Resurrecting the Lost Technology of Grief
Shaping Water (part 3)
Grief isn’t a stage you “get through.” It’s a living technology — a force that dismantles and remakes us. Here I share how grief works on the body, the spirit, and the community, and why learning its language is key to healing.
“Breathing slowly, mechanical heartbeat
Losing contact with the living
Almighty TV plugged, hybrid empty brain
Don’t see anything real in the game
The tension is building constantly
No reason, just a reflex I have, driven by clockwork
I try to keep an eye open, and I realize
I haven’t closed my eyes in a long time”
-Joe Duplantier, The Art of Dying
This may be the most important post I’ve written about trauma and also the one I feel least equipped to write. I don’t have a theory to lean on, only raw observations from five years of intense healing.
Grief is deeply misunderstood in our society. We don’t respect it, we don’t practice it, and we rarely give it space. Instead of grieving, we run from pain by distracting, consuming, chasing, numbing and blaming.
Something Missing
Our culture doesn’t truly understand grief. What we teach is shallow, fragmented, and incomplete.
Take the best-known model: Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It misses critical dimensions:
The freeze response — the nervous system’s first reaction before the mind can process.
The role of embodiment and ritual — movement, somatic release, and ceremony are essential ways to metabolize pain.
The need for integration and meaning-making — seeing how loss reshapes identity, purpose, relationship to life.
The importance of community — grief witnessed, shared, and turned into contribution.
The cyclical nature of grief — returning again and again, with new depth each time.
Above all, it frames grief as an individual, passive, and temporary process — something to “get over” — when in truth, it’s communal, active, and lifelong.
My Story with Grief
I grew up with a narcissistic and abusive father. Like many children in such homes, I froze, adapted, and disowned parts of myself just to survive. Grief became the only way to undo the damage.
I grieved the little boy frozen in terror.
I grieved his unmet needs: not being seen, accepted, affirmed, valued, encouraged, held or supported.
I grieved being gaslit, guilt-tripped, blamed, exploited, betrayed, abandoned, neglected, abused, terrorized, deprived.
I grieved the self-sabotage and self-neglect that followed.
I grieved the childhood, youth, and manhood I never got to live — the stolen years, the wasted life.
I grieved the relationships I turned away from, and the love I couldn’t let in.
I grieved the creativity, curiosity and empathy that were blocked.
I grieved for the people who denied, justified, and perpetuated violence.
To me, grief was not just bereavement. It was a resurrection.
The Purpose of Grief
Grief isn’t just sadness. It is the body, heart, and soul metabolizing loss and weaving it into a story. Its purpose is to bring us back to life:
To release old pain.
To rediscover belonging.
To reconnect with innocence and life force.
To choose who you are on your own terms.
To reclaim your true voice.
To make the unconscious conscious.
To align with purpose and fulfillment.
In the case of childhood trauma, to learn to give yourself the love you were denied.
To stop anger, sadness, shame, guilt, and fear from running your life.
To return to presence, peace, and focus.
In short: to restore the nervous system — body, mind, and soul — to its natural rhythm.
How Grief Manifests
Grief is a whole-body experience: nervous system dysregulation, disrupted sleep, appetite changes, deep fatigue, agitation.
It’s a dismantling process: old identities, attachments, and ways of being have to die.
It’s a meaning-making process: if given space, grief eventually reveals what we value most and reorients us toward life.
It’s cyclical, not linear, you don’t “get over it,” you spiral through it, each time with a little more capacity and perspective.
Expressions of the Need for Grief
Grief wears many masks. Naming them helps us see that we are not “broken” when it shows up:
Emotional: sadness, longing, rage, guilt, despair, numbness, even joy or ecstasy.
Physical: heaviness in the chest, lump in the throat, exhaustion, tremors, chronic pain, illness.
Behavioral: withdrawal, avoidance, addiction, compulsive activity, clinging, bursts of creativity.
Spiritual: questioning meaning, seeking signs, connection with everything or nothing, absurdity.
Cognitive: intrusive memories, time distortion, “what if” spirals, obsessive rumination.
The Grief Cycle
Pain comes in waves. The cycle has distinct and consistent stages: pain, processing, release, integration. We can shape the cadence and intensity of them. We can choose how we react to them and how beneficial they are.
The Trigger
Pain just just comes when it comes.
I used to always have something to point to that caused it. Someone spoke angrily, or rejected me, or their face showed contempt. Someone didn’t do what I wanted them to do. But most of the time it was just a trigger. The sensitivity was from before not from anything in the current situation. The association brings up what was left unprocessed. When given attention and presence it gets transformed. When avoided, it comes back unchanged or stronger next time.
The trigger is a gift.
Processing
Everything in this article.
The capacity can be built up. Being resourced, rested and not stressed helps. Not being surrounded by assholes helps. In my experience, physical nervous system capacity as expressed through fitness, coordination, agility, endurance, strength helps more than anything.
Don’t waste the pain, use it to build capacity.
Other things I find helpful: Presence, Authenticity, Soothing, Rest, Flames, Music, Art, Safe relationships, Physical contact, Community, Dancing, Physical exertion, Crying, Sobbing, Waling, Bawling, Screaming, Singing, Chanting.
Things that don’t help: Numbing, Medicating, Distracting, Dissociating, Addictions, Blame, Physical and emotional violence.
Release
I publish a post!
A massive amount of energy and creativity gets unlocked. My body changes. Tensions that I didn’t know I was holding get released. Injuries heal. Chronic physical pain disappears. New flexibility and mobility opens up. Strength increases without muscle size, purely through better alignment and neural drive. I can find myself better able to relax in the company of other people. I find a new capacity for authenticity, connection and influence. I find anger, sadness, shame and fear diminish. The brain stops repeating the old patterns. Choice becomes available where there was only reactivity before.
Integration - Plateau
Rest and digest.
I’m so restless and addicted to intensity, I don’t spend enough time here but it’s important to appreciate the changes with gratitude and joy. It’s important to find pleasure in growth and also to find pleasure for its own sake.
To build capacity, exertion needs to be paired with rest wisely.
As soon as the nervous system is done integrating the last phase it typically unleashes the next. It’s wise, it only gives it to you in dosages that you’re equipped to handle, but, in my experience, it takes up the complete capacity. The pain doesn’t shrink, it gets bigger when you can take on more.
Don’t look for it to get easier; build capacity to go beyond.
Strategies for Moving Through Grief
Strategies & Techniques for Moving Through Grief
Body-Based:
Crying & Vocalizing: deep sobs, wails, even screams help discharge trapped energy. Chanting can be powerfully regulating.
Movement & Somatics: dance, yoga, shaking, somatic experiencing to let the body finish its stress response and build the capacity to handle more.
Breathwork: gentle breathing to calm the nervous system or cathartic breathwork to access deeper layers.
Touch & Co-regulation: hugs, massage, cuddling, even weighted blankets can help signal safety.
Ritual & Creative:
Altars & Offerings: photos, candles, symbolic objects to honor the loss.
Writing & Storytelling: journaling, poetry, letters (sent or unsent) to express what can’t be spoken aloud.
Music & Art: singing, drumming, painting to bypass the thinking mind and speak from the soul.
Ceremony: grief circles, burning ceremonies, nature rituals to give the loss a sacred container.
Relational:
Grief Witnessing: sharing your pain with someone who can hold it without fixing.
Community Rituals: collective mourning, drum circles, vigils, support groups.
Therapeutic Spaces: somatic therapy, IFS, EMDR, grief counseling.
Meaning-Making:
Ask “what now?”: how does this loss invite me to live differently?
Find threads of gratitude: not to bypass pain, but to remember what remains.
Create a legacy: dedicate work, art, action to what was lost.
See grief as a teacher: a guide toward deeper humanity, empathy, and alignment.
Capoeira:
The ancient practice called in by African slaves in Brazil that involves community, singing, rhythm, ritual, dance, fighting, mischief, etc. What a perfect recipe for healing. In my experience, there is no better grief technology out there. Yet, even most people practicing it don’t get it.
Grief is not an obstacle to “get past.” It’s a bridge. When we let it work us all the way through we come out more whole, more compassionate, and more fully alive.
An Ocean of Pain
When I began therapy, I told my therapist: “It’s like an ocean I’m trying to scoop out with a teaspoon.” For over a year, I cried every day. I didn’t know capacity could grow. It took years. It’s still ongoing.
Even now, the pain descends like a shroud — crippling, paralyzing. The temptation is always to blame, abandon myself, or dissociate.
But when I stay, it works. What once took me out for days now lasts minutes.
It’s worth it. Not because I will ever erase what was lost. Not because my spoon will ever be big enough.
But because now I know:
I contain this ocean.
I don't need a bigger spoon.
