It’s impossible to understand spring, until you know winter.

I realize now that I never understood spring. Not in nearly a half-century of
springs. It’s impossible to understand spring, until you know winter. I
I moved from the coast to the mountains after my Love died. Mountain
winters are different, to be sure. The snow piles deep and silent long past the
season when I would have been cooking from my garden in years past. But I
am different too.

How many internal winters have I skipped in my life?

External winters used to be something I pushed through, endured, and resisted.
In winter, I stiffened against the cold and the dark, relieved when coastal
wildflowers began blooming again by late January. My winters were short and
mild, allowing barely a breath between releasing and grasping, again and
again.

How many internal winters have I skipped in my life?

Winter is the place beyond the fear.

Until grief, I never knew that winter is the place beyond the fear. It is the place where reality is what it is. It is the place of nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to be. This is the state itself I lived afraid of long before Don’s illness and death.

I tried to push through life with action instead of stillness and resistance instead of acceptance. I didn’t want to learn what winter had to teach.

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.

The transformative moment comes when so much identity is stripped away that the ego can no longer shelter the fear, and when the rawness of I AM sits exposed.

Mark Nepo writes, “All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.”

That space of nothing becomes everything.

When the internal winter is long enough, dark enough; when the soul is willing enough; when it feels like there is nothing left to do but surrender to the void; In that moment of embrace, that space of nothing becomes everything.

There is no more fear of loss.
There is no more clinging memories or expectation.
There is no more striving.
There is no more fight against what is.

That is the gift of winter.

Swaying quietly in the space between being and doing there is a fullness.

That is the gift of winter.

Winter came later.

The winter of grief didn’t come for me when Don was diagnosed with cancer, during the months of chemotherapy or witnessing the violence of the illness and the treatment. It didn’t even come with his death.

That was autumn. The letting go. Winter came later.

Winter is the pause between exhale and inhale.

When the letting go is strong enough, struggle ceases, sits twitching like a dying animal, finally grows still.

Winter is the pause between exhale and inhale that is neither loss nor receiving, neither letting go nor reaching forward. In modern life, most of us exist on an endless metaphorical hamster wheel, trying to run fast enough to escape that pause, numb our feelings, and escape pain before we can find our center within it.

Winter isn’t sadness. It is the silence that happens afterward.

Winter isn’t sadness. It is the silence that happens afterward, the moment of surrender when peace comes again, when the next intake of air is no longer frantic and grasping, beginning another cycle of hyperventilation. And in the emptiness, as if for the first time, there is fullness.

This is the fullness that opens into the audacious boldness of tulips unfolding when snow is in the forecast, of cherry blossoms braving wind and frost, of birds coming home to to build and nest on a promise of hope. This is spring. Let it be spring.

What has winter made possible for you? How are you opening into spring?

The Edge

“You’re dying.”

Those words are startling to hear, even for someone who is passively suicidal.

“None of what I am doing is working. I suggest you focus on enjoying the time you have left.”

I was speaking with an energy healer. My friend had referred to him, thinking he would be able to help with my deep grief after the death of my husband.

“Your soul wants to be with him, and he is reaching for you too. Soon your energy will become so diffuse that you join him.”

“Okay, thanks?”

I didn’t know what to say. Really, how are you supposed to respond to something like that?

Yes, part of me wanted to die. But the bigger part did not.

What We Don’t Know How to Do

We barely know, as a culture, how to talk about death, or grief, let alone how to guide ourselves, or someone else, back from the edge.

The energy healer was correct that I was too fundamentally altered to be called back to the person I used to be. Five years later, the biggest thing I understand now that neither of us understood that day was that there are other ways of moving forward.

Grief, even intense grief, isn’t a bad thing. He couldn’t bring me back because I was in the middle of a journey that wasn’t finished. The journey mattered, and it was already guiding me forward in important ways.

Grief as a Gateway

In a world that glorifies, and sometimes even necessitates, emotional numbness, grief is a gateway to being human. When we give ourselves to the journey, in darkness we find light, and in death we find life.

Grief has the potential to challenge and transform all the parts of us. Energy, yes. Also emotion, intellect, body, interpersonal patterns, spiritual connections. And the problem is that no one talks about this. For this most universal human experience, there is no universally understood roadmap.

The Map We Do Know

You know the roadmap for other life quests—even if you haven’t named it, you’ve seen it in books and movies, and if you look further back, stories and myths. It’s so pervasive that it is often the way we subconsciously organize our thoughts and approach our own life challenges.

Picture this: An ordinary person is going about life. They receive a call to adventure—something they never expected and probably didn’t want. In following the call they face challenges, are guided by mentors, test their strength and determination, and in the end return triumphant and transformed.

Joseph Campbell named this template the Hero’s Journey in The Hero’s Journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949. He described patterns that had persisted for millennia. Even if you have never heard of Joseph Campbell or his work, you probably resonate with the idea. It’s the framework behind old and new stories like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Lion King, The Matrix, The Percy Jackson series, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Dr. Strange, and more.

Some call it the universal journey of being human.

The Journey No One Gave Us a Map For

The problem is that grief, that other universal journey of humanity, doesn’t fit the template.

The hero’s journey is about becoming powerful through taking action. The hero on their quest takes external steps like fighting monsters and solving problems, in order to bring peace and safety to the kingdom.

It doesn’t work that way with grief. What is the hero supposed to do when the enemy is something as slippery as the nature of humanity, or as immutable as death?

Trying to Bring the Dead Back

There is evidence that we have tried to make the pattern work. Many cultures have myths about heroes visiting the afterworld, seeking to bring back a loved one or to change the governing rules for life and death. The longing is deep enough to form the underpinning for multiple religious traditions.

But for the individual seeker, the Demeter who wants to bring Persephone back from the underworld, the practical possibilities are discouraging. Hope often rests in another realm—beyond the veil of this one—and in the resulting sense of powerlessness mourners may sink into depression—or be consumed by rage.

Wisdom We Were Taught to Ignore

What if we need a different paradigm? A paradigm that better captures the reality of our shared human experience, and that offers a different map for becoming powerful, and a different definition of what that power looks like.

These paradigms have also existed for millennia, especially among the voices of women and Indigenous peoples. Their teachings have long addressed grief, loss, and transformation, yet they have often been devalued or dismissed by dominant cultural narratives. As the global community confronts the consequences of imbalance, disconnection, and an overreliance on conquest-based ways of knowing, the urgency to listen to perspectives that have been historically silenced becomes increasingly clear.

Engaging these traditions requires care. Study and practice must honor those who have walked this terrain before us, with explicit attention to avoiding appropriation or extraction. When we approach grief with a hero’s-journey mindset, we risk carrying an unexamined agenda—to conquer, defeat, overcome, pillage, or deconstruct—rather than to listen, learn, and be shaped by what we encounter.

Wisdom We Were Taught to Ignore

There are differences in the hero’s journey through grief:

The goal is to learn, respect, and become, not to conquer, defeat, overcome, pillage, or deconstruct.

There is an understanding that not every question will be answered in the time we want, in the way we expect.

We understand that we are working with forces that are expansive and powerful, and the knowing we encounter in these realms is vast and sometimes unspeakable.

We are invited into a realm of being rather than a realm of doing.

When we approach the space where lines blur between life and death, ego dissolves, and we experience instead connection, humility, and presence.

The Dragon’s Way

Imagine yourself as a knight, riding proudly home on your stallion, banner sailing after slaying the dragon. You are the victor.

This is the hero’s journey.

Now imagine yourself instead as the dragon’s apprentice. She allows you to travel with her to the secret realms, where you experience what it is to fly, and learn the flavor of fire. You have not conquered her, because her power exceeds your own. Instead, you honor the gift of her presence.

This is the journey grief invites us to take.

An Ancient Map

This map is hard to find, and when we do, it is even harder to understand. It is as though it were written in a foreign language. Each step of the journey is measured, paced by our progress with translation and deciphering, as though we were following an ancient parchment recovered from the underworld, its markings revealing themselves gradually, only as we are willing to linger with them.

What I Wish Had Been Said

Here is what I wish that healer had been able to say to me, years ago:

You are not dying. You are grieving.

Grief can feel like annihilation because it dismantles the structures that once held us. It rearranges the nervous system and softens the boundaries of self. It loosens identity, certainty, and even the familiar sense of time. When grief is deep enough, it can feel indistinguishable from death itself.

But this does not mean you are meant to disappear.

It means you are in an initiation.

Learning to Stay

Growth inspired by grief moves differently. Power is not found in control, mastery, or answers. It is found in capacity: The capacity to stay, to feel, and to hold paradox without resolving it. We reframe progress in terms of relationship instead of victory.

In this experience of profound disconnection, you are learning to be in relationship with absence, with longing, and with love that no longer has a physical home. As you sit with the conflict between love and the limits of form, you yourself are deepened and enlarged.

Sacred Terrain

As the impulse to escape grief—or rise above it, or rush its healing—softens, another landscape comes into view. Grief reveals itself as wild and sacred terrain. In these liminal lands, ego softens, and something older and wiser begins to speak.

This is where the dragon becomes a teacher and the underworld becomes a classroom. What matters here is presence — the willingness to stay, to listen, and to be shaped by what you encounter.

If You Are Here

What I needed then was permission to stay alive inside the pain. I needed someone to trust that grief had intelligence—that it knew where it was taking me, even when I did not.

If you are here now—hovering near that edge—I see you.

The Story Continues

You are learning how to live inside a world that has been irrevocably changed. This learning asks everything of you. It reshapes attention, patience, and trust. It is holy work.

Grief marks a turning in the story, a place where the language darkens and deepens. What is being written now carries weight, texture, and truth born of love.

You are still here.
You are still becoming.

And the story is still unfolding.

This is the work:

to allow the leave to molder

and turn to mush,

the grass to brown

and to see the beauty of it still.

To let your tears rain

In the soft fertile places

Of the heart

Seeing death and life

Intertwined—

Your heart composting

Beauty and loss

Welcoming it all.

Most of us are taught, quietly and relentlessly, that beauty is found in what is alive, green, productive, and growing. We learn to tidy away what is decaying: to rake it up, bag it, and remove it as quickly as possible. Grief, exhaustion, disillusionment, and heartbreak are treated the same way. They are something to clean up, and to get past.

But the natural world does not hurry decay. Leaves fall and soften. They collapse into the soil. They become nourishment for what comes next.

This is the work:

to allow the leave to molder

and turn to mush,

the grass to brown

and to see the beauty of it still.

This is the invitation of grief work—not to transcend loss, but to stay with it long enough for it to transform.

To let your tears rain
in the soft fertile places
of the heart.

Tears are not evidence of weakness or failure. They are water. They soften what has hardened. They seep into the places where feeling has been compacted by survival. When we allow tears without rushing to explain or fix them, they do quiet, essential work beneath the surface.

Seeing death and life
intertwined—

Grief teaches us what our culture resists: that death and life are not opposites. They are companions. Every love carries loss inside it. Every ending reshapes the future. To grieve is to tell the truth about loving.

Your heart composting

beauty and loss.

Composting is not clean. It is slow, dark, and often uncomfortable. Things break down. Identities soften. Certainties dissolve. But compost is not destruction. It is transformation. What we cannot carry forward in its original form is not discarded; it is changed.

Welcoming it all.

Allowing life and trusting the patterns that naturally emerge within and around us shouldn’t feel like a radical act, but it often does. You don’t have to like it, but you can begin to soften into the truth of what is. What would it feel like if you accepted that all parts of the cycle belong—growth, decay, rest, and renewal? If you trusted that even now, life is happening beneath your awareness?

Deepening Practices

If they resonate with you, choose one or more of the following practices to deepen your experience with these ideas. Trust your instincts about what will be helpful for you right now. You don’t need to finish all of these, or any of them. Some might be helpful to work through with a therapist or a friend.

1. Letting the Leaves Fall (Reflective Writing)

• What in your life is asking to be allowed to “fall” right now?

• What are you tempted to clear away too quickly?

• What might happen if you let it soften instead of resolving it?

2. Composting the Heart (Somatic Practice)

Sit or lie down comfortably.

• Place one hand over your heart and one over your lower belly.

• Imagine the center of your chest as rich, dark soil.

• Bring to mind one loss, disappointment, or grief you’ve been carrying.

• Without revisiting the story, notice the felt sense of it in your body.

• Feelings of tension or guarding might indicate that you have been fighting this emotion instead of allowing it to be composted and transformed.

• Soften your body and slow your breath while sitting with this emotion.

• Notice how the sensation shifts as you extend witnessing and acceptance. You may feel an intensification, a release, internal resistance to allowing, or something else.

• Extend the same acceptance to whatever responses arise, allowing them witnessing, warmth, and space for transformation.

• Return to this practice regularly, notice the shifts that happen with practice.

3. Tears as Rain (Permission Practice)

If tears come easily, allow them.
If they don’t, that’s okay too.

Ask yourself gently:

• Where in my body does grief want to land?

• What soft place might receive it?

• What would it feel like for me to allow that?

• Choose an action that allows softening, even if it is just a degree. That might look like dancing, stretching, singing, or sitting in nature. A couple of resources I love are the work of Paul Denison with Grief Yoga and the mindful movement and drumming at Rhythm Bliss (I don’t get any kind of referral benefit for mentioning them).

4. Life and Death Together (Meaning-Making Reflection)

Complete these sentences in writing or silently:

• Something that ended in my life also gave birth to __________.

• Something I am mourning has changed how I love by __________.

• If I trusted the composting process, I might release __________.

Closing

Grief doesn’t need you to be strong.
It asks you to be honest.
To stay.
To soften.
To trust the unseen work happening beneath the surface.

This is the work—not rushing toward spring, but honoring winter soil.
Not choosing beauty or loss,
but letting the heart hold both.

This is the work:

to allow the leave to molder

and turn to mush,

the grass to brown

and to see the beauty of it still.

To let your tears rain

In the soft fertile places

Of the heart

Seeing death and life

Intertwined—

Your heart composting

Beauty and loss

Welcoming it all.

Grief—experienced once—is achingly familiar in its return:

a cold rush,
a sudden narrowing of the room.

Disbelief settling like fog.

Pain spreading slowly:
heavy in the chest,
twisting low in the belly,
dull and vibrating beneath the skin.

Then more quickly:

Breath becomes shallow.
Time loses its edges.

Pain hums everywhere at once:
behind the eyes,
under the ribs,
deep in the places without language.

Sound feels too loud.
Light feels wrong.

The instinct to howl—
to let the sound rip through bone and air—

is countered by a whirlpool of
stillness,
longing for disappearance,
for the mercy of not feeling for a while.

The feeling is terrifying, disorienting, and exhausting.
No one instinctively welcomes grief.

But what if we did?

Gifts of Grief

We aren’t very good at grief as a culture.

We avoid it, rush it, suppress it—whatever it takes not to feel it. And as a result, we get stuck in it. I regularly meet clients who live day to day with overwhelming, raw emotion just under the surface of their lives. So much energy goes into containing what has never been allowed to move that there is little bandwidth left for joy, creativity, or connection.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Grief, when it is allowed, brings gifts. It is not only something to survive; it is something that can transform us.

Over and over again, in my work as a grief therapist and in my own life, I’ve seen grief act as a portal—into authenticity, accountability, and awakening. Grief reminds us of our humanness and asks us to recommit to a bigger, truer vision of what that means.

These are the things America desperately needs right now.

I meet with clients regularly who want help coping, grounding, and otherwise managing their emotions in regards to the current political stage. I’m happy to do that. But there is another truth.

We need to grieve, because we need its gifts.

Grief and Authenticity

American life in the 2020s is busy. Most of us live lives fueled by overwhelm and medicated with distractions. We need the intensity of our emotional responses to tell us what matters most to us.

Much of what we are grieving right now—whether we name it or not—has to do with losses we never expected to have to face:
a sense of safety,
shared reality,
moral clarity,
trust in systems,
or the belief that life would continue more or less as it had before.

Current events are inviting us to weigh assumptions and alliances, to rethink and clarify core values.

I cannot speak to the lived experience of everyone in America. For myself and many of the clients I serve, privilege has in the past provided insulation from the harshness experienced by others in our communities. Grief interrupts that illusion. It asks us to see painful truths, and to be honest about where they settle—in our hearts and our guts.

I also speak with clients who experience the current political environment as deep validation for the sense of disenfranchisement and lack of safety they had been told for years was in their imaginations. Grief feels like a call to trust themselves in ways they were conditioned not to.

For all of us, grief poses deep questions:

Where do we draw internal lines?
Where are the circles we draw, and who is inside them?

Increasingly, it is difficult to engage fully with ourselves if we are not also finding ways to engage with community.

I have seen a growing number of social media posts from people engaging politically in new ways—changing alliances, clarifying positions. National polling data seems to validate this observation.

We need this.

We need to feel deeply enough to define our values—and to act based on them.

Grief and Accountability

Grief invites reflection.

When we slow down enough to feel, we begin to see more clearly—what we are responsible for, what we are not, and what needs to change.

Sometimes grief brings guilt. When that guilt is justified, it can guide repair. When it is not, it can be released. Either way, grief creates the conditions for discernment rather than defensiveness.

We need to be willing to ask:

How did this happen?
How did the collective lifestyle we are living allow this to happen?

Instead of answering these questions with reflexive finger-pointing, grief slows us down. It refocuses the inquiry:

What can I do?

I didn’t personally cause this mess. Neither did you. But we are part of the collective that created it. We need to be present enough—as a nation of individuals—to find responsibility and take action.

Accountability can take many forms.

I have witnessed beautiful variations in my own community—people using suffering as an impetus to create benefit events, donate to food banks, foster animals. These are gestures of humanity, love, and connection that came from feeling too deeply to remain passive.

Even more difficult—and more important—is accepting the call to challenge our assumptions, beliefs, and habits.

There is no single answer to this crisis, unless that answer is to shift the underlying dynamic that feeds it. Our national dialogue has become a competition to silence and dismiss the stories and perspectives of others.

Grief invites us to listen with an intent to understand—to hear each other with openness and humility.

Grief and Awakening

At its deepest level, grief is an awakening.

It brings us into the present moment—into our bodies, our emotions, our values. It asks us not to numb what we feel, not to discharge it impulsively, but to sit with it, listen to it, and understand what it is asking of us.

When we know and tend our own wounds, we are less easily manipulated through them. When we bypass grief, those unexamined wounds are activated again and again—fueling reactivity, judgment, and fear.

Judgment invites defensiveness.
Presence invites dialogue.

Grief teaches us something radical: that self-interest and the good of the whole are not in opposition. They are the same thing. My well-being cannot be separated indefinitely from yours. None of us are free from the systems we participate in.

To grieve is not to collapse.
It is to wake up.

The Cost of Avoiding Grief

When grief is not allowed, it doesn’t disappear—it hardens.

It turns into numbness, ignorance, apathy, or rage. It fuels divisiveness and a failure to truly listen to voices outside our own echo chambers. We focus on deconstruction and criticism without the capacity to imagine what might be built in their place.

Leaving—emotionally, relationally, or civically—begins to look like the only answer.

Underlying all of this is a powerful illusion:
that I am separate.
That my well-being can be indefinitely isolated from the well-being of the community I belong to.
That what happens to them will never reach me.

Grief dismantles that illusion.

It reveals a web of interconnection so vast and intimate that the only way to live well is to act with love, compassion, wisdom, and care.

Whether we like it or not, we exist as a shared community—locally, nationally, globally.

We are all America.

Every one of us is part of what has been created—whether we agree with it or not.

Grief does not ask us to drown in despair.
It asks us to become more human: more honest, more responsible, more awake.

If we can allow ourselves to grieve—fully, courageously, together—we may yet discover that the very thing we’ve been avoiding holds the wisdom we need to move forward.

Companion Practices: Sitting at the Bridge

Grief and trauma often arrive with a sudden collapse of certainty. They can activate deep feelings of powerlessness and disconnection—from our bodies, from meaning, from one another, and even from ourselves. In the face of what cannot be fixed or undone, we may reach instinctively for doing, for answers, for something solid to hold.

Healing, over time, is less about erasing these experiences and more about finding our way back to empowerment and connection. It is a relational process—one that unfolds through presence, attunement, and the slow remembering of our shared humanity. Often, it looks less like forward movement and more like a careful dance: allowing as much truth, sensation, and emotion as our hearts can hold in any given moment.

This dance asks us to honor the humanness of our own responses—fear, love, grief, tenderness—while also recognizing the humanity of those around us. There is no single path through this terrain, only moments of meeting what is here with a little more honesty and care.

The practices offered here are gentle suggestions for that journey. They are not meant to push or force, but to support presence, grounding, and connection as they naturally emerge. Take only what resonates for you. Move slowly, with grace. Let the questions that don’t speak to you wait.

1. Naming the Bridge

Reflective writing practice

Bring to mind a moment—recent or remembered—when you found yourself at the edge of certainty.

Without trying to explain or interpret it, write for five minutes beginning with:

“I am standing on a bridge where…”

When you finish, pause.

Notice:
What becomes clearer simply by being named?

2. The Luxury of

“Doing”

Inquiry + journaling

The question What can I do? can be both a lifeline and a shield.

Consider:

• When has doing helped you survive?

• When has doing kept you from feeling?

Now write two short lists:

What I do to care
What I do to avoid

Hold both with compassion.
Neither list is wrong.
Both reveal wisdom.

3. Somatic Grounding: Staying With

Body-based practice (3–5 minutes)

Sit or lie down somewhere quiet.

Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly.
Feel the weight of your body supported by the surface beneath you.

Without changing the breath, gently name what is here:

• Breath

• Fear

• Love

• Grief

• Not knowing

You don’t need to change your emotions or force them away.
Just be the witness.

If sensations intensify too much, open your eyes and orient to the room.
Let presence be enough.

4. Looking Down / Looking Up

Gentle visualization

Recall the image of looking down on the bridge.

Now imagine—only if it feels safe—lifting your gaze slightly.
Not to find answers.
Just to notice what else is present.

Ask quietly:

• What remains when I stop trying to fix?

• What is still here when certainty disappears?

There is no correct response.
Silence counts.

5. Common Humanity Practice

Connection through reflection

Finish this sentence slowly, allowing multiple endings if they come:

“What binds us is…”

Let your answers be simple.
Ordinary.
Human.

6. The Ground of Compassion

Closing practice

Place one hand on your body—wherever it naturally lands.

Say silently:

• This is hard.

• I am not alone in this.

• Others have stood here too.

Let compassion be the ground beneath the bridge.

7. Witnessing Without Repair

Relational reflection

Think of someone you care about who is hurting.

Ask yourself:

• What would it mean to stay with them without trying to make it better?

Journal or sit with:

• How do I respond when I cannot help?

• What does presence feel like without fixing?

This is as much about self-compassion as it is about relationship.

8. Orienting to Safety

Trauma-informed grounding

Look around the space you are in right now.

Silently name:

• 5 things you can see

• 4 things you can hear

• 3 things you can feel with your body

• 2 things you can smell

• 1 thing you can taste

Then ask:

What is one thing that tells me, in this moment, I am safe enough?

If safety feels inaccessible, adjust the language:

• I am here.

• This moment is different from that one.

• I am breathing now.

Let orientation be a return, not a demand.

9. Closing: Permission to Feel

Integration

Place a hand over your heart and say—out loud or internally:

• I cannot fix everything.

• I cannot protect everyone I love.

• I can stay.

Notice what shifts, even slightly, when permission replaces effort.

Presence is key to individual and collective healing. Presence itself is the work. In allowing ourselves to feel what is here, we participate in a process that is both deeply personal and profoundly shared. This is how connection returns: breath by breath, moment by moment, through the simple courage of staying with what is real.

At 10:16 a.m., the text came.
Maddy fell off the balcony.

Maddy is my youngest granddaughter.
Fourteen months old.
Barely twenty pounds.

I texted back:
What can I do?

It’s a luxury, that question.

My daughter gives me tasks, and I take the steps to complete them:
I cancel my client appointments for the day,
pick up the other children,
bring food and clothes to the hospital.
I am doing something.

I know that, sitting in the hospital with her child, my daughter is asking herself the same thing.
What can I do?
And the answers are less clear.

The emergency entrance at our hospital is located across a pedestrian bridge from the parking area.
Crossing that bridge later, I pause.

There is a space between certainty and fear,
a place between the illusion of control
and the deep understanding that reality, as we perceive it, is fragile.
Life can change, end, or begin in the space of a breath.

I recognize this space.

Crossing the bridge, I see images of other passings across that emotional threshold.
I see the times reality came back into focus.

“Everything is going to be all right,”
I reassured myself and others.
We can go back.
Let’s help each other go back from this place.

And I see the times that it didn’t.

Entering the emergency room, I hear medical staff questioning an older man:
“Do you remember falling?
Do you remember hitting your head?”

I see a middle-aged couple—
tear-stained faces,
vacant eyes,
stunned expressions.

The room is full of people.
I know many of them also crossed an emotional bridge to be here,
in what is now a sacred space.

I look down.

Today, it is too much to be here, together.
Tomorrow, or the next day, I will go back to work as a grief and trauma therapist.
I will sit with people who are on that bridge.

But today, I look down.
And I look for words.

All day, as I move through the tasks on the list,
I search for language to hold this thing—

this thing that binds us in our common humanity
and sometimes feels too heavy to carry.

It is what we fear
in our most private, searing moments.
It is what we face together
in seasons of collective loss and unrest.

It is what we avoid—
consciously and unconsciously—
through numbing of all kinds—
not only substances, shopping, and scrolling,
but the excuses we make,
the stories we tell ourselves,
the way we look down instead of up.

And still—
it is what we need.

The ground of compassion.
The doorway to connection.
The source of meaning, hope, and healing.

It lives beyond words.
Beyond doing.

This bridge of uncertainty asks us to just be:
to be present with the whole truth
of who we are,
of what matters most
and what doesn’t matter at all.

To be present with the strength,
the fragility,
the wonder and the terror.

To be fully human.

Even this searching, I know,
is its own form of doing—
the words a layer of insulation from the emotion.

So, much later, finally home,
I stop trying to do anything at all.

I think of her small body,
fourteen months of wonder,
how life can tilt in a second.

I cannot fix what happened.
I cannot protect everyone I love.

All I can do is stay.

With my breath.
and the fear.
and the fierce love
that makes it all hurt this much.

With this sacred humanity.

I let myself feel.
I cry.

This piece is an invitation to move from reflection into lived experience. These practices are not meant to fix grief or rush healing. They are gentle doorways into presence, allowing winter to do its quiet work inside you. It is written as a companion to Wintering and Grief.

Move slowly. Take what resonates. Leave the rest.

1. The Object of Grief/Winter

Symbolic Reflection Practice

Find an object in your space that feels connected to grief and this season of your life.
It might be:

• Something cold or heavy

• Something soft or protective

• Something broken or worn

• Something natural (a stone, leaf, branch)

Hold the object in your hands.

Study it slowly:

• Its texture

• Its weight

• Its temperature

• Its shape

Ask yourself:

• What part of my grief does this represent?

• What does this object know about endurance?

• What has it survived?

• What would it say to me if it had a voice?

Let answers arise intuitively, not logically.

Integration

• Write a short paragraph beginning with:
  “This object is teaching me…”

• What qualities of this object live inside you?

• What might it be asking you to honor or release?

2. Journal: Let Grief/Winter Speak

Grief can sometimes feel like an enemy. For today, imagine grief as a protective figure who has come into your life as a guide and a mentor.

Grief/Winter:

What do you want to teach me?

What message have I been missing?

What gift do you have for me today?

What is my next step?

3. Creating a Winter Nest

Ritual of Comfort

Choose one small act of intentional coziness today.

Examples:

• Light a candle.

• Wrap yourself in a blanket.

• Make tea or cocoa.

• Sit near a window and watch the sky.

• Turn on soft music.

As you settle in, place a hand on your body and say quietly:

It is safe to rest.

Notice any discomfort with receiving comfort. That, too, is information. Offer kindness to any parts that feel resistant or uncomfortable. Allow them time. This is often an indication of areas where wintering can bring deep healing.

4. Somatic Awareness: Where Grief Lives

Sit or lie comfortably.

Scan your body slowly.

Ask:

• Where do I feel grief today?

• Is it heavy? Sharp? Hollow? Warm?

Place your hand there.

Breathe into that place.
Not to change it.
Just to accompany it.

Stay for a few breaths.

Reflection

• What does this part of me need?

• Can I offer it kindness instead of fixing?

5. The Darkness Inquiry

Complete these prompts:

• The part of grief I avoid most is…

• I’m afraid if I go there, I will…

• What if darkness is not my enemy but my teacher?

• What might I discover if I stop running from it?

6. Poetic Listening

Return to David Whyte’s Winter Grief.

Read it slowly.

Choose one line that speaks to you.

Write it at the top of a page.

Free-write for five minutes:

• Why this line?

• What memory does it touch?

• What truth does it carry for you?

7. Living the Pause

Daily Integration

Choose one way to honor winter this week:

• Cancel one non-essential obligation.

• Take a slow walk without a destination.

• Journal before bed instead of scrolling.

• Sit in silence for three minutes a day.

• Let yourself cry without explanation.

Write:

This week, my winter practice will be…

Closing Reflection

Winter does not hurry.
Grief does not follow a schedule.

Both ask for presence.

You are not behind.
You are not broken.
You are in a season.

Let winter be winter.
Let yourself be human.

How does January feel for you? Is there ever a disconnect between the cultural push towards productivity and new beginnings and an internal pull towards stillness and rest?

This year I have read many references to the concept of wintering, popularized by writer Katherine May. The concept resonates for me, and it points towards even deeper grief-specific applications that I have been exploring since the death of my husband seven years ago.

Self-care is a complicated topic in 2026 America. As a country we bounce between extremes of media-fueled self-indulgence and exhaustion, desperation, and overwhelm. The clients who grace my office are mostly in the second category: beautiful souls who push themselves so hard to be productive that they don’t remember who they are. They struggle to find the bandwidth or the budget for authenticity, and self-nurturing may feel like an abstract and confusing concept.

For them, the concept of wintering is revolutionary. Although it may not feel fully accessible due to cultural, family, and financial pressures, introducing the concept of celebrating quiet, offering comfort, and allowing slow-paced ease and coziness feels like an invitation to finally breathe fully.

I love this. Comfort needs to be celebrated, and to have its place. I support hanging up fairy lights, drinking cocoa, and snuggling into a fuzzy blanket.

Grief has also taught me how to go deeper into what the dark times offer. It’s possible to focus so much on bringing light that we miss the power of darkness. In the context of a cultural fascination with fixing ourselves, escaping pain, and doing it all the space of thirty days of less, we can overlook profound opportunities for healing.

I hope wintering doesn’t become oversimplified in our collective cultural mindset as a form of escapism. Real self-care is more than dressing avoidance up in a cozy cardigan.

Going Deeper into Wintering

In the natural world there are mysterious and essential transformations that happen in winter. For many species of plants, a period of cold is required before seeds can germinate, in a process known as cold stratification. Winter shifts soil patterns of moisture, nutrients, structure, and pest populations in key ways. Biologists even have found that animals who are natural hibernators in the wild may still require a period of winter slow down in captivity—regardless of environmental factors being managed.

It’s not surprising that humans also feel seasonal physical and emotional shifts. The interesting part is how little we do to as a collective to understand and work with these shifts effectively. Most often we brace against natural rhythms instead of embracing and working with them.

The same can be said for how we collectively approach grief. Grief can be understood as a metaphorical winter. It is the pause, the space in between. It is the time when mysterious and essential processes can also happen within us, if we allow the space for them.

Breathing into Winter

Try an experiment with me.

Put one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. Breathe out slowly, and pause mindfully in that space at the bottom of the breath. Don’t rush your inhale.

This space between inhale and exhale represents winter. Metaphorically speaking, it is the void, or the pause. There is a human instinct to be uncomfortable in the sense of emptiness here and to rush the next inhale, but let yourself linger. Allow winter to have its space.

There are processes in your body (which I’ll explain in a moment) that are invisible yet important that happen only here. When you are ready, breathe in intentionally, with no rush. Pause again after inhaling. This is summer. It also has a purpose and a space, no more or less important. When you are ready, exhale slowly and intentionally.

As you repeat this cycle several times you might imagine the pattern of your breath forming a circle, supporting you in a path of internal wholeness that mirrors the external seasons.

Do you notice a sense of grounding as you do this?

Physiologically, an extended exhale followed by a pause causes your heart rate to slow and invites calming alpha waves into your brain. This is a variation of a box breathing, a technique made popular by Mark Devine, who shared how it was part of the stress resilience training he received as a Navy Seal.

On the other hand, breathing that rushes from one inhale to the next has the opposite effect. Imagine someone hyperventilating under extreme stress. This kind of breathing also has an important purpose. We need extra oxygenation in situations like running a sprint, for example. The problem comes when there is a lack of balance, a lack of knowing when or how to slow down.

So how does that relate to grief?

Living the Pause

The coping mechanisms we use for winter—and for grief—often focus on calling in more light. There are winter sports, special lamps, increased activity—and they are all good and helpful.

But equally essential is allowing all the seasons, including all the aspects of winter. Can the quiet of January be as welcome as the sparkle of December?

It can be a time for:

• meditation
• journaling
• stillness
• dreaming possibilities
• celebrating the darkness that comes before possibility has fully taken shape

It can be a time for allowing the human fear that comes when the future is unformed, and instead of letting it rush us, giving the season its time and space.

I moved to a mountain valley in the Rockies after the death of my husband. It was COVID, and social distancing requirements combined with layers of snow and new-community isolation gifted me with hours of alone time I never would have chosen. I think of that time as a long, cold winter.

I remember feeling lost and searching for direction and connection I couldn’t find. And now, years after the fact, I can see how the long, slow embrace of winter did prepare me for the next season.

In stillness there was a slow autonomic reset from the near-panic I had lived in while caretaking my sick husband and trying to manage the complicated aspects of our busy life with a large family and a hobby farm.

I like doing things—having a list to check off. This wasn’t something I could do. It was a way I needed to be, and I could only enter into that state through the quiet unfolding of time.

There was a long, slow, metaphorical exhale and pause as I allowed myself to absorb the magnitude of the loss—not only the death of my beloved, but shifts in career, community, and my core sense of identity. All of that had to unravel before it could be knit together again. I had to step into the void and feel what it was to no longer be in my old life. That’s a terrifying thing.

I experienced a different kind of growth than I had been taught to understand and focus on for my entire life. Instead of having a clear plan with measurable goals, corresponding objectives, and ambitious timelines, I found myself co-creating something I couldn’t fully see with something larger than myself.

The closest analogy I can think of is what it is like to be pregnant, which not coincidentally is the other experience in life that draws us closest to the veil of this existence. Both are periods of profound internal changes that cannot be consciously controlled. They call us into a liminal state of power and transformation.

I was fortunate to stumble into the practice of yin yoga, a slow deep practice that provided a philosophical framework and a physical outlet for understanding the season I was in. It helped me to allow the season instead of fighting it. I will offer yin applications in future posts.

I also rediscovered a love of poetry, which speaks to the soul in ways that prose can’t.

Consider the following poem, Winter Grief, by David Whyte:

Winter Grief

David Whyte

When you find yourself alone in this winter’s narrow light,
when you want to come out of the darkness only to confirm you can return there again.

When you see by a single glance through the misted window that the rain has come to beat on your walls.

When you watch yourself alone and walking,
when you watch yourself alone and remembering so closely what you never wanted to remember.

When everything near to you is too near to you and everything faraway, is still too far away.

Let this wind and this winter and this rain and this weather and all the difficult blessings of the world find you here, walking in the shelter of white walls under the tracery of stone windows in the nest of greenness at the valley floor below a sailing sky between mountains and green fields among centuries of the rested dead.

Let the green that laps at their graves hold your memories in place when they want to slip through your hands.
Let the rest in this rested place rest for you.
Let the birds sing and the geese call and the sky race from west to east when you cannot raise a wing to fly.
Let evening trace your loss in the stonework against a fading sky.

So that you can give up and give in and be given back to,
so that you can let winter come and live fully inside you,
so that you can retrace the loving path of heartbreak that brought you here.

So you can cry alone and be alone so you can let yourself alone to be lost,
so you can let the one you have lost alone,
so that you can let the one you have lost have their own life
and even their own death without you.

So the world and everyone who has ever lived and ever died can come and go as they please.
So you can let yourself not know, what not knowing means.
So that you can be even more generous in your letting go than they were in their leaving.

So that you can let winter be winter.
So that you can let the world alone to think of spring.

When Spring Comes

Spring comes gradually, in spurts that tease and dance, then retreat again. It’s often unclear: will the season last? Or will there be snow again in a week?

Grief is like that.

I recently moved states again, and this time I find myself asking different questions:

• “When did I learn to like too much color on the walls?”
• “When did I start planting fairy gardens?”
• “When did humor and whimsy become part of what I want in my surroundings?”

This is a version of me that didn’t exist in the same way, even before my husband died. Who is she? Where did she come from?

I can’t pin it down exactly. I just know that she was born while I was sitting in the dark.

For deepening practices, consider a paid subscription for access to the companion piece: Practices: Wintering in Grief

Some gifts arrive wrapped in beauty.
Others come disguised as disappointment, fear, or heartbreak.

These practices invite you to explore what it means to receive life as it is—
without forcing gratitude,
without bypassing pain,
without pretending the hard things don’t hurt.

Move gently.
Pause often.
Return whenever you need.

1. The Expectation Inventory

(Noticing what you hoped for)

Purpose
To bring awareness to the expectations shaping your reactions.

Journal Prompts

• What outcome was I hoping for in this situation?

• What story did I tell myself about how this should have gone?

• How does my body respond when reality doesn’t match my expectations?

• What emotions surface when I name my disappointment honestly?

Let yourself write without censoring.
This is not about being “positive.”
It’s about being real.

2. The Gift I Threw Across the Room

(Exploring resistance)

Just like the childhood moment with the doll dress, we all have experiences we’ve mentally tossed away.

Reflect

• What in my life have I rejected because it didn’t look how I wanted?

• What did I need at the time that I didn’t receive?

• Can I acknowledge that need with compassion now?

Optional Prompt

• If I could speak to my younger self in that moment, what would I say?

3. Somatic Awareness

(Where the “no” lives in the body)

Purpose
To notice how resistance shows up physically.

Practice

1. Sit comfortably.

2. Think of something you are currently struggling to accept.

3. Notice:

   • Tightness

   • Heat

   • Pressure

   • Numbness

4. Place a hand on that area.

5. Breathe into it gently.

Silently say:
“Of course this hurts.”
“It makes sense that I feel this way.”

Reflection

• What shifted when I stayed present with the sensation?

• What does this part of my body need?

4. Meditation

(Holding pain and gratitude together)

Purpose
To experience how sadness and appreciation can coexist.

Guided Practice

Close your eyes.
Take a slow breath in.
Long exhale out.

Bring to mind:

• One painful truth in your life

• One small thing you are grateful for

Hold them side by side.

Notice:

• Where does grief live in your body?

• Where does gratitude live?

You are not asked to like the pain.
Only to allow it to exist.

Stay for five breaths.

5. When Gratitude Feels Fake

(Permission to be honest)

Journal Prompts

• What am I tired of being told to “be grateful” for?

• What feels too tender to reframe right now?

• What would real gratitude look like for me—without forcing it?

Gratitude that ignores pain isn’t healing.
Gratitude that walks with pain is.

6. The In-Between Gifts

(Finding what grew in the cracks)

Inspired by your story of financial hardship.

Write

• What have difficult seasons taught me?

• What parts of myself emerged because things didn’t go as planned?

• Who showed up for me when I needed help?

These are not replacements for what you lost.
They are additions you didn’t expect.

7. Choice Point Reflection

(Who am I becoming?)

Prompt

• How has this experience changed me?

• What qualities am I developing because of it?

• Who do I want to become now?

Closing Question

• What small choice can I make today that honors both my grief and my growth?

8. Somatic Closing

(Receiving what is)

Place one hand on your heart.
One on your belly.

Breathe slowly.

Silently repeat:

• “I don’t have to like this.”

• “I don’t have to understand it.”

• “I am allowed to receive this moment as it is.”

Stay for three breaths.

Closing Reflection

Some gifts come wrapped in beauty.
Some arrive disguised as devastation.

You don’t have to call them gifts yet.
You only have to stay open.

Healing unfolds
not because you force it—
but because you allow yourself
to be changed.

When I was a little girl, our family attended a friend’s party every Christmas Eve. It was a magical event—sparkling decorations, trays filled homemade Christmas cookies, crowds of happy people, and holiday carols sung with a guitar. I’m not kidding. It could have been a television show.

It was also—from the perspective of a small child who was anxious to go home and open presents—very long. Sometimes painfully so.

After the cookies were eaten and the songs were sung, the adults liked to linger and talk for what seemed like hours. I remember sitting by our friend’s tree, gazing at their gifts, fidgeting restlessly and longing for something to do.

There was one reprieve my younger brother and me. At a designated time in the evening we were each given one small gift from the hostess. I looked forward to that gift not only with the usual Christmas anticipation, but with a sort of desperation, hoping that it would be something entertaining for the long wait while the adults socialized.

The year that I was about five years old, I opened my gift and found a shiny, white ballerina dress for a doll. It was the most beautiful doll dress I had ever seen.

I threw it across the room and yelled, “I hate it!”

In the awkward silence that followed, my child brain had a realization. I didn’t hate the dress. It was beautiful. Under other circumstances I would have loved it. I was frustrated because I had been focused on a very specific outcome—I wanted a toy I could play with at that moment to alleviate boredom and impatience, and I didn’t have a doll with me that could wear the dress.

I couldn’t appreciate the gift in front of me because it didn’t match the expectation in my mind.

I apologized, of course, and the next Christmas my mother made sure I brought a toy with me to the party. But the lesson of that night has unfolded in broader ways in the intervening years.

I know what you might be thinking. This is a simplistic example—and you’re right it is! But bear with me. I have slowly learned that the underlying principle—accepting life for what it is and choosing to grateful even when it isn’t what I expected—brings healing to much more complicated and painful circumstances. We’re about to go deeper.

It’s All A Gift

Fast forward a few years.

I was a young mother struggling with financial adversity. Our family had recently moved to a new state. We were renting an apartment while waiting for our old home to sell, except it wasn’t happening.

We had the house under contract 5 different times, and each time the sale failed. Then the water heater malfunctioned in our absence, causing a flood that required a trip home and expensive repairs.

Then the insurance company didn’t want to provide continued coverage because the home was vacant.

Then the mortgage company discovered we were no longer living in the home and threatened to foreclose, since the terms of our loan specified that the house be owner-occupied.

And all this time we were paying both rent and mortgage payments, which was draining our limited savings.

One day I felt so beaten down and discouraged that I fell on my knees and just cried.

And in the midst of those tears, I felt quiet, firm inspiration speaking to me,

It’s all a gift.

The message was so unexpected that it stopped me short.

A gift?

What, this?

How?

In that moment the memory of my childhood Christmas lesson came back to me. I could relate to the part about being disappointed, but at first I couldn’t see how the financial stress that was making me crumple compared to a pretty doll dress. So, I asked myself what beautiful thing could possibly come of this difficult chain of experiences.

When I let myself look past my fear and frustration, I came up with a whole list of beautiful things. None of them were the things that I had had in mind we began the process of selling our home, so I hadn’t really thought about them before.

Patience. Humility. Compassion. An increased connection to the family and friends who reached out with kindness to help us in various ways.

Most of the things that really matter in life don’t come when your carefully made plans unfold on schedule. They come in the in-between places. They come from the times when you feel lost and discouraged. They come from the times that you have to make a choice to believe in love and hope and goodness, even though the world isn’t speaking those things back to you.

They are the perfect gift that you aren’t prepared to receive.

The hard times are not an interruption to what life is supposed to be. They are the heart of it. Those are the times that allow us to become our best selves.

Of course, that’s easy to say when the challenge is small, or even moderate. But what about those experiences in life that leave you feeling gutted? When life slams you to the pavement so hard that you aren’t even sure you can keep breathing? Those are the times you need gratitude the most.

When Gratitude Isn’t Pretty: Making it Real

Let’s be real.

When the hardest times of your life hit, it’s not all unicorns and rainbows.

Being grateful for a Christmas gift you didn’t want is one thing. Being grateful for the loss of a loved one or a traumatic experience is something else.

When the love of my life was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I might have spit in your face if you suggested to me that I should be grateful.

(Okay, probably not really. But I would have felt like it.)

And in retrospect, I stand by that sentiment. Too often well-meaning friends oversimplify deep pain.

Look on the bright side. It’s all for the best. Stay positive.

None of those statements allow pain to be heard and listened to, so following that advice could at best serve as a band-aid over a gaping wound.

Glossing over grief does damage by preventing the healing that could have occurred if those feelings were acknowledged and processed.

So feel your grief. Let it be what it is. And in the midst of all of the complexity that is grief—loneliness, anger, hurt, shame, fear, and everything else—also allow the moments of grace and clarity that will slip in—maybe almost unnoticed at first—before they disappear again into the pain. Let them light the way towards something new and powerful.

The kind of healing that gratitude brings is deep, raw, and real. It isn’t covering up the truth with platitudes. It is letting yourself feel the pain, listen to it, and learn from it.

It’s understanding that you don’t have to hide the hurt or mask it or try to force it away before it is ready to go.

It’s allowing space for sadness and anger, but also choosing to appreciate the unexpected gifts that come with even the deepest hurt, knowing that all of these can exist at the same time.

It’s trusting healing to unfold within you as you open to your experiences.

It’s realizing that there is space in your heart for sadness and joy, simultaneously, and choosing to live deep enough to experience both.

So What Does that Actually Look Like?

I’m still figuring it out, to be honest. There are ups and downs, and the goal of living in joy has often been aspirational for me—something I hit on the good days. But you know who my best example is? My late husband.

Watching the effects of cancer on a loved one is tough. Don’s physical decline was real, and it eventually killed him. But weirdly enough, in the last year of his life, he was the most joyful I’d ever seen him. His face literally glowed. The kids and I used to whisper about it when he left the room. “Did you see that? What does it mean?”

I wish it had meant that he would beat cancer and live to an old age. That didn’t happen. What did happen is that he somehow worked with the cancer, befriended and lived with more integrity and fullness in that year than any other I’ve seen. His mental focus shifted to align more clearly with his deepest priorities. He grieved, yes. Especially at the thought of leaving me a widow and the children fatherless. But I wtinessed more joy in him that year than all the other more comfortable years.

Accalimed poet Andrea Gibson’s extensive writing about gratitude in grief put words to what I witnessed in him. I especially love her poem, When Death Came to Visit. I’m grateful to her for putting words to what I witnessed.

As for me, the one left behind, it’s been a slower process. I don’t think anyone was whispering about the light in my eyes most of the time when I left the room as I grieved. More likely they were worried about me. But this reluctant partnership with grief, the friend I never wanted, has brought compassion, appreciation, and a deep presence in my own life. I’ll be writing in more detail about these gifts of grief in future posts.

The Choice That Changes Everything

Some experiences are too big, too important, too impactful to leave you unchanged. I will never again be the person who I was before my husband died.

There’s nothing I can do about that. I can’t go back in time and magically change the results of his CT scan or the way that his body responded to chemotherapy. I can’t change how much he meant to me, or to our six children. I can’t change how devastating his loss was for all of us.

The only thing I have control over is how that experience will change me for the future. I can become stronger, gentler, wiser, and more compassionate. I can develop an increased appreciation for the people I care about, and for life itself.

None of that will bring my husband back. And honestly, given the choice, I would pick him over personal growth a thousand times over.

But I don’t have that choice. And staring relentlessly at a door that will never open would be enough to destroy me.

So, I am learning to make the choice that changes everything.

Each day I look for gifts, and I choose to be open to receiving them.

For deepening practices linked to the ideas in this post, check out the companion piece here

Your pain is so big, so overwhelming. It’s natural instinct to fight it.
And still… there is another way.

These practices are not about bypassing grief or making it disappear.
They are invitations to step into the eye of the storm—that quiet place your story points toward—where tenderness, truth, and breath coexist.

Move slowly.
Skip what feels too much.
Come back whenever you need.

1. The Practice of Radical Acceptance

(“It is what it is.”)

Purpose:
To soften the exhausting battle against reality and conserve your energy for living.

Exercise

1. Sit somewhere comfortable.

2. Place one hand on your heart, one on your belly.

3. Take three slow breaths.

4. Gently name what is happening right now:

   • “I am grieving.”

   • “I am exhausted.”

   • “I miss them.”

5. After each statement, whisper:
   “It is what it is.”

Not as resignation.
As truth.

Journal Prompts

• What am I fighting against right now?

• What would change if I stopped arguing with reality—even for 10 minutes?

• Where in my body do I feel resistance?

2. Standing in the Eye of the Storm

(Finding stillness inside chaos)

Purpose:
To access your inner calm even when the outer world feels unbearable.

Visualization

Close your eyes.

Imagine a massive storm around you—wind, rain, noise, destruction.

Now picture yourself stepping into the center.

The storm still exists.
But here… it is quiet.

Ask yourself:

• What does this calm place feel like?

• Is it warm? Bright? Soft? Spacious?

Rest here for a few breaths.

Reflection

• Where have I already experienced small moments of peace?

• What helps me return to myself when everything feels too much?

3. Mindful Noticing

(Beyond “good” and “bad”)

Purpose:
To widen your awareness so grief is not the only thing you feel.

Practice

For one minute, notice:

• One sound

• One sensation in your body

• One color in the room

• One small neutral or pleasant thing

Do not label it good or bad.
Just… notice.

Journal Prompts

• What did I observe that surprised me?

• Where do I still experience tenderness?

• What small beauty did I almost miss today?

4. The Meaning Inquiry

(“This is the meaning.”)

Purpose:
To explore what this season is teaching you—without forcing answers.

Write Freely

• What might this pain be shaping in me?

• What parts of myself are growing stronger?

• What matters more now than it did before?

You are not required to like the answers.
Only to listen.

5. Gratitude Without Guilt

(Honoring both love and loss)

Purpose:
To let gratitude coexist with grief—not replace it.

Exercise

Complete these sentences:

• I am grateful I got to…

• I cherish the memory of…

• I never realized how much this mattered until…

Let tears come if they need to.
Gratitude can ache.

6. The Sacred Witness Practice

(Letting yourself be held)

Purpose:
To offer yourself the same compassion you offered your loved one.

Close your eyes and imagine:

• Someone sitting beside you

• Not fixing

• Not rushing

• Just staying

Ask:

• What do I need right now?

• What would it feel like to receive comfort?

Place a hand over your heart.
Stay for three breaths.

7. A Letter From Peace

(Integration exercise)

Prompt

Write a letter to yourself from the part of you that already knows peace.

Start with:

Dear me,
I know you are hurting…

Let it flow.
You may be surprised by what emerges.

Closing Reflection

Peace does not mean the storm is gone.
It means you have learned where to stand.

You are allowed to:

• Grieve deeply

• Love fiercely

• Rest when it hurts

• Find beauty anyway

There is peace beyond pain.
And you are already walking toward it.

Journaling Prompts: Grief as Unfolding

1. Naming the Invisible Losses

Grief often lives beneath the obvious.

• What losses in my life have gone unnamed or unrecognized?

• Are there expectations, identities, or imagined futures I quietly mourn?

• What versions of myself feel especially tender to remember?

Optional follow-up:
Write a brief letter to one of these “unlived selves,” offering acknowledgment rather than correction.

2. Where I Learned to Rush

Our culture teaches urgency around grief.

• What messages did I absorb about how long grief is “supposed” to last?

• Who modeled grief for me—explicitly or implicitly—and how?

• Where do I feel pressure (internal or external) to move on?

Body check-in:
As you write, notice where urgency or constriction shows up in your body.

3. Abandonment in Grief

Loss is often layered.

• In what ways did others step back when I needed closeness?

• In what ways did I step away from myself?

• What did I most need that went unmet?

Gentle reframe:
What would it sound like to offer yourself now what was missing then?

4. Being Rewritten

Grief changes us, often quietly.

• How has grief altered my values, priorities, or sense of meaning?

• What parts of me feel softened? What parts feel stronger?

• What has grief taught me that nothing else could have?

5. Dancing With Grief

Resistance and relationship are different postures.

• What does “dancing with grief” mean to me personally?

• When do I feel in rhythm with grief, and when do I feel at odds with it?

• What helps me stay present when waves rise?

Creative option:
Describe grief as a dance partner. How does it move? What does it ask of you?

6. Grief as Love’s Shadow

Loss reveals what mattered.

• Who or what do I grieve because I loved deeply?

• How does love still show up through my grief?

• What becomes possible when I allow grief to remain connected to love?

Deepening Exercise: The Becoming Place

Purpose: To shift from “getting through” grief to listening to how it continues to shape you.

Step 1: Ground

Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Take three slow breaths.

Step 2: Reflect

Complete the following sentences slowly, without overthinking:

• Grief is still teaching me…

• Love is asking me to…

• I am becoming someone who…

Step 3: Integrate

Ask yourself gently:

What wants to unfold next—not be solved, but be allowed?

Write whatever comes, even if it feels incomplete.

Closing Reflection

If grief is not something to finish, but something to live with—
what kind of relationship do I want to have with it?

If so, this is your space.

Our culture has grief all wrong. We approach it (if we can’t find a way to avoid it!) with something like caution, fear, or even distaste. It scares us, makes us uncomfortable, interrupts the flow of what we would rather be doing. The message is that we should be able to wrap grief up as quickly as possible and move back into the typical routine of life. It’s as though the goal is to remain as untouched as possible by those experiences in life with the potential to help us become deeply human.

One of the most common complaints I hear as a grief therapist is that my clients feel abandoned by their people. I experienced the same thing in my personal life. Friends who I expected would support me in pain slipped out of my life, compounding the levels of loss and mourning.

Worse yet, we may even abandon ourselves in grief, by pushing away the feelings that seem too big to sit with.

That approach underestimates the nature of grief.

After my husband died seven years ago, I wrote about early grief—the rawness and intensity, the ferocity of that pain. Many people resonated with those words, corresponded with me, and followed my blog.

Then I took a break from writing.

I needed to sit with what all of it meant for me. Did I want to write about grief forever? I knew that I could not stay with my experience of grief, in that form, indefinitely. I also knew that I couldn’t just move on from it either. I was changing in fundamental ways. Grief was rewriting me in ways I couldn’t yet articulate.

The answer I am growing into is that grief is an unfolding. When processed, held, and honored, it becomes an opening of heart, mind and experience. And the question I am growing into is this: What does it look like as mourning resolves, but grief continues? What happens when grief becomes less about bracing, rawness and emptiness, and more about the beauty of the space that has been created?

I have heard it said that all therapy is grief therapy. We grieve not only obvious losses like the death of a loved one. We grieve for unmet expectations, for hopes that don’t materialize, for opportunity cost and the times the world falls short of our ideals. We grieve abstract yet profound losses—versions of ourselves we never became, relationships that could not be repaired, and moments of safety, belonging, or innocence that were interrupted or never fully formed.

Learning to dance with grief instead of to fight or avoid it is a radical act of trust in self and source in this world of constant change.

Seven years ago, I wrote about my late husband’s dying insights, when weak and exhausted, he struggled to finish the sentence, “This is the meaning. . .” The meaning he discovered was love.

The more I am able to dance with grief the more capacity I have for all the manifestations of what love is. When I try to rush, compartmentalize, or escape from grief, the result is emptiness.

This substack is a space for grief. And for love. If you are interested in conversation about what grief looks like in evolution, it is also a space for you.

Welcome.

For deepening practices linked to the ideas in this post, see the companion post here.

You’ve tried to push it away.

Tried to deny it.

Tried to wrestle it down in the mud and hold it still until it stops kicking.

Nothing works.

No matter how much you fight against what cannot be.

Will not be.

Must not be.

The tougher you fight, the tougher the pain fights back.

But what if there is another way? A way that actually brings relief?

My Surprising Role Model of How to Find Peace

My husband Don died of cancer. He was only 45 years old. He left six children behind.

I grieved hard for the ten months between his terminal diagnosis and his death.

I wandered the grocery store sobbing each week, eyes blurred too much to read the labels of the food I had no desire to eat.

I lost so much weight that my children started buying me food with their spending money.

I broke down sobbing in the middle of my job teaching college classes.

I sat up all night researching alternative treatments on the internet.

None of them worked.

I couldn’t see a path to living with peace again.

Ever.

Heck, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to live.

“Maybe I’ll be one of those people who just burns down the house while I’m inside,” I told Don in a moment of desperation.

Turns out he would be the one to show me how to heal.

The Beginning of My Journey Towards Healing

Don suffered not only his own fear and grief as his illness progressed, but also physical pain. The nights were the worst. In his final months he was often up past two am — sometimes all night — pacing, rocking, climbing in and out of bed, in and out of a hot bath, all to try to find some comfort.

Mostly I waited up with him those long nights.

In the early morning hours after one particularly agonizing stretch, he sat up and said,

There is peace beyond pain.

Then he shut his eyes.

His ability to communicate was gone.

I was fascinated.

Jealous.

Perplexed.

At that point Don was often either out of his head with pain or groggy from pain medications. His comment hadn’t felt like confused ramblings, though. I felt that he had been trying to tell me something important — even he couldn’t explain it, either that night or the next day.

And so I began a quest to understand what the heck he was talking about. And hopefully, to find my own peace beyond pain.

The First Clue to Finding Peace

The first clue came during another long night.

I sat cross-legged next to him on the bathroom floor, computer on my lap. He rocked back and forth, hunched over in pain. I rubbed his back with one hand and tried to complete an assignment he was worried about finishing for his job for him using the other.

He smiled up at me and said,

Love is a beautiful thing.

What?

I mean, sure. It is.

I get that.

If I am ever awake night after night in intractable pain, I would like to have someone willing to sit up with me too.

But I wasn’t thinking about beautiful things. I was thinking about exhaustion and grief and frustration.

And that was my first breakthrough realization for finding peace beyond pain.

It’s where you put your focus.

Positioning Yourself for Peace

You’ve heard of that calm spot smack in the middle of a tornado or a hurricane.

The eye.

Turns out, there can be the same place of stillness in a storm of grief, disappointment, or physical pain.

Even if the gales still rush and roar and whistle. Even if they still inflict major damage. You can stand in that space, and there is calm.

I’m not saying I stopped grieving.

But something in me shifted as I unraveled what he was talking about. There was stability under my feet. There were moments of joy, along with the overwhelming sadness. There was peace.

I was standing in the eye of the storm.

Finding the eye of a pain storm is different than finding the eyes of a wind storm. It’s not about positioning yourself geographically. It about positioning yourself mentally.

There are three key steps to doing that.

Learning the Five Magic Words: The First Step to Positioning Yourself for Peace

It is what it is.

Practice saying that to yourself.

It is what it is.

There are a whole lot of complicated psychological and medical and religious theories that boil down to these five simple words. Here are a few:

• Psychologists teach that the first step to dealing with suffering is something called reality acceptance. The idea is, the more you fight against what is, the more unhappy you make yourself. Once you accept what is, you can find ways to problem solve.

• Labor coaches teach expectant mothers not to fight against labor contractions. Fighting makes the pain worse. Instead they coach mothers to ride the flow and work with their bodies.

• Buddhists believe that there are four noble truths that explain — and heal — suffering. The first of these? Accept that life is suffering. Until then you can’t move past it.

• Christians learn to trust God, and to surrender to His will, as the path to healing.

Whatever way you spin it, I had been doing the opposite.

Can you blame me?

Lose the love of my life?

Raise my children without a father?

Oh heck no.

But saying it is what it is doesn’t mean you stop doing everything you can. I could still go to doctor’s appointments. I could still cook healthy meals and research alternative treatments and try to help him beat the odds. I could still love him with every ounce of my soul.

The difference was, I did those things from a place of peace.

He didn’t have to see me cry every time he looked at me. My children didn’t have to sit up at night wondering if their mother would be able to hold it together enough to take care of them. Standing in the eye of the storm, I was better able to do everything I could to help.

There is power in acceptance. That is also why the second step to positioning yourself for peace works.

Mindfulness: The Second Step to Positioning Yourself for Peace

If you’re anything like me, you probably aren’t very good at being mentally present.

Who can blame you?

You’re busy.

Emails.

Texts.

Social Media notifications.

And besides technology there’s all the general life stuff to remember, organize, do.

You multitask as a survival skill.

Add in serious pain of any kind, and most of us start walking through life in zombie mode. You don’t really experience much of anything.

A side effect of that is that you also judge — things, events, people — as quickly as you perceive them. You don’t so much savor moments as categorize them.

But good and bad miss so much of the nuance of what actually is.

Like my late nights with Don.

When I was categorizing, that experience got labeled bad. And why not? It disrupted my routine and limited my sleep. It was frustrating and painful for me to see Don struggling. That’s all bad, right?

Sure. But there was also peace and beauty in those late nights. And sharing that experience added to the strength and depth of our relationship.

Good.

Don perceived those things because he savored the experience. Love is a beautiful thing.

And because he made room for all the nuances of the experience — the richness and love entwined with the suffering — he found meaning in it.

Finding the Meaning

Shortly before his death, Don asked everyone but me to leave his hospital room. When we were alone he said, “I understand. This is the meaning.”

Looking around the hospital room, I asked him “What do you mean? What is the meaning?”

Was he talking about sickness? Suffering? Was he describing some spiritual vision only he could see? Don was too weak to answer.

Later that day I tried again, “What is the meaning?”

This time he responded. “Love.” And then he asked me, “Do you understand?”

“I think so.” I smiled at him. “Love is a beautiful thing.”

He squeezed my hand.

And then, after a long silence, he added, “And life.”

That perspective was something that I needed to hear after weeks of sitting in a dark room both night and day, missing my children who were struggling in my absence, watching my beloved suffer and decline.

He was telling me that these wrenching moments are part of the purpose of life, not an interruption to it. They form the tapestry of our love, made more perfect for all the shades and colors and contrasts of the pattern. Is our love story more or less beautiful for the tenderness and difficulty and sacrifice of his final months?

Of course, it’s hard to think that way when you’re still fighting the pain. That’s why it’s time instead to open to the gifts the pain is offering you.

Gratitude: The Third Step to Positioning Yourself for Peace

Pain — whatever its source — always brings gifts.

Gifts of meaning. Gifts of perspective. Gifts of growth.

Give yourself permission to find them.

To unwrap them.

To give thanks for them.

Don and I were high school sweethearts. I delighted in the process of growing older together. I loved that I knew him as a teenager, barely able to grow facial hair, and that I witnessed the physical and emotional changes that maturation brought.

I knew the twenty-something Don, the thirty-something Don, the forty-something Don.

I loved to stroke his beard and feel the way it became thicker over the years. I traced the streaks of red that highlighted that beard, until they turned to streaks of white.

I imagined him in a Santa suit in another twenty years, with the full natural white beard to match.

I looked forward to experiencing old age together.

We’ll never get to share that now.

But I did get to share his final journey.

I held his beloved body through all the stages of cancer.

I sat with him through chemotherapy and immune therapy treatments, and their aftermath.

I lay next to him in his hospital bed when he struggled to breathe and coughed blood onto my cheek.

And at the end, when he didn’t remember where he was or what was happening, he heard my voice, and leaned toward me, and let me comfort him.

It was a sacred, holy journey.

And I am grateful.

Claiming the Promise of Peace

Merciless. Unremitting. Intractable.

Pain.

It grips your your lungs. Wrenches your throat.

The line between physical and emotional blurs as you fight back — thrashing, struggling.

Determination hardens your gut. You resist the pain that must not be.

Until you stop.

Stop the fight. Stop the fear. Stop writhing in futile resistance and stand strong.

There is a place of calm.

A place where you can breathe.

A place where you feel beauty and goodness and hope unfolding.

You embrace them.

The battle subsides.

Relief comes.

There is peace beyond pain.

For deepening practices, see the companion post here.