EWR :: 11. Allowing grief, sadness, & disappointment
Embodied Writing : Relating, Relationships, & Trauma series
When we remove the cages around our hearts, we are not only opening ourselves to both potential joy and potential grief, we are also opening ourselves to past grief, the grief we stuffed down by not allowing or denying our emotions to flow due to past heartaches.
Grief is an uncomfortable emotion. I don't really know anyone who enjoys grief. Grief can hurt physically, it often brings uncontrollable tears, it can make our whole body and being shake and quake. Grief can shatter us.
And.
We grieve because we loved and because we loved, we lived. We didn't simply survive. We didn't do the bare minimum. We didn't hide ourselves away. We loved and we lived and we experienced the joy and ecstasy and sorrow and pain of it all.
There is beauty in that.
There is beauty in experiencing and living our lives in the fullest ways we are able, which includes both opening our hearts and having them broken.
And.
There is also grief in the work of learning to connect more vulnerably and deeply with others. There is grief in setting down our armor and removing the cages from our hearts. There is grief in letting go of the old ways of being and doing and adopting new ways. There is the grief of having had those old ways in the first place, the grief of the trauma that instigated those ways of being, the grief at all the work we need to do to change those ways, to let the old neural paths atrophy and growing new ones.
And.
There is grief in the disappointment that comes with being in relationship with other humans. They will do things that disappoint us, frustrate us, irritate us. They will have their own wounds that show up. This can awaken sadness in us on so many levels: sadness that they had the experiences they did that influence them; sadness at the "dance" you do with them which stems from each of your wounds; sadness at how much work it all is. Sadness and grief.
I invite you to sit in the discomfort of all this grief. To allow it. To open your heart to it, so your heart can also be open to love, and joy. We can't pretend those people or those events didn't matter to us any longer, because they did. We can't pretend the things we currently experience aren't frustrating, because they are. And that is okay. It is okay that we were and are open and were and will be hurt. We did survive it and we will in the future. Now is the time to allow ourselves to feel all of that, and to stop merely surviving, but instead to begin to move into feeling and thriving.
EMBODIMENT EXERCISES
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