Tools for Grief: Let Your Breath & Tears Flow

Autumn is officially here. This time of year, although beautiful, can also bring up feelings of change and grief for many.

When someone holds grief in their body, it can look and feel like it’s harder to take in a deep breath - tight shoulders, a bent downward posture, almost as if the body is trying to shield and protect the lungs and a broken heart.

In our culture, often feelings of grief or loss are swept aside and finding safe spaces to genuinely face and release difficult emotions can feel challenging- even though everyone deals with loss and change in their life.

One of the mechanisms we learn early in life is that if we hold or restrict our breath, we can try to control our feelings. We do this to be self-protective and to not feel the difficult moments in our lives. But over time these stored, unresolved experiences can make us feel stuck, depressed, confused and frustrated.

Have you recently lost someone or been struggling with unresolved grief that feels just under the surface? Are you seeking ways to deepen your emotional connection to yourself in order to honor and shift feelings of sadness, fear and shame?

Difficult emotions can feel overwhelming at times, especially when we don’t have safe places to release and be with them. Breathwork Sessions with Spiraldance Breathwork can help us to unlock the places within ourselves that feel just out of reach.

When our emotions are out of reach we feel closed off to the joys in our life. But when we get our breath flowing again, we can begin to process our natural feelings and let go.

Learning how to get in touch with difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them is a conscious breath practice that builds resilience within ourselves. And, when we learn to breathe with and through difficult emotions we open up greater pathways to freedom- because we realize that we don’t have to carry our burdens alone anymore.

Discover how Breathwork Sessions offer a safe and supportive place for you to let your tears flow so you can feel lighter and more free.

Consider these additional tools to support a grieving heart-

Lung Point Self-Massage-

Massaging the points just below the collarbone can help release some emotional tension. Apply gentle pressure, and allow your breath to deepen, creating space for emotions to surface as you create small circular motions and let go.

Create Rituals: Mandalas

Go into Nature and create a mandala. Be as creative as you like. Everything in nature has meaning and creating in nature provides a vehicle to process our grief externally in a ritualized way. Rituals give form to feelings that may otherwise be difficult to express initially.

Individual Breathwork Sessions

Breathwork Sessions allow for a safe container to really tap into difficult emotions and be supported to let go. Integrative Breathwork therapy with Spiraldance Breathwork utilizes a somatic approach for trauma integration and stress release to re-pattern the body-mind and soul system.

Grief Theories: There are so many wise perspectives and potential tools about how we process Grief. A long-standing, popular model is recognizing the 5 Stages of Grief by Kubler Ross which includes:

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

These are not linear steps in a set timeline of grieving as there is no linear model to letting go and everyone's experience is unique. But recognizing there are many stages and aspects to losing a loved one, going through a major change in career or life, or facing our own mortality can provide some comfort in the ebbs and flows.

The vastness of what human beings can feel during significant life changes is profound. Let us all choose to honor them and welcome our full expression.

Breathwork Sessions can help you navigate to the true vastness of what it means to be alive and to grieve- a deep breath of remembering and solace in times of uncertainty.