Grief : MY 8 TOP TIPS

Multiple friends, pets and life things dying all at once can take its toll. I wish I knew these things to move through it more kindly to myself.

1. You can’t speed it through.
   You can set yourself to feel more of whatever grief you’re storing, but it doesn’t really make it move through you quicker. The most efficient thing I’ve seen people work with is plant medicine as it can connect you to a deep feeling needing to pop. But does it make it move faster? Well you can’t chain medicine journies and expect to force-sh*t all your grief in one efficient set. If you could, your nervous system would feel like an overloaded electrical circuit and you’d likely feel unable to do anything other than be a puddle. It would also likely create a new trauma, so it’s worth considering that the lingering of the process is itself a kindness of the body to not wreck you.

2. Emotional Safety helps the most
   Do you think you’ll have an easier time processing grief in a sporting event with friends, or alone at a beach watching a stunner of a sunset, while a gentle wind strokes your hair and face? This is deliberately polarizing to illustrate what your system doesn’t respond well to as safety. You simply will not engage a healing process if your nerves are in fight or flight, even at a subtle level, and that includes social events where you need to put on a ‘brave face’.

3. Grief is the boss. Your plans come second
   When grief calls, it could be at the most inconvenient time, somehow after days, weeks or months of feeling free of it. Grief comes when your system is likely ready to free more of it from your body, and something has reminded your system of what is connected to your grief. Or, you finally feel a large breath of safety in your body. For many, it’ll happen during watching movies, hearing songs, or spotting something that reminds you of a person, pet, place or thing that you’re still grieving.

4. Names are important
   A wise friend (I’m ironically not naming in case this is sensitive for her) knows grief at a level few will ever experience, as she suffered the loss of her 1 year old by way of a cruel babysitter. She helped guide me through the grief of a friend simply by asking me to say his name. Soon as I did, the tears spilled out like they’d been pressure-built over weeks. Turns out it’s a pattern to avoid saying the names of our deceased loved ones as a way to avoid accepting the death.

5. Remember the good things you did for and with them
   Of all the loss I endured in a particularly difficult time, the hardest was my pets. Three of them in 6 months. One being a cat who I had quite the story with. The first two felt like a train whacked me in the chest. But Sir Jinx (the cat) felt like a mix of loss and victory. Why victory? He had a difficult life before we rescued him as he was ten years a feral according to the vet. After his rescue, we (and me particularly) gave him a great life. I learned many lessons from my first few pets and it taught me so much about how best to treat our animal friends. And Sir Jinx was a happy little guy. And super loving, and very loved and cared for. So his ending felt like the happy ending of his own movie and something about that diffused so much of the pain that existed in the other deaths. In those other deaths, I struggled to reflect without some form of self-critique for past behaviors. But with Jinx? I felt like I did great by him and while I still lament his lack of presence today, I feel more appreciation and joy for my time with him and the grief for him flows more in peace than the others. The grief that hits hardest for me personally… the ones with the most regrets, guilts and similar.

6. Grieve the one who grieved
   Even now as I write this years on from the particular life phase that inspired this piece, a few tears got rolling. Sometimes we also need to grieve the fact we were a person who suffered the pains we did at that time, and that alone can also feel quite lightening and cathartic. We’re no longer in that chapter of life, and there’ll be other ones that feel great, others that challenge and others that feel like unmitigated bum (ass for the American readers).

7. Fucking cry
   Seriously. Stop holding it back. It helps release healthy chemistry in the body that will soothe and de-escalate survival chemistry in the body.

8. Find pleasure and choose to experience as if it’s urgent life-saving medicine
   Pleasure and joy is one of the most potent curatives for a heavy heart. And sometimes we resist that very thing through a subconscious belief, either abstract or obvious. If you feel like watching that movie, jumping in that ocean or time away from laptop and with partner will lighten you up considerably, that’s your medicine. If you feel you don’t deserve to do those things, that’s a dose of medicine you’d do well to push through your resistance to drink.

9. Okay fine. One more
   Is there a plant medicine that is most suited to grief? Yes. Huachuma / Wachuma / San Pedro, which is from Echinopsis Pachanoi cactus family, native to the Andes mountains and parts of South California. You can even see some growing wild in traffic islands in Los Angeles (I’m not kidding). I found it immensely helpful in a deep grief passage and it tends to give me great clarity and re-connect me to my heart nicely. Highly recommended with a practitioner and environment you feel safe with.