Welcome %%first_name%%, I’m Linnea and I write about healing at the intersection of science and spirituality, and embracing the Both-And. I’m so glad you’re here. There’s a moment in the therapy room that is both painful and beautiful, and it always wakes up a sense of reverence in me. A client releases an old pattern, and the grief of everything that pattern once held moves through them and out. That is the moment the seed of transformation is planted. This is clean pain, tears that wash away the ashes of a life too small, and open space for something more aligned to emerge. Just like composting old material to nourish new growth. This kind of grief is medicine. It teaches us how to release what we've outgrown… and how much that release costs. We’ve been taught to fear grief as something that happens to us when we lose a loved one. I want to talk about the grief that happens for us, as the price of transformation. The Science of Grief Underneath the story, grief is a nervous system event. Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory describes how our physiology organizes around cues of safety and danger, mostly beneath our awareness. When something ends, like a relationship, an identity, or a belief you'd built your life on, the nervous system reads it as its own organization collapsing. Grief is what it feels like when the body begins to reorganize around an absence, but before it has time to build a new scaffolding. Pat Ogden’s work in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy adds the understanding that reorganization doesn’t happen through thinking. It happens through metabolizing bodily held memories, the ones that live in sensation and movement below our conscious awareness; in bracing patterns, in the immune system, in chronic tension, and in patterned movement. Insight alone isn’t enough to move the needle. An old belief can survive years of therapy and journaling and still run the show. You cannot out-think the nervous system. You have to feel your way through. The Three Griefs of Transformation In transformational coaching and depth psychotherapy, grief tends to show up in at least three distinct forms, and it helps to know which one we’re in. We typically only talk about the first one, and that is a mistake. Grief for what happened — the actual wounding, the conditions that made a coping strategy necessary in the first place. Grief for what didn’t happen — the relationships you didn’t let yourself have, the chances you never took, the version of your life the old belief quietly closed off. This one is harder to see. It’s grief for a life path you may never have considered possible. Grief for the missing experience — the experiences we need that you didn't have. Being cherished by a parent. Unconditional love. A home that felt safe. This is called disenfranchised grief: a loss with no funeral, because nothing technically died. But the body knows the absence is real, even when everyone around you insists there's nothing to mourn. Grief as Sacred Passage Long before any of this had research behind it, cultures across the world treated grief as a sacred passage, a threshold that required ritual and time, and for others to bear witness. Communities wailed together out loud because sound moving through the body is a form of release. Elders understood that a person moving through grief was moving through a portal and that the community’s job was to hold the space and not rush the process. We’ve largely lost this. What we’ve kept instead is a culture that hands you a few days of bereavement leave for the death of a person, and nothing at all for the death of a belief, or an identity, or an old organizing story. There’s a phrase I return to, sometimes attributed to writer Jamie Anderson: grief is just love with no place to go. Grief cannot be rushed for any loss, including the loss of the chance to live an aligned life. You cannot organize your entire nervous system around a belief for forty years and expect the grieving of it to resolve in a weekend. Grief for Our World Not all of this grief is individual. Increasingly, the people I sit with are grieving something larger. Climate collapse. The fraying of institutions where we once placed trust. An economy that no longer delivers what it promised (or even pretends to). A political landscape so polarized the culture is tearing itself apart. This grief is real. It deserves the same respect as any other kind of grief, not a diagnosis of anxiety to be medicated. But mourning for something that has, in fact, been lost. Joanna Macy spent her life making the case that grief is evidence of love. In The Work That Reconnects, Joanna holds our pain for the world as sacred, a direct measure of our interconnection with it. We can only grieve what we love. And grieving the unraveling of ecosystems, of institutions, of a future we counted on is proof we were never separate from any of it. Macy’s insight mirrors what I see in the therapy room. The pain isn’t the problem; avoiding it is. When we refuse to feel grief for the world, it curdles into numbness, denial, or busyness that pretends to be useful. Pema Chödrön offers a companion teaching from the Buddhist tradition. In When Things Fall Apart, she calls groundlessness the condition of being alive, rather than a thing to fix. When we lean into it instead of bracing, we open to compassion. First for ourselves, and then for everyone else who’s just as frightened, just as unsure the ground will hold. Tonglen is one of the most potent practices I know, but it is also very intense. You intentionally breathe in suffering and breathe out peace and light, allowing yourself to be the vehicle of transformation. Tonglen works by reversing our instinct to push away suffering. It asks you to breathe in pain and suffering, fully and without flinching, and breathe out relief, spaciousness, or light. You can do it for your own suffering, for the suffering of someone you love, and for suffering so vast it is beyond our ability to fully name it, like grief for the state of our world. Relief doesn’t come from fixing anything but from changing our relationship to suffering. Rather than holding what you’ve taken in, this version leads you to let the pain drop down, out of your body and into the molten core of the earth, where it is metabolized. You become a conduit rather than the container. Paid subscribers get my Tonglen Guided Meditation. Tonglen works by reversing our instinct to push away suffering. It asks you to breathe in pain and suffering, fully and without flinching, and breathe out relief, spaciousness, or light. You can do it for your own suffering, for the suffering of someone you love, and for suffering so vast it is beyond our ability to fully name it, like grief for the state of our world. Relief doesn’t come from fixing anything but from changing our relationship to suffering. Rather than holding what you’ve taken in, this version leads you to let the pain drop down, out of your body and into the molten core of the earth, where it is metabolized. You become a conduit rather than the container. Thank you for being a paid subscriber. Listen to my Guided Tonglen Meditation here (18 min): Seen this way, grief for collapsing systems stops being a private catastrophe and becomes a doorway into solidarity with every other person feeling the same thing. This is where personal grief and collective grief move together to the same melancholic, but slowly transformative, tune. Grieving an old belief clears space for a nervous system to come into alignment. Grieving the world clears space for a fiercer kind of relational care and for whatever comes after. We practice this kind of relational presence in The Weaving. Bypassing grief with avoidance or forced optimism does the same damage at a civilizational scale that it does in a single body. It keeps us organized around a center that can no longer hold. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” — William Butler Yeats Honoring, Not Transcending or Bypassing Sometimes our attempts to help can cause harm through invalidation and dismissal: “Everything happens for a reason.” “This was all necessary for your growth.” “But look how far you’ve come.” Oh how these make me cringe! Not because they are untrue, but because they are almost always said to make the witness more comfortable. They interrupt the flow of raw emotion that the grieving person actually needs. This is where we can tip into bypassing. Trying to make the leap to meaning before the loss has been fully felt doesn’t work. We cannot rush the process (for ourselves or for anyone else), no matter how much we’d like to. Grief doesn’t need to be transcended to become sacred. It already is sacred, exactly as it is, in its rawest and most unfiltered form. The people I’ve watched change most fully weren’t the ones who got to the insight fastest. They were the ones who allowed the process to move through them at its own pace. They grieved the caregiver who wasn’t there, the child-self who became hypervigilant to survive, the 70-year-old realizing they’d never fully lived. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” — Henry David Thoreau The Only Way Out is Through Underneath it all lives a paradox. Grief is painful AND it is generative. It is the initiation that costs you the old story and the medicine that lets you survive its absence. It is the teacher whose curriculum is feel it fully. This both-and is not a spiritual nicety but the mechanism of healing. The generativity doesn’t arrive after the pain is gone — it arrives inside the pain. If an old belief is softening in you
