Grief Isn’t Just in Your Mind or Heart; it Lives in Your Entire Body

It’s the knotted muscles in your neck and shoulders. It’s the tightness around your heart. Grief makes a home in your lungs. It rushes to your stomach, turns to heaviness in your limbs, and lingers in your joints like a storm that won’t pass.

Grief doesn’t follow a linear plan to healing.
It arrives in waves, often unannounced, and always unapologetic. You might feel nothing for days. Then one morning, brushing your hair or opening your inbox, it crashes over you like a thunderclap, reminding you of all that is missing from your world.

And you might wonder, What’s wrong with me? The answer is: Nothing. Grief is a full-body experience, and it demands everything of your entire being.

Our emotions aren’t separate from our bodies. Every organ is in a relationship with our emotions. They change your sleep, your digestion, your memory, your appetite, and your ability to be in the world. It floods your nervous system. It’s exhausting and sacred all at once.

As a death doula and someone who sits with deep grief, my own and others, I want to gently remind you: your body is doing its best to carry you through what feels unbearable.

That ache in your chest? That buzzing, numbness, or sense of collapse? It’s love and loss, all speaking through the body.

Let it speak.

Grief work asks us to slow way down and listen quietly. To let the ache move through us, unhindered, without judgment. To express what words alone cannot hold.

To hold ourselves the way held our beloved animal in their final moments, with every ounce of love in our being for them without expectations. Honour grief as a sacred rite of passage of the love that lives on. Not something to fix or rush through, but something to feel, witness and companion.

If you’re in the depths of your emotions during anticipatory grief or after the loss of your soul animal, take this as your affirmation that what you are experiencing is valid, deep, soulful, life-changing, and demanding of your entire being.

Your loss could be from a month ago, six months ago, three years ago or twenty years ago, and grief will still enter the room with you.