Tending to our Grief

This is my tenth year of business offering spaces, experiences and resources with Intuitive Self. What I love about this work is how much it grows and evolves as I grow and evolve. The last decade of my life has seen so much and it is through these practices, these body based expressive therapy modalities that have supported me to feel safe, to reconnect with my body and to be able to be present with rising emotions.

When in the depths of my grief and different seasons of going fallow, I searched for community support groups that tend to our grief. Grief without resolve, that comes in waves. Grief that yearns to be felt, acknowledged, revered.

There is so much that stops us from feeling our grief, from making time to be with our grief and all the shapes and forms it takes on. We can disconnect from our grief, suppress our emotions, look to numb or distract ourselves. Feel isolated in our experience because others don’t know how to be around us, what to say, they are uncomfortable so we may fall into old habits of appeasing them. We may have experiences where we’ve felt dismissed, undermined, brushed off. 

What I have learnt is that we need to feel safe in our bodies and safe in our environment and relationships to be able to give our grief the space it deserves and longs for to be felt. When we can have safely held and supported containers, we can meet the grief and the waves with love, with compassion, with tenderness. With a curious willingness to see what it needs. We can tend to ourselves and allow the grief to shift through being present with it, meeting it through the body, meeting it creatively. Allowing the heaviness to be lighter, the sacred to be more known to us. 

I just dived into beautiful conversation with Brad Morrell on his Grief Observed podcast. Brad is a licensed counsellor who specialises in Grief counselling. 

Our conversation spanned some of our lived experience of grief, what we have come to know and appreciate about the gifts of this space, and how we can grow our capacity to feel and meet grief through body based expressive healing. 

You can listen to our conversation here

If you are moving through the waves of grief, are seeking supportive spaces to tend to different aspects of your grief, or long for sacred containers to be creatively in ritual with yourself, I invite you to join me for my monthly Grief Tending spaces, held online Saturday mornings.

More information here