is willing to hold narrows toward whatever feels manageable at the moment.

Which isn’t dysfunction. It's protection, and your body is so intelligent.

When something enormous happens, your system reduces the amount of incoming information so it can manage what's already there. The problem is that contraction doesn't always stay in your body. Eventually, it can start influencing your decisions.

You decline invitations, order the same meals, take the familiar route around the city, stop calling certain people, stop starting things and stop imagining too far into the future. It's not because you're consciously deciding to make your life smaller. Novelty, desire and possibility all require some willingness to believe there's a future worth moving toward, and grief can shake that belief.

One reasonable little decision at a time, your life can begin to contract around you.

The wild part is that people may praise you for it. They'll call it strength, grace or resilience. They'll tell you, You're handling this so well.

Meanwhile, you may have quietly constructed your life to ask almost nothing of you because asking for nothing feels safer than wanting something you could lose.

And that's not failure, but it is worth noticing.

Why “healing” didn't undo it

Grief researchers have understood for decades that healthy grieving involves oscillation. We move between being oriented toward the loss and being oriented toward living, and both matter.

Living isn't what happens after grief. Living is part of grieving.

That distinction changed everything for me because when I looked honestly at what I'd been practicing, I realized there wasn't much oscillation in it. Almost every tool I'd learned was aimed at reducing distress inside my existing life.

Regulate this, understand that, process this, and don’t forget to release that.

All of it was useful, but almost none of it asked the question that eventually mattered most: Sis, is your life getting larger? Is it expanding?

That was the variable I hadn't been measuring.

I'd spent years becoming better at existing inside the contraction. Grief made my world smaller, and then, without meaning to, healing kept me that size.

Whew. That one took a minute.

The question everything now rests on

Eventually, a different question emerged:

What if grief isn't something we heal from, but something we integrate through the restoration of our capacity for pleasure?

Before somebody pictures champagne, vacations and a bubble bath with candles burning around it, let me be very clear about what I mean by pleasure.

Pleasure is the capacity to receive.

To receive beauty, sensation, warmth, taste, connection, curiosity, rest, laughter, joy, touch and desire. It's that moment when something feels good and your body is actually able to register it instead of rushing straight past it.

Pleasure, as I use the word, isn't indulgence or excess. It isn't a reward you earn for suffering long enough, and it sure as hell isn't proof that you've finished grieving.

Pleasure is a physiological capacity. It's your body's ability to let something nourishing, interesting, beautiful or satisfying in, and grief often impacts that capacity.

That's why someone can put your favorite meal in front of you, but taste doesn’t hit like it used to. It's why the song no longer moves you, the invitation sounds exhausting, or something can be objectively beautiful and your body responds with a polite little meh .

The world is still offering sensation, but your system simply may not have the capacity to receive much of it yet.

That's where my work changed because pleasure isn't the opposite of grief, it isn't what replaces grief, and it isn't the reward for “completing” it.

Pleasure is one of the ways your body remembers it can still receive.

A body that can receive can begin to expand around what it carries. Your grief doesn't have to disappear for your life to become larger. That's the work.

Why baby loss was never the boundary

Once I understood this, I started recognizing the pattern everywhere.

I saw it in the woman whose marriage ended and who no longer knew who she was outside of it. The woman whose career disappeared and took half her identity with it. The woman navigating estrangement from someone who's still alive. The woman whose body changed, whose friendship ended, the woman grieving the future she thought she'd have, and the one who lost a parent and suddenly became the person everyone else leaned on.

Different losses, different stories, but underneath them I kept seeing the same contraction, the same competence covering up their pain, the same disappearing desire and the same question: Who am I now that this happened?

Often, the losses receiving the least witness were carrying an enormous amount of weight because there was no funeral, ritual or socially sanctioned period of mourning. Sometimes there wasn't even language for what happened.

There was just a woman standing in the middle of her life knowing something ended while everyone around her continued as though nothing had happened.

That's when I understood that pregnancy loss wasn't the boundary of my work.

It was the birthplace of it.

To the women who were here first

If you came to me through baby loss, I'm speaking specifically to you now.

This work exists because of what you trusted me with. Full stop.

Pregnancy loss is where I first learned to listen differently to grief. It's where these ideas began, and it's where I learned what happens when a loss changes not only what you have, but who you understand yourself to be.

Expanding my work doesn't require me to abandon its origin, just as expanding your life doesn't require you to abandon what you lost.

If the word pleasure feels unbearable to you right now, honor that. There's no schedule or assignment you're failing. Your body is communicating its current capacity, and your job isn't to bully it into being somewhere else.

If this work speaks to you, I hope you’ll stay. If it doesn't yet, come back if and when it does. And if what we explored together through the B.R.E.A.T.H.E. Methodology, grief x Rebirth Virtual Summit, LiberationMethod or LiberationGang is complete for you exactly as it is, I honor that too.

This next chapter isn't about dragging everyone with me. It's about following the work where it has honestly led.

When it's more than this

Everything I've described here can be part of an ordinary response to loss, but not every experience should be treated as something you simply need to somatically work through.

Some grief requires clinical care.

If intense grief has persisted beyond a year and significantly affects your ability to work, maintain relationships or care for yourself, it may meet criteria for prolonged grief disorder, a formal and treatable diagnosis.

Similarly, if you're experiencing persistent depression, using substances to cope or sleep, unable to function, or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact a licensed mental health professional or a crisis service in your area.

Somatic work doesn't replace clinical care. It can sit beautifully beside it, and you should never be confined to one or the other.

One thing to notice today

As this essay comes to a close, I want you to try something.

Name three things your body still says yes to.

Not what you should enjoy, not what you used to enjoy, and especially not what Instagram has informed you counts as self-care this week. What does your body say yes to today?

Maybe it's warm water running over your hands, cool sheets, the hour when the light in your house gets soft, a particular song, a weighted blanket, the first taste of some cold and creamy ice cream, or somebody making you laugh when you were absolutely committed to being irritated.

Some women can name three immediately, many can name one, but some can't name any, and realizing that can feel frightening.

If that's you, I don't want you to interpret that as another thing to fix because it's data. That's all.

Not being able to name your desires isn't proof that something is wrong with you. It's an assessment of where your capacity is today.

Unlike almost everything else in grief, capacity gives us somewhere to begin. You don't have to make grief smaller, and maybe that was never the assignment.

Maybe the invitation is to become capable of holding more life alongside it.

Frequently asked questions

Can you be too focused on healing?

Yes, but the amount of healing work isn't necessarily the problem. The issue is orientation. Healing can become counterproductive when recovery becomes the organizing principle of your identity, schedule, spending and conversations, while placing minimal attention on expanding your actual life. The question isn't simply how much time you're spending processing grief. It's whether any of that work is helping you reconnect with desire, sensation, connection and participation in life.

Is it normal to still feel stuck after years of grief work?

Yes. Most grief support focuses on understanding, processing and reducing distress. Those things can be useful, but understanding your loss and expanding your body's capacity to receive life again aren't the same process. You can become highly skilled at understanding your grief while still feeling contracted in your everyday life.

Does wanting pleasure again mean I've stopped grieving?

No. Grief and pleasure can exist in your body at the same time. The return of desire or pleasure doesn't mean your grief is ending, that you've forgotten what happened or that your love for who or what you lost has diminished. It may simply mean your capacity to receive is expanding.

Start here: P.U.L.S.E. ™ is a short, free resource for noticing what your nervous system actually needs.

Next: Pleasure Is Not the Opposite of Grief , where we're getting into why feeling good after loss can feel like betrayal, who taught us that suffering proves love, and why that whole equation deserves another look.

Amber Wood is a Certified Trauma-Informed Loss Practitioner and the creator of the PleasureProtocol™ and LiberationMethod™. She helps women reconnect with their bodies, pleasure, joy and themselves after loss through pleasure-based grief integration.

Quiet Ache

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:59:35 GMT

The Weight of the Holidays After Loss

The holidays have a way of amplifying everything.

The joy.
The noise.
The expectations.

And when you’ve experienced pregnancy or infant loss… the grief.

What’s supposed to be “the most wonderful time of the year” can instead feel like a season you’re just trying to survive. Every commercial, every family photo, every “So when are you guys having kids?” lands like a quiet gut punch. Even well-meaning cheer can feel unbearable when your heart is holding a story no one can see.

If this is you, let me say this plainly:
There is nothing wrong with you, love.

Grief doesn’t follow a calendar so it doesn’t take holidays off, and it definitely doesn’t care about matching pajamas or festive brunches.

Why the Holidays Hurt More After Loss

Pregnancy loss doesn’t just take a baby.
It takes dreams.
Timelines.
Imagined traditions.
Future memories you were already rehearsing in your mind.

The holidays tend to spotlight what’s missing . You may be grieving the baby who should be here this year. Or the pregnancy you thought you’d be announcing. Or the version of yourself who believed this season would look different.

Add family dynamics, social pressure, spiritual confusion, and exhaustion—and suddenly December feels like emotional quicksand.

You might notice:

Your body feels heavier, you’re unmotivated to do anything
Shorter patience and sudden, unexpected tears
Guilt for not feeling “grateful enough”
A desire to disappear, isolate, or numb out

This is grief asking to be acknowledged.

You Are Allowed to Do the Holidays Differently

Let me free you from something right now... you do not owe anyone your presence, performance, or emotional labor.

You are allowed to:

Skip events that feel draining
Leave early without explanation
Say “no” and not follow it with a justification
Redefine what the holidays look like this year

This season may not be about celebration.
It may be about preservation .

And that is sacred work.

Gentle Ways to Navigate the Season

There is no fixing grief, but there are ways to move through this time with more softness and less self-betrayal.

1. Name the Loss—Out Loud or in Writing
Unspoken grief grows heavier, so journal, pray, meditate, talk to someone safe. Write a letter to your baby. Light a candle and say their name. Acknowledgment is medicine.

2. Create a Ritual of Remembrance
Grief needs a container, and it could look like:

Lighting a candle on a specific day
Creating a small altar or memory space
Donating or volunteering in your baby’s honor
Wearing or carrying something symbolic

Ritual doesn’t erase pain—it gives it somewhere to rest.

3. Tend to Your Nervous System
Your body remembers the loss, even when your mind is trying to “be okay.” Slow things down.

Gentle breathing
Warm baths
Walking outside
Somatic practices that help you feel safe again

Regulation is survival, not indulgence.

4. Lower the Bar. Then Lower It Again.
This is not the year for perfection, productivity or pushing through.
Eat what’s going to nourish you. Rest more than you think you should. Cancel plans if your body says no.

You don’t heal by forcing yourself to cope.
You heal by listening.

5. Let Joy Be Fleeting—and That’s Okay
If laughter shows up, let it.
If sadness follows right behind it, let that too.

Grief and joy are not enemies, they often travel together so you don’t have to choose one to honor the other.

If the Holidays Feel Lonely, You’re Not Alone

One of the hardest parts of pregnancy loss is how isolating it can feel—especially during a season centered around family, children, and togetherness.

If you find yourself thinking:

“No one really gets this.”
“I feel invisible.”
“I don’t belong anywhere right now.”

Please hear this: there are women who see you, who speak this language, who understand the ache without needing you to explain it.

You deserve support that is gentle, trauma-informed, and rooted in compassion.

A Final Word, From One Woman Holding Space for Another

If all you do this holiday season is breathe, rest, and make it through—that is enough.

Your grief is not a failure of faith.
Your sadness is not a lack of gratitude.
Your healing does not have a deadline.

You are still whole.
You are still worthy of care.
And your baby—however briefly they were here—matters.

I’m holding you close through this season.
And when you’re ready, there is space for you to heal.

With love and deep reverence,
Amber

P.S. If the holiday-heaviness has you seeking a space where you don’t have to explain your grief or rush your healing, LiberationGang exists as a soft place to land. It’s my community for women navigating pregnancy and infant loss—where you can exhale, be witnessed, held and move at your own pace. When the world feels loud and lonely, come be held.

Honoring The Spirit of Your Baby

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 20:53:31 GMT

Honoring & Remembering Through Ritual

Hey Gorgeous,

I know that the holidays can stir up a whirlwind of emotions. For many, they’re a time of joy and togetherness, but for those of us carrying the pain of pregnancy loss, the holidays can also be a stark reminder of what we’ve lost. If the past few weeks felt heavy, I want you to know you’re not alone.

As we step into this new year, let’s take a moment to honor the babies we’ve carried in our wombs and hearts, and create space to remember them in ways that feel sacred and nurturing. Whether the holidays brought moments of reflection or feelings of longing, now is the perfect time to lean into love and healing as we carry their memory forward.

Creating rituals or memorials isn’t just about remembering our babies; it’s about giving ourselves permission to grieve, to honor, and to begin again with intention and grace. Let’s explore some ways to do just that.

1. Name Your Baby

Sis, the start of a new year is a chance to examine previous ways of existing as you look to embrace fresh ways of healing. Sometimes early-term loss babies were never named because it was so soon. If you haven’t already, consider naming your baby. Whether it’s a name you had in mind or something that comes to you now, this simple act can feel like claiming the space they hold in your heart.

Speak their name during your prayers, whisper it in moments of quiet reflection, or write it in a journal. Their name is a testament to their existence and the love you’ll always carry.

2. Create a Sacred Space

As we reset after the busyness of the holidays, now might be the perfect time to create a quiet, sacred space in your home. This could be a small altar with candles, photos, or keepsakes that remind you of your baby.

This space can serve as your sanctuary—a place to grieve, to connect, and to heal. When life feels overwhelming, it’s a reminder that their memory is always close.

I would also like to encourage you to reflect on the following prompts to gain clarity about what to release as we enter the new year. Whether you journal or meditate, the choice is yours:

What created energy in my life this year?

What drained energy from my life this year (hint: the answer isn’t your loss; this is anything outside of it that might have also exacerbated the trauma brought on by your loss)?

How can I take steps to release the energy draining activities, people, places in order to co-create a more harmonious future existence?

3. Light a Candle

The holidays often come with twinkling lights and candles glowing in every window, but now you can create a light that’s just for your baby. Lighting a candle in their honor is a simple yet powerful way to hold space for them.

Choose a time that feels right—perhaps on special dates or quiet evenings when you need a moment to reflect—and let the light remind you of their presence.

4. Write a Letter

Writing a letter to your baby is a gentle way to release unspoken emotions, feelings or memories, and give them a voice.

Tell your babies about your dreams for them, how much they’re loved, and what their memory means to you. You can keep the letter, read it aloud, or release it as a symbolic act—whatever feels right to your spirit, do that.

5. Plant Something in Their Honor

A new year is a perfect time to plant something in their memory—a tree, a flower, or even a garden. Watching it grow can be a healing reminder of the love and connection you share.

Choose something that blooms in a season that feels meaningful to you or a plant that represents renewal and hope.

6. Create or Wear a Keepsake

After the gift-giving season, consider giving yourself a gift of remembrance. Whether it’s a piece of jewelry, a piece of art, or something personal, a keepsake can be a beautiful way to carry their memory with you into the new year.

Each time you see or wear it, let it be a reminder of the bond you’ll always share.

7. Host a Ceremony or Gathering

Coming off the gatherings of the holidays, you might find healing in creating a more intimate moment of remembrance. Host a small ceremony with family or close friends—or keep it just for yourself.

Light candles, read poems, or simply sit in silence. It’s not about what you do but about creating a moment to honor your baby and the journey you’re on.

8. Mark Special Dates

If the holidays brought up specific memories or dates, you can choose to honor those days in your own way. This might be journaling, lighting a candle, or planning a quiet moment of reflection.

Grief doesn’t follow a calendar, Love, so however these days show up for you, be gentle with yourself and honor your feelings.

9. Join a Community of Remembering

The holidays can sometimes leave us feeling isolated, but you’re not alone in this journey. There are so many women walking this path alongside you.

Whether it’s a support group, a remembrance event, or an online community, connecting with others can remind you that your baby’s memory lives on—not just in your heart but in the hearts of those who understand your journey.

10. Trust Your Spirit

As you move into this new season, remember that your connection to your baby is eternal. They live within you, in your heart and your spirit. Trust yourself to honor them in ways that feel meaningful and healing.

There’s no perfect way to do this, Sis—only the way that’s right for you. Your love for them is what matters most, and that love will always guide you.

This time of year is all about renewal and reflection. Honoring your baby doesn’t mean staying stuck in the pain; it means carrying their memory forward with love and grace. Whatever rituals or practices you choose, know that you’re walking this journey with strength, and you are not alone.

Until next time… be well, Love

Supporting a Loss Mama on Mother's Day

Sat, 11 May 2024 20:38:47 GMT

A Heartfelt Guide

Mother's Day is a beautiful occasion to celebrate the incredible women in our lives who have nurtured, loved, and guided us. But for women who have experienced the pain of pregnancy loss, Mother's Day can evoke a complex array of emotions. It’s for this reason I think it’s important to explore how you can provide support, love, and understanding to a woman navigating the isolating-terrain of grief and loss on this special day - whether you’ve experienced pregnancy loss or not.

1. Validate Her Feelings:

First and foremost, acknowledge and validate her feelings. Let her know that it's okay to feel a mix of emotions on Mother's Day – whether it's sadness, anger, longing, or even moments of joy and sorrow. Assure her that her emotions are valid and that you're there to support her through it. Most importantly, ensure she knows that it’s okay to not be okay.

2. Offer Gentle Remembrance:

Consider honoring the memory of her lost pregnancies in a gentle and respectful manner. This could involve creating a sacred space for her to remember and reflect, perhaps through lighting a candle, planting a tree, or writing a heartfelt letter to her unborn children. Let her know that their presence, though unseen, is deeply felt and cherished.

3. Be Present, Listen, and Hold Space:

Sometimes, the most powerful form of support is simply being present and listening without judgment. Create a safe and nurturing environment where she feels comfortable expressing her thoughts, fears, and hopes. Actively listen and hold space for her emotions without trying to fix or minimize her pain.

4. Offer Acts of Love and Kindness:

On Mother's Day, consider offering acts of love and kindness that acknowledge her journey and honor her resilience. This could be anything from preparing her favorite meal, giving her a thoughtful gift that honors her motherhood, or simply spending quality time together engaging in activities that bring her joy.

5. Encourage Self-Care and Healing:

Encourage her to prioritize self-care and engage in activities that nurture her physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Whether it's practicing mindfulness, seeking professional support through therapy or support groups, or indulging in activities that bring her solace, remind her that her healing journey is important and deserves care and attention.

6. Embrace the Power of Spirituality:

For those who find solace in spirituality, Mother's Day can be an opportunity to connect with the divine and draw strength. Encourage her to lean into her spiritual beliefs, whether through prayer, meditation, or rituals that honor the sacredness of her journey as well as the spirits of her babies.

Supporting a woman who has experienced multiple pregnancy losses on Mother's Day requires a delicate balance of love, compassion, and understanding. You may never have experienced pregnancy loss yourself, but by validating her feelings, offering support, being present, and encouraging self-care and healing, you can provide invaluable support. Above all, let her know that she is seen, heard, and deeply loved – not just on Mother's Day, but every day.

And to any Loss Mama's reading, know that I'm holding you in the light and prepared to support you on your journey.

Until next time... be well, Love.

Sea of Emotions: Healing Emotional Trauma after Pregnancy

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 20:06:29 GMT

Pregnancy loss is a profound and deeply emotional experience that can leave a lasting impact on a woman's mind, body, and spirit. The journey of conceiving, nurturing life within, and then losing that precious connection can evoke intense emotional trauma - that’s not always identified as trauma. These experiences have the power to manifest within the body, creating energetic blockages and disrupting the natural flow of life force energy. Here, we will explore the profound impact of emotional trauma on the body after pregnancy loss and delve into transformative ways to release and heal these wounds.

I experienced my first miscarriage on Thanksgiving Day 2017. It was the most devastating experience of my life. My husband and I had traveled from Atlanta to Maryland to spend time with his family for the holiday. I was 7 weeks pregnant, this was going to be our first child, and thrilled was an understatement. We made a pit stop along the way when I noticed blood after using the bathroom. It made me nervous, but I made a choice not to worry about it. Miscarriage just wasn’t. on my. radar. We made it to his Aunt’s home, where we were staying, but the bleeding didn’t let up. It continued for the next couple of days and then the cramping began, as I came to the realization that our dream of becoming parents was quickly coming to an end before it even started. And here I was… meeting much of his family for the first time and putting on a happy face to hold this sacred experience close to my heart. I think not being able to retreat and nurture myself during that time made the miscarriage that much more intense. I wanted to be anywhere else, doing anything else except navigating that experience. As the festivities came to a close, I was able to find moments of quietness to process and grieve and come to terms with what happened, but the silence was so loud. Worst of all was witnessing my husband break down. One moment shattered his heart into a million pieces and it destroyed me.

When we left Maryland, we left our dreams of becoming parents. We left our hopes for the life and experiences we wanted to share with our baby. We left our identities. Returning home felt lonely. It felt painful and empty. It was isolating. Still grieving the loss of my Father who lost his battle with brain cancer the year prior, our baby’s arrival was the joy we needed; not this ? I just didn’t know what to do. I stood firm in my Christian walk at that time, but was so angry. I couldn’t believe God would allow us to experience this level of suffering. Silly when I think back on it because the Bible is filled with stories of suffering, but sometimes being thrust into your own causes you to forget it’s part of the human experience. However, I knew I needed to stay connected to Source, so I prayed for everyone else. I would ask friends and family how I could pray for them because I couldn’t pray for myself. Then, hello Shame! Because who else had gone through this? I thought, no one else in my immediate family or friend circle so I did the best I could. I got up and went to work the following week, showed up on virtual calls, met with my internal team and clients as if nothing happened because it was entirely too personal to share and I couldn’t imagine being alone with my thoughts for too long. The nights were the toughest. That’s when I allowed myself to feel the raw edges of every emotion. From not being able to sleep to waking up crying and being so lovingly embraced by my husband in those tender moments. Having witnessed the grace with which my Mother grieved the loss of my Father - her partner of 37 years, I knew that allowing myself to feel the emotions was necessary for my healing process and I’ve always wanted to be like my Mama. So there we were… Brokenhearted. Confused. Lost. Angry. Grieving.

Yet still hopeful and so so grateful that we had one another. I had a support system of beautifully grounded women who so lovingly pulled me from the depths of my despair with every prayer, scripture, encouraging word, phone call, and text. The lessons are among the things I hold closest to my heart now. I learned the true meaning of sisterhood. I learned who my prayer warriors were. I learned that not only was I stronger than I thought, but that I could be strong and soft at the same time; just like Mama. I learned that my Daddy was closest to me during that time from the spiritual realm. I learned that my husband and I are foundationally equipped to endure anything. I learned that I am so deeply loved by so many people. I learned more about God’s gentle nature and comforting presence. I learned that purpose is so often shrouded in the most devastatingly challenging experiences. I learned that I have been sent to guide and support other Angel Mamas in navigating their experiences with pregnancy loss while also normalizing the conversation around it.

So how do we transcend our grief?

The first step towards healing is acknowledging the depth of pain caused by your pregnancy loss. It’s so necessary to allow yourself to grieve and honor the emotional impact it has had on your being. Understand that your emotions are valid and natural responses to an extraordinary loss. I knew my emotions were valid and I allowed myself to feel all of them… the painful ones, the embarrassing ones, the shameful ones, the hopeful ones, the shallow ones, the envious ones. Every emotion. I recognize there will be times when allowing your physical response to an emotion felt may not be the most appropriate, but there will also be times when it’s perfectly appropriate and those are the times you must allow yourself freedom of expression. If you don’t and instead choose to suppress your emotions, they’ll bubble to the surface and burst through when you least expect and most likely, an inopportune time. So give yourself permission to feel the feels through the journey.

You must practice self-compassion by embracing your journey and giving yourself permission to heal at your own pace. Allow yourself the time and space needed to process your emotions, releasing any guilt or shame that may arise, without judgment of self. You also may feel the need to establish boundaries with those around you who may not fully understand or support your journey or your healing process. I wasn’t able to embrace the journey in those early days because I struggled to accept that this was my reality, but had I known this was part of the process I think it might have been easier to accept. It’s also easy to slip into regrets and guilt, so allow yourself the time necessary to move through your process with all the compassion you need to extend yourself. Understand that healing is unique and individual, and it’s also okay to seek support when needed.

Create a sacred space for yourself where you can engage in healing practices. This one was huge for me! I had a place, but I didn’t realize it would become THE place. The place where I came to cry, talk to my Daddy, journal, sit in silence, read, perform healing rituals, meditate, move my body and pray. It could be a peaceful corner in your home, a serene natural setting, or even an altar dedicated to honoring your lost baby. Fill this space with objects that hold meaning for you, such as candles, crystals, or photographs and allow it to be a sanctuary for self-reflection and healing. Make it personal to you and your experience.

Rituals can provide a powerful means of releasing emotional trauma. Consider creating a ritual that resonates with you, such as writing a heartfelt letter to your lost baby, creating art or poetry, or performing a symbolic gesture, like releasing a flower into a body of water or a biodegradable lantern into the ether. Healing rituals grounded me in my own sacred power so much more than I ever knew possible. They allowed me to honor the spirit of my baby and I was able to release the pain of their absence - which helped me shift to gratitude for their presence and the fact that they chose us to be their parents, even if for just a moment. These acts of intention and surrender can help release stagnant emotions and invite healing energy to flow. What ritual(s) resonate with you most?

Engaging in mind-body practices can facilitate the integration of healing on multiple levels. Explore practices such as meditation, breathwork, gentle yoga, dancing or deep stretching to bring harmony and balance to your mind, body, and spirit. You could even seek out the assistance and support of a Reiki Practitioner to align and balance your main body chakra system to support your healing process. Deep stretching and meditation were already part of my self-care practice, but I had no idea how beneficial they are in transcending grief until I was face-to-face with my own. Pregnancy loss is seldom referred to as trauma, especially by healthcare clinicians, but it absolutely is. Trauma, by definition, is anything that threatens one’s security. We hold the energy of every traumatic experience in our bodies and when left unresolved (meaning un- released ), it can manifest into physical disease and discomfort. For these reasons, it’s incredibly important to move your way through your grief. These practices help release stored trauma, cultivate resilience, and foster a deeper connection with your inner self.

I know it feels isolating, but remember that you don’t have to navigate this healing journey alone. Reach out to trusted friends, family, or support groups who can offer empathy, understanding, and a safe space for sharing your experiences. Seeking guidance from a Pregnancy Loss Practitioner such as myself, a Professional Counselor or Therapist can also be immensely helpful in facilitating the healing process and providing additional tools for emotional release.

Explore and nurture your spirituality as a means of finding solace and guidance. This could involve connecting deeper with God/Source, engaging in prayer and meditation, exploring alternative spiritual practices, or seeking wisdom in nature. My experience was challenging as I was rooted in my relationship with God, but I struggled to connect when the experience of my loss was so raw and acute, but connecting to others who were willing to engage in prayer with me as well as me choosing to pray for others allowed me to maintain my connection. Spirituality can bring a sense of purpose, hope, and comfort as you heal and find meaning in your journey.

Healing emotional trauma after pregnancy loss is a deeply personal and transformative journey. By acknowledging the impact of the experience on your body, mind, and spirit, and engaging in healing practices with intentionality, you can release stagnant emotions, cultivate self-compassion, and find a path towards wholeness. Remember to be patient and gentle with yourself as you navigate this sacred process of healing, honoring your unique journey, and embracing the light that can emerge from the depths of darkness.

This One is Personal, Sis

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 19:53:01 GMT

In an instant... EVERYTHING changed!

Trust Yourself And Your Intuition

Intuition is defined as "the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process” - The Oxford English Dictionary

Isaac Asimov said, “Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.”

So my question is… how is your relationship with this aspect of yourself? Can you find your own way through a situation with what seems to be incomplete data? Are you able to balance the left and right sides of your nature: instinct and logic, in order to create maximum persuasion?

We all have experienced gut feelings, mostly in the form of danger. Recognizing that you're in the wrong place at the wrong time before trouble shows up is an unpleasant reminder of our intuitive natures. Or maybe you’ve experienced it in a romantic situation, indicated by “butterflies”. We’ve all heard stories of a man or woman meeting their twin flame for the first time and thinking to themselves, ‘This is the person I’m meant to be with. I can feel it.’

The thing is, our inner wisdom / intuition is a muscle that can be strengthened. It is an aspect of emotional intelligence and through study, attention and patience, can be grown and used to further aid your persuasive skills.

Hunches, gut feelings and intuition are entirely acceptable to apply in business matters, as well as, life in general. Following these are signs that God is flawlessly guiding our lives as we’ve requested.

I remember being younger and wondering if my inner wisdom would ever be as strong as my Mother's. She just knew stuff, you know? I admired that about her among SO many things, and I wanted it for myself… I've always wanted to be like her. So I grew up, and I learned over time that our intuition is always communicating; we just have to be present enough to hear it, and what some people don't know is that the feeling of discerning what our intuition is communicating is difficult to teach. There has to be an allowing and a receptivity that creates space for this level of communication with God and higher self. I stumbled upon the ability to sharpen my inner wisdom as I began to become more consistent in my spiritual practices.

So what brought me to this desire to delve into my spiritual practices? I experienced the most difficult time of my entire existence between the years of 2016 and 2019. It all began when my Father lost his battle with lung cancer after it metastasized to his brain. What's worse? He passed away just 1 month after my now-husband had proposed to me. So there I was, "Daddy's little Girl" who had this long-awaited desire to experience my Daddy walking me down the aisle, and the realization that the dream would never become a reality. Then, it happened literally right before becoming my reality. I remember telling my husband, “I don't know if I’ll survive losing Daddy.” For the first time in my life I would never be able to say “this too, shall pass”. I knew that grief would stick with me.

Fast forward to the following year, my husband and I conceived our first baby, and experienced a devastating miscarriage 7.5 weeks later. And there I was again, "I don't know if I'm going to make it." My health began to fail, as I started experiencing numbness in my extremities and was ultimately diagnosed with neuropathy, yet none of the specialists could determine the cause. I went on to experience the loss of my 13-year career through a restructuring (layoff). Then, my Grandmother, my last-surviving Grandparent died and my Uncle, with whom my husband and I had developed a closeness, passed away suddenly just 6 months after Grandma. And while all of that was happening, my husband and I lost 3 more pregnancies to miscarriage, so a total of 4 in 4 years. Whew... it was ROUGH!

Now, more spiritual than religious as I lean into and explore this remembrance of the practices of my ancestors, but I grew up religious and attended church regularly, and during that difficult time I held onto it with everything in me. However, I always had this feeling that I was waiting for God to save me. I'll get into what I've termed this "save me" syndrome at a later date, but it was life for me at the time. I felt helpless, I felt hopeless, I felt alone because despite all of the amazing people in my life, still supporting me such as my husband, mom, brother, sister-friends, cousins, co-workers, etc., none of them were experiencing what I was going through. I also somehow knew there was more that I could do to heal myself and not wait to be saved (prayer without works, right?), but I just needed guidance from a more tangible source. Regardless of what was real or true, I knew that no matter what, I couldn't stay where I was - that was for SURE! I needed transformation - mind, body, and spirit, and then, I was introduced to a Queen who guided me to reclaim my power and recognize the ability that I had within to transform my life.

And in an instant — everything changed!

I began to pray differently, I began to meditate daily - not just occasionally, I connected to and sought guidance from my ancestors, I grounded and centered myself in the Earth / in nature, I nourished myself through plant-based foods, and I sought out reiki because the trauma from my experiences was trapped in my body and I knew I needed to release it in order to heal. As I began to vibrate at a higher frequency, it allowed me to become more sensitive to my inner wisdom - which opened the pathway to healing. This also assured me that I was Divinely guided and supported.

I'm not talking about just going through the motions. I'm talking about the steady, fortification and honing of the relationship with God, with thyself, to others and our desires, that only blooms through connection. When we just know, we act accordingly... like Mama did. That means praying and meditating on our heart's desires and taking heed to the promptings about which actions to take. Taking aligned action to achieve what we know rightfully belongs to us as if we already have it. Then, allowing God / Spirit to do the rest. When I began to see my desires manifest repeatedly by taking these steps, I realized it was no secret at all. And what I love most about it, is I can access this energy at any time by consistently taking the aforementioned actions... rinse and repeat!

Be careful, Sis, not to assume this is only about getting what you want. God isn't a genie in a bottle to be called on to grant wishes, and I still believe everyone has a destiny and a calling upon their life. Not everything works out the way we plan, but there's a beauty that comes from the fortification of relationships and usually, you find that the journey itself was more gratifying than you ever thought possible because you maintained a focus on the relationships and not the end goal. I told you Sis… this one's personal.

Think back to times when you had these feelings and didn’t heed the warning, or on the positive side of things… had a desire, but didn't heed the promptings. What unpleasantness could you have avoided if you had heeded the warning(s)? What positive desires do you believe you could have manifested if you took aligned action? By checking in, centering, and gaining clarity, our life is enhanced immeasurably in all aspects.

My personal experience, my skill sets, my education, my inner wisdom... THIS is what qualifies me to guide other women to reclaim their own personal power and heal themselves. THIS is what I have been called to do. THIS is what I love to do.
If you are struggling to heal your trauma, move beyond your grief, or connect with your inner wisdom, I urge you to join us for Wounds to Wisdom. It’s my 9-week collective healing journey that is designed to guide you in Aligning with Your Inner Wisdom to Heal from the Emotional Trauma of Pregnancy Loss.

Until next time... be well, Beloved.

Big Energy, It's Giving

Fri, 20 May 2022 19:37:40 GMT

So let's talk about it, Sis... starting with the chakras!

Hey Gorgeous!

My work is ALL about ENERGY… so let's talk about it, starting with the chakras!

"Chakra" also known as energy center is a term used in Pranic healing - which is an ancient Hindu system of energy healing. Prana means life energy. “Aura” is another term related to Pranic healing, and is a non-physical body that consists of energy and exists along with our physical body. Many of us have been blessed with the gift to see auras surrounding some people! The aura that covers our body is said to have seven layers pertaining to the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of an individual as manifested by energy.

Studying the color and thickness of auras gives ideas on the state of health of a person. Six colors are associated with an aura and interpreted into six personalities. These colors are all present in an individual, but one or two are more pronounced and I have broken them down below:

Green: Ambitious achiever

Blue: Spiritual peacemaker

White: Unconventional chameleon

Red: Activist

Orange: Creative communicator

Violet: Psychic

Though, in the West, Tantra is popularly associated with the practice of sex and spirituality, it is another method of energy healing and it comes from the word “tan” - which means to spread or expand .

Unlike Pranic and Tantric healings, which have Hindu origins, Reiki was discovered in Japan by Mikao Usui. It is relatively younger than Pranic and Tantric healings, having been rediscovered in the early 1900s. Reiki stands for universal life-force energy; an energy brought forth by higher intelligence. Students of Reiki, like myself, are taught how to tap into this energy to heal physical, emotional, and mental illnesses.

So Why Do People Turn to Energy Healing, Anyway ?

Well, for me, it happened after I began to develop neuropathy and after visiting specialist after specialist and getting tested for everything under the sun, was told I was perfectly healthy. The frustration and fear was on another level! So I did what most of us do… I took to the internet. I began to learn about how energetic imbalances can manifest themselves into physical disease and I sought practitioners to help balance my energetic frequency. I was so intrigued by energetic practices in general, I decided to become a Reiki Master. The benefits were CRAZY and I wanted to share them with others who had found themselves in a similar situation!

Pranic, Tantric, and Reiki are considered alternative methods of healing. In spite of the availability and relative accessibility of modern medicine, why are more and more people drawn to them? Here are some possible reasons:

Energy healing worked where modern medicine failed.

For several reasons both explainable and unexplainable, modern medical treatment can fail to heal ailments and conditions in a lot of people.

Modern medicine is considered to be isolating.

How many times have you gone to the Dr. for a physical health concern, and never asked a single question about your diet, prayer life, whether you meditate, etc.? Practically, everytime right?! Medical treatments are oftentimes focused on the symptoms of disease, often disregarding its cause, and this can make a patient feel isolated and treated like a mere host of the disease. Some hospitals are beginning to gradually promote holistic treatments to their patients, but many still only focus on the physical symptom and disregard the root in order to treat the whole being: mind, body, spirit. It's a MAJOR flaw in the American healthcare system… treat the symptom with medication in order to drive pharmaceutical profits. My 15-year experience within the healthcare industry exposed me to this philosophy and ultimately helped me draw the conclusion that I wanted no parts of it!

Energy healing is non-obtrusive and natural, thus it is safer.

Repeated surgical procedures are physically and emotionally traumatic for most patients. It is but a logical and attractive option to both patients and families to look for less stressful health interventions.

Energy healing is a good way of relieving stress.

Meditation is part and parcel of energy healing methods and this is an added benefit for highly stressed people.

Energy Readings & Reiki are the 2 types of Energy Healing modalities in which I specialize. Energy readings are a form of radionics or pendulum dowsing where I analyze your energy field using the elements: ether, air, fire, water, and earth. After a quick 10-minute assessment, I develop a customized program uniquely designed to address your specific concerns as well as anything uncovered during the reading, through holistic rituals, and gentle lifestyle adjustments. BOTH energy readings and reiki provide significant insight into our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual states and my extensive holistic health training and experience provides not only the insight, but they’ve qualified me to suggest holistic practices that can help you improve your overall well-being.

Energy readings can be done virtually, so if you have any concerns or even just curiosity, don't hesitate to reach out to me. I would love to provide you with a reading! **Must be local to Costa Rica for Reiki.

Until next time, Sis... Be well!

Ritual

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 19:48:44 GMT

Thank Me Later...

Hey Goddess,

Between family, work, home, and social responsibilities do you often feel that all of your time is spent taking care of others? Neglecting self-care is so easy in a busy world, but the consequences can be detrimental. Adding self-care practices to your daily routine can help to strengthen your health and well-being - allowing space for pouring into others. Plus, experts say the happiest and most successful people focus on self-care regularly!

Self-care = The highest form of self-love!

So Sis… do you have a self-care routine? If not, no judgment here, but keep reading because this one's gooooooood!!!!

If you struggle with self-care, it’s likely because you spend so much of your energy taking care of others that there’s nothing left in your well for yourself. By taking the time to do one selfish act you’ll be restoring your own importance, so I implore you to begin implementing some of these simple self-care strategies today and #thankmelater

1. Block out time for self-care in your schedule. That's right, put it on the calendar! Self-care is an ongoing process and just as you reserve time in your schedule for other appointments, set aside time to take care of yourself, too. And let's face it, if your cup isn't full, you won't be able to do all those other things on your calendar, so make this one a priority. You may be asking, “…and do what?” If that's you, I got you, Queen! Some women like to use this time to pray and/or meditate. Some like to get active and go for a run, do yoga or hike through nature. Other women decide to light some incense, sip some herbal tea and read a chapter out of that book that's been sitting on the nightstand for months. Some like to draw a warm bath, add a few drops of their favorite essential oil or some nourishing herbs, pour a glass of wine and un- wind. And others like to use the time to sit in silence and do absolutely nothing. The beauty of your routine is that it's all yours, so whichever ritual resonates with your spirit is exactly how you should move because you're being guided by your inner wisdom. If you're short on inspo, these next few ideas should get the juices flowing!

2. Reconnect with nature. They say if you want to see God, open your eyes. I say if you want to see God, open your eyes in nature . God is all around and will use so many different vehicles to communicate with us; we just need to be sensitive enough to recognize them. So what's my go-to strategy? Focus my intention on connecting to the Divine Feminine within me to create space for the ‘allowing’. This means, activating the flow and connecting with God in nature by utilizing all of the senses. I allow myself to be open to new discoveries or perhaps redefine “beauty.” I allow the ways in which I connect with the Divine to be intuitively-guided, meaning if I feel led to meditate in nature, I do it. If I feel led to ground in the earth (stand, walk or sit barefoot) for 30 minutes, I do it. If I feel led to watch the sunset or stargaze before bed, I do it. If I feel led to hike through the coffee plantations in my beautiful Costa Rican backyard, I do that. My intention is to open myself to all the many ways the Divine will communicate with me… including through encounters with the wind, maybe a feather in my path, or even animal spirit totems . No matter how you choose to center yourself in nature, the importance is that you're present - which will improve your overall well-being over time so GET OUT THERE, GIRL!!

3. Replace negative thoughts or self-talk with the positive. This one is pretty self-explanatory, but if you're anything like me you are your biggest critic so it might take a bit of practice, but you know what they say… practice makes perfect! Thoughts become things, so which would you rather manifest in your life? The negative thoughts about who you think you are in a moment of frustration or disappointment, or more of all the beautifully, amazingly, wonderfully, fabulous things about who you actually are? I'm willing to bet that you would much rather manifest more of the latter and not the former, so get this one in your spirit, Love!

4. De-clutter. Whether you decide to de-clutter your closet or clean out the fridge, removing clutter will raise the frequency of your space because it allows stagnant energy to dissipate - which in turn, uplifts your spirit. Clutter can drain you physically, mentally, emotionally and energetically. It can also make you unhappy or frustrated as you try to move through your day. After de-cluttering, you can also smudge your space with some white sage or palo santo as it further clears negative or stagnant energy. Regardless of how you choose to de-clutter, you should eliminate the things that no longer serve you in all ways and take notice of the difference it makes.

5. Make note of the compliments you receive. Now, I'm sure you've seen the meme… the one where Idris Elba compliments you, and you utter a mental “Okaaaayyyyy, you still got it, Sis," but if it's Flavor Flav you're ready to file a sexual harassment complaint? LOL! I get it, but this isn't necessarily about that so don't let this one stress you out! I mean, of course you can take note of the compliments you receive from your mate or potential suitors, but this also applies to the random stranger that compliments your outfit or your boss who praises you for a job well-done, which means you can enjoy this self-care practice as you work or run errands! Just start taking note of the compliments you receive by jotting them down in a journal, diary, or online folder. Your compliment folder can also include emails, notes, thank you cards, and other things that make you smile. This particular self-care practice will also help you combat negative thoughts (see #2). Moreover, compliments serve as little reminders that you matter, your existence is important, and someone appreciates you.

Whichever rituals you use to create your routine, it’s important to adopt self-care habits that you can enjoy on a regular basis because they’ll help you increase your productivity, avoid burnout, and allow you to enjoy life. And anything can be ritual because it's all about the care with which it's executed and the intention behind it. I'll leave you with this… peace resides within fulfillment so start making time for you today.

Chat Soon, be well!

Essays

Why Grief Makes You a Stranger to Your Own Body

Why do I feel disconnected from my body after loss?

Step one: your body registers the loss

Step two: your attention narrows

Step three: you start to feel less

Step four: the distance becomes a habit

Why more attention isn’t always the answer

Gentle ways to come back to your body

When it needs more support

One thing to notice today

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to feel disconnected from my body after a loss?

Why do I feel like I’m watching my life from the outside?

How long does the disconnected feeling last?

Can pleasure help me reconnect with my body?

The Intelligence of Numbness

Why don’t I feel anything after a significant loss?

What numbness actually is

Why numbness isn’t selective

Why you can’t argue your way out of it

When numbness helps and when it overstays ﻿

Gentle ways to invite sensation back into your body

When it needs more support

One thing to notice today

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal to feel nothing after a death?

Does feeling numb mean I didn’t love them?

How long does grief numbness last?

Can I make myself feel again?

Your Body Knew Before You Did

Why did my body react before I understood what happened?

What's actually happening inside your body

The first response is chemical

The next response is protective

Why you couldn't read your own signals

What this can look like during an ordinary week

Why understanding doesn't automatically change your body

What can help your body begin to soften

Let your exhale last a little longer

Give your eyes somewhere to land

Move something

Add warmth and weight

Practice before you're in crisis

When physical symptoms need medical attention

One thing to notice today

Can grief cause physical symptoms?

Why do I feel numb instead of sad?

How long do the physical symptoms of grief last?

Identity Is the Second Loss

Who am I now that this happened?

The first loss and the second

What disappeared

Who disappeared with it

This isn't a personal failing

Where identity loss hides

Roles

Routines

Reflections

Why “getting back to yourself” is the wrong assignment

What identity is actually made of

How do you rebuild your identity after loss?

Start with preference, not purpose

Let your answers be different

Follow what your body says yes to

Give the current “you” somewhere to be witnessed

Let it take the time it takes

When it may be more than identity disruption

One thing to notice today

Frequently asked questions

Why don't I know who I am after a loss?

Will I ever feel like myself again?

Is identity loss normal after divorce or job loss too?

The Hierarchy of Loss Is Real

Is grief the same for all types of loss?

What your body is actually measuring

Depth

Suddenness

Witness

What the research shows

When numbness helps and when it overstays