Recognizing Your Grief

I am noticing more and more opportunities these days to tend to our grief. There is so much to grieve.

But we don’t always know what grief looks like or how it moves through the body. We often think grief is crying or sadness, but grief has many faces. Sometimes we are grieving and don’t even know that grief is what we are carrying.

Here are a few ways I have learned to recognize grief along the way.

Sadness: Grief shows up as sadness. Sometimes it is a subtle sadness that sits underneath everything. Sometimes it is a deep sadness that won’t go away. Sadness is one of the ways grief asks to be felt.

Depression: Grief turned inward with no place to go. Grief needs movement. It needs somewhere to go and someone to be with us while it moves.

Anger: I believe anger is unprocessed personal grief. Whenever I am angry, I have learned to ask myself: What needs to be grieved? What needs to be let go of? What am I holding that needs somewhere to go?

Rage: I believe rage is unprocessed communal grief. Rage feels different in the body than anger. Rage can feel like an explosion moving through us.

Rage is bigger than our individual story.

Sometimes what is moving through my body is mine, and sometimes I am touching something that belongs to my family, my ancestors, my community, or the collective. Rage uses us as a conduit to move what the community has not yet been able to grieve.

This is why we cannot understand all grief as individual.

Some grief belongs to us.

Some grief belongs to our people.

And sometimes it is impossible to separate the two.

The Body Knows

Our bodies are pretty wonderful. They are always communicating with us. They give us lots of ways to release our grief—lots of ways to move the stuck water in our bodies.

The more I listen to my body, the more I learn how it tells me that there is grief that needs tending.

Watery Eyes: My eyes will sometimes start to leak when there is grief in me that I am not tending to. I may not even feel sad. My body knows before my mind does.

Water is trying to move.

Congestion: When I am congested, I sometimes literally experience grief as stuck in my body. Something is not moving. Something needs release.

I have learned not to always ask, What is wrong with my body?

Sometimes I ask, What is my body trying to do for me?

What I Do About It

Call a friend: Wounding happens in community, so healing has to happen there too.

We need each other.

Sometimes grief needs a witness. Sometimes it needs someone who can sit beside us without trying to fix it, explain it, or make it go away. Invite someone into your grief. Let yourself be witnessed.

Create a ritual: Ritual gives grief somewhere to go.

Create a ritual to help you release what you have been holding onto. Light a candle. Speak a name. Burn something. Bury something. Put something in the water. Sing. Pray. Cry. Sit in silence.

What I love about ritual is that you can’t mess it up. You don’t even have to believe it will work.

Doing it is your faith gesture.

Take a salt bath: Get in the water.

Let the salt and the water help move some of what you have been carrying. You don’t have to understand everything that is leaving. You don’t have to have words for all of it.

Let the water do some of the work.

Dance. Walk. Move: Grief needs movement.

It is hard for things to stay stuck in the body when the body is moving. And being busy isn’t the same as moving. Often our busyness is what keeps us from feeling.

Give yourself over to movement.

Dance. Walk. Rock. Shake. Sway.

Let your body move in the way it knows to move.

Attend a grief gathering: Grief was never meant to be carried alone.

Nzuzu offers a quarterly online Grief and Praise Circle. We gather in community to give our grief somewhere to go.

Join us.

There is nothing wrong with grieving.

Grief is part of how we love.

Grief is part of how we remember.

Grief is part of how we release.

And grief is part of how we make room for what comes next.

By Quanita