Pleasure in Grief
Grief is a sensory experience.
I experienced the grief first through my body. I knew what it was as it hit me, as the wind outside shook my little yellow house and my body violently rejected anything I attempted to put in it.
Nausea and vomiting signal this rejection of new ideas or experiences.
In both my personal and professional life, I’ve been holding this boundary between death and new life for people I love. There is so much new blooming as winter melts into spring, and I carry the weight of the endings.
I’ve been unearthing the guts of my own pain story as I attempt to align myself deeper with healing and expansion, and as my physical body shifts in response so does my internal landscape. There is a new level of grief here that permeates everything.
The following day, once my flu like symptoms had subsided, it became tears leaking out for no particular reason. It didn’t make sense, but I knew it was sacred, and that tears were my body’s way of communicating what we carried. And so I let myself marinate in the experience, noticing the salty tears as they traveled down my cheeks without any attempt to brush them away.
Grief is one of the most sacred things I know. The cultural narrative I hear on grief is that it is to be avoided at all costs. Grief can only exist in a neatly wrapped up package, for a predetermined amount of time. It is to be rushed through, and on the other side the griever isn’t to have changed at all. Everyone I know doesn’t experience grief this way, but we don’t admit it. We grieve in silent because it’s easier, and draws less attention to ourselves. Grief, embodied grief, the kind that is felt before it is comprehend, doesn’t play by these rules. In letting myself grieve, I am absorbed by the sensory experience of it all.
Feeling runs parallel to aliveness. By feeling it all, we embrace what makes us human. I am feeling this way because I am alive. Marinating on each sensory experience, I allowed myself to sink in and hold both the pain of grief and the pleasure. I read a study recently detailing how complicated grief, long term grief, this deep abiding, sensory grief, activates the same places in the brain as pleasure does.
Let me tell you about what I found in grief, about what I noticed.
the feeling of the sheets as I lay in bed all day, blinds drawn, allowing my body to ride the waves, trusting the emptiness that came.
my love washing my hair for me in the shower, his fingers massaging my scalp
the aroma of the ginger tea when I was finally able to keep something down
(I also noticed the lingering taste of what I’d consumed the day before as I threw it back up, but thats a less than pleasurable sensory experience)
I noticed chickadees singing outside my window even when I was attempting to hide from the world, and my dog licking my hand. To experience grief fully, I needed to use my body, and my senses, to enter into it and allow what existed to be there.
On the morning of my writing this, feeling better and more spacious in my body, I unrolled my yoga mat and practiced body poetry, allowing my body to communicate independent of my conscious mind. I gave my body space to tell the story. It might not make sense, but it doesn’t have to. We don’t need stories to process grief. We need the integration of the body, the senses, to allow ourselves to feel what we feel.
And I felt it all.
