Grieving in Your Body
We tend to speak of grief as if it is something that happens in the heart — a feeling, an emotion, a psychological state. But anyone who has experienced significant loss knows that grief is not just an emotion.It is a weight in the chest that makes breathing feel effortful. A heaviness in the limbs.
A tightness in the throat that arrives without warning. A strange absence in the body — as if something physical has been removed.Grief lives in the body. And it asks to be met there.What the research tells usNeuroscience has confirmed what grieving people have always known: loss activates the same regions of the brain as physical pain.
The body does not distinguish easily between a broken bone and a broken bond. Both register as injury. Both require healing.When we lose someone — to death, to separation, to estrangement, or to the slower losses of illness, migration, or life transition — the nervous system responds as if to threat.
Over time, if grief is not processed, it can become frozen in the body. Held in patterns of tension, numbness, exhaustion, or chronic pain.The stages of grief were never meant to be a ladderKübler-Ross's five stages were never intended as a linear sequence. And yet many grieving people feel they are doing it wrong — moving too slowly, cycling back to anger after acceptance, still crying a year later.Grief does not move in a line. It moves in waves.
And it does not end at acceptance. It transforms.What embodied grief can feel likeIn my work as a somatic therapist — and in my own lived experience of loss — grief often shows up in the body in ways we don't immediately recognise:Persistent fatigue that sleep doesn't fixHeaviness or a feeling of being "weighed down"Tightness across the chest or restricted breathSudden waves of physical sensation — heat, trembling, a rising feeling in the throatNumbness or disconnection from the bodyA physical ache in the heart area, the gut, or the bonesThese are not symptoms to be treated. They are the body's language for what it is carrying.How somatic therapy supports griefSomatic therapy invites the body into the healing process. Rather than talking about grief, we learn to be with it — noticing where it lives in the body, how it moves, what it needs.
This might look like staying with a physical sensation rather than moving away from it, using breath to create more space around the tightness, or allowing the body to complete impulses that were interrupted — trembling, crying, reaching out.In many wisdom traditions — including the Ayurvedic and yogic lineages that inform my personal practice — grief is understood not as a problem to be solved, but as a passage to be moved through. To grieve fully is to have loved fully.If you are grieving and find that talking has limits,
I invite you to book a free 15-minute introductory call at calendly.com/fernanda-megda/free-intro-callFernanda Megda is an ACA-registered psychologist and somatic therapist in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, offering online grief support across Australia.
