So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for listening.
And thank you for being here.
Now I want to begin somewhere unexpected.
Not with the lawsuit list.
Not with the obvious ones.
I want to begin with the losses you never quite let yourself count as losses.
Because you've been taught which griefs are allowed?
When someone dies,
You may grieve.
There is a word for it,
A ritual.
People who know to be gentle with you.
And the grief is sanctioned witnessed and in the eyes of the world it's real.
But there are so many others.
And nobody ever told you?
That you were allowed to mourn them.
The life you thought you'd have and that quietly didn't happen.
The version of yourself you were before something changed you,
Who you sometimes miss like a person.
A friendship that didn't end in a fight.
It just faded away.
No one died.
So where do you put that egg?
The place you left.
The ears that took something from you.
The future you were promised by your own younger heart.
That turned out to be not coming.
The child who grew up a joy,
Of course.
Everyone reminds you it's a joy.
And yet somewhere quietly,
A grief for the small one who used to reach for your hand and doesn't anymore.
And one more quieter than all of these.
That so many people carry.
And never once call grief.
The grief of never quite fitting in.
Of being somehow always slightly outside the circle.
At school,
In the friend group,
In the profession.
In a room where someone else seems to have been handed a manual you never got.
So the sense going back as far as you can remember.
Of watching belonging happen to other people.
Through a pane of glass.
Of working so hard to fit and never feeling you fully did.
And that's a real loss.
It's the loss of an ease other people seem to have for free.
The effortless membership,
The sense of these are my people and I am home here.
And because you couldn't point to a moment it happened.
Because nobody excluded you dramatically because you did have friends,
Sort of.
Mostly.
You never let yourself call it what it was.
A long low grief for belonging you could see but never quite touch.
And I want to say something clinically true about that one.
Because it matters and it might lift a little of the shame.
That ache is not weakness.
And it's not you being oversensitive.
We are social animals,
Mammals who for the whole of our history could not survive alone.
So to a nervous system built over millions of years,
Being outside the group was not a social disappointment.
It was a mortal danger.
Which is why exclusion doesn't just make us sad,
It registers in the body as something closer to threat,
To pain.
So the grief of not fitting in is not you being dramatic about something small.
It's one of the oldest,
Most wired-in losses a human body can feel.
And it really hurts because it was designed to.
Nobody bought you a casserole for any of these.
Nobody sat with you.
In most cases,
You didn't even let yourself sit with you because it felt indulgent or dramatic or ungrateful.
Other people have real problems,
You told yourself.
Nobody died.
What are you so sad about?
So the grief didn't get gripped and it didn't go anywhere.
It just settled into the body and it waited.
Now there is a name for this.
And I want to give it to you because naming.
Is the beginning of letting it be real.
And it's called disenfranchised grief.
Grief that the world doesn't recognize and so never gives you permission to feel.
And unrecognized grief doesn't disappear.
It goes underground.
It becomes the heaviness you can't explain.
The tears that come at strange times,
At the adverts,
At nothing.
The lump in the throat that has no story attached.
So.
We are going to let some of it be real today,
Or try at least.
Not all of it.
Grief isn't a thing you finish in an afternoon.
But we are going to stop pretending it's not there.
And that it turns out is most of the work.
So let me tell you one thing about grief,
Because it changes how you hold all of this.
And then I'll stop talking,
We'll stop talking and start listening.
So grief is not fundamentally a thought.
It's not something you understand your way through.
It's a physical process.
Something that the body does or needs to do.
The way it needs to shiver when cold or heel a wood So grief is the body metabolizing a loss,
Moving it,
Letting it pass through.
And when grief is witnessed,
When you're allowed to weep,
To be held,
To scream,
To fall apart and caught.
The body completes the process.
The wave rises and passes.
Something moves through and is in time then processed or released if you like that word.
But when grief is not allowed,
When you swallow it.
When you tell yourself it doesn't count.
When there is no one to witness it and no permission to feel it.
The body doesn't get to complete the process.
The wave rises,
And you push it back down.
And it stays.
Held in the muscles,
The throat,
The chest,
The belly,
Unmoved and unfinished.
Years of that,
Decades sometimes.
A body full of unwept weeping.
To the heaviness you carry the one you can never quite explain.
The one that has no single story.
May not be depression or a character flaw or ingratitude.
It may be grief.
Real grief.
Just grief that was never given the one thing it needed.
To be witnessed and to be allowed to move.
So today,
Gently we witness it.
And we let a little bit of it move.
Wherever you are now.
You don't need to change anything.
You can soften your gaze or close your eyes,
Or you can just receive my words.
Whatever works for you.
Just let yourself arrive.
And let the body settle where it is.
Just let yourself arrive.
And let the body settle where it is.
Now you can put any one hand on the center of your chest.
And simply start by feeling the weight of your hand on your body.
I want to say something to you that maybe no one has said before.
Something the grief inside you has been waiting to hear for a long time.
The losses were real.
The losses were real.
The life that didn't happen.
That was a real loss.
The person you were really gone to.
And worth missing.
The friendship that faded.
The place you left.
The future that didn't come.
The small child.
Small child's hand that doesn't reach for yours anymore.
Real.
All of it.
You didn't make it up?
And you were not being dramatic.
You were not being ungrateful.
You were grieving?
You were always grieving.
You just did it alone,
In the dark.
Without permission.
So let's bring some permission now.
If it's available to you.
Just let one slow breath out.
Just let one slow breath out.
And as you do,
See if you can let the body soften.
Just slightly.
Around whatever it's been holding.
Not to release it.
Just to stop pressing against it quite so hard.
And notice.
You might feel something rise.
A tightness in the throat.
Stinging behind the eyes.
A heaviness in the chest that suddenly has a bit more presence.
And if that happens.
That's not something going wrong.
That something long frozen,
Beginning,
Very slightly now,
To be seen.
That's the wave.
Finally allowed to rise a little bit,
If it wants to.
You don't have to make it happen.
And you don't have to stop it either.
If tears come,
Let them.
They are old.
And they've been waiting.
They're so welcome here.
If they don't come.
That's alright too.
The body moves at its own pace.
And it will not be rushed.
Your only job is to stop pushing it back down.
Just stay here,
A while.
With whatever is present.
You don't have to name every loss.
You don't have to understand it or file it or make it into a tidy story.
You just have to let it be here in the body,
Witnessed finally by you.
Bring a little bit of your attention to your hand which is on your chest,
If you have it there.
Just so we can let the grief know that someone is there.
Just so the grief has company after all this long time.
I see you.
I am here.
You don't have to carry this in the dark anymore.
I see you.
I am here.
You don't have to carry this in the dark anymore.
Let the wave do what it does.
Rise if it is rising,
Pass if it is passing.
You are safe to feel this today.
Nothing bad happens now if you let it move.
The dangerous thing was never the grief,
It was the holding of it.
And you can set a little bit of the holding down.
And I want to offer you something now.
About what this heaviness is underneath.
Because it reframes the whole thing.
Grief is love.
That's all it is in the end.
Grief is love with nowhere left to go.
You only grieve what you loved.
The life,
The person,
The self,
The place and the future.
You grieve it because it mattered,
Because you were attached,
Because it was yours and it was so precious to you.
So the weight you've been carrying all this time The one you were ashamed of,
The one who you told yourself didn't count,
It's not a weakness,
It's a monument.
It's the shape love takes when the thing it was reaching for is gone.
Your grief is proof that you loved something.
And that is so real.
That is so sacred.
And it counts.
And that's why you don't ever get over grief.
And why everyone who tells you so is wrong.
You don't get over love.
You carry it.
But it changes shape.
From an open wound to something quieter.
Something you hold rather than something that holds you.
But it never leaves.
And it's not supposed to leave.
The people and lives and selves we have lost deserve to be carried.
And the caring is how we keep faith in them.
What changes isn't that the grief goes away.
What changes is that you stop having to carry it alone in the dark,
Pretending it's not there.
You bring it into the light.
You let it be real.
You let it make you more tender instead of more closed.
And slowly.
The grief that was crushing you becomes a kind of a deepening,
A softness,
A capacity to be with others in their losses because you finally let yourself be with your own.
And there is something worth knowing here,
Especially if one of the losses you carry is that old grief of not belonging anywhere.
The very thing you felt shut out of connection,
Being held by others,
Is not a luxury.
It's how we are built to heal.
That's a real physical process,
Sometimes called coregulation.
A nervous system in distress can settle in the presence of a calm one.
So we are quite literally wired to regulate through each other.
A baby calms in steady arms and that never fully stops being true.
Which means the belonging you grieve was never something you were too much or too strange to deserve.
It's the birthright of the body.
And every time you let one person witness your grief,
Even a little,
You're not just being comforted,
You're doing the thing you were built to do,
The thing you were shut out of,
Finally,
From the inside.
You belong to the human family by the simple fact of a body that hurts and can be.
Soothed,
Calmed.
Held.
Loved.
You always did.
The glass was never as solid as it looked.
So just rest here now.
Nothing more to feel than what's already there.
Nothing to reach for.
Nothing to finish.
Whatever moved,
Moved.
Whatever stays,
Stays.
Grief keeps its own calendar and there is no being behind on it.
You did something today that you maybe never did before.
You witnessed it.
You gave it company.
And that's enough.
That's everything.
You are allowed to miss what you lost.
You were always allowed that.
The ordinary day will take you back.
And the world will still be a place that doesn't quite know how to make room for these quieter griefs.
That's all right.
Because you know how now.
You can make room yourself.
When this heaviness comes again,
And it will.
Grief comes in waves and always will.
You'll know what it is.
It's not a flaw.
It's not weakness.
It's just love with nowhere to go,
Asking to be felt.
Once again,
It's just love with nowhere to go,
Asking to be felt.
And you'll know what to do.
Not to fix it,
Not to push it down.
But to put a hand on it and let it be real.
To give it company.
The losses no one let you name were real.
They were always real.
And you don't have to carry them in the dark anymore.
So be very gentle with yourselves today.
Something moved that had been still for a long time and you may feel tendered or tired or lighter or all three.
That's the body doing what it was always meant to do.
Finally allowed to do it.
So whatever you grieved here,
It was very worth grieving,
Because it was worth loving at some stage.
And so are you.
Thank you.
Much gratitude for joining me.
And until next time.
.
.
Namaste.
