Let It Rip
Grief is praise — hold nothing back.
The more I learn from grief, the more I get curious about other challenging energies and wonder what would happen if we suspended our naming of these energies and worked with their raw expression instead? Considering emotions as natural expressions of energy invites us to take emotions, especially the difficult ones, less personally.
Energy is meant to move. We learned from Einstein that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another. In nature, we can observe that the options for energy's movement are flow, block, channel, or transform.
The sciences of the mind give us myriad options for working with emotional energies — we can trace their roots in our biography, we can talk about them, allowing witnessing to unfreeze them from time, we can analyze, and strategize. While I spend a lot of time playing in the realm of the mind, my most profound breakthroughs occur in the landscape of the body.
Lately, the question that has captured my curiosity is: what becomes possible when we let the body, rather than the mind, lead the processing of emotional energy?
What is unlocked when we value the intelligence of the soft animal of the body? What happens when we allow ourselves to slink out of the sheaths of our civilization and give voice to the wild creature self? And what if that voice didn’t need to form words and phrases, but expressed itself through pure, uncensored, untamed sound? What would we hear and learn from our inner wilderness if it were allowed to speak in its native tongue? Once expressed, would that utterance lead to a great, full-body sigh of relief?
In Wild Care, we use vocal toning to liberate bound energy, discover the wild self, and reclaim our wholeness. When we sense an energy that wants to move or be expressed, we let it do just that – we don’t tighten up or push it away to preserve the perception of being “civilized.” We allow there to be dignity in our wildness, worthiness to our animal cravings for expression, movement, relief, comfort, rest, touch, and connection to something greater than ourselves.
Since the death of my canine soulmate Ladybird in May 2023, I have maintained a daily 15-minute grieving ritual. It's simple, yet it's been instrumental in my healing process, giving me a container to transmute the often brutal energy of grief. I've found that creating a dedicated, time-bound container is the key to keeping the grief from swallowing you whole and driving you mad.
I'd like to share my grief ritual with you and invite you to try it out. I've even made you a Grief Party playlist. The songs aren't slow and sad – they're chosen to invite your energy into motion and invoke reverence for the complexity of human life and love.
If you need more fuel to get the feelings flowing, try listening to the first track on the playlist, “Together Again,” knowing that Janet Jackson wrote it as a love letter to the many friends she lost to the AIDs epidemic, which devastated the professional dance community.
15-minute grief ritual
1. Set a timer for 15 minutes.
2. Put on some music. Wearing headphones can help to keep the experience internal.
3. Look at images that remind you of what you're grieving. I have an album of Ladybird pictures on my phone that help me access grief specific to her, and also to everything else I'm grieving. Once you invite the feelings to flow, you may be surprised by where they take you.
4. Move your body: bounce, jump, shake, shimmy, flail, stretch, swivel, swirl, roll around on the floor, maybe even dance. Breathe, make sounds – any sounds. Let your feelings in, then let them out.
5. LET IT RIP.
6. Reorient. Once the timer sounds, take some soothing breaths and squeeze your body with your hands. Wrap your arms around yourself and hug your body toward the midline to ground and center your energy. Look around the space you're in, allowing your eyes to land on individual objects. Remove your headphones (if used) and hear the sounds of your environment.
Remember: you don't have to eat the whole elephant in a single bite. You're allowed to go slow and take breaks. You're allowed to feel good, even when you're grieving, even when the world is suffering.
You deserve to unburden your body from the heaviness of personal and collective grief. You deserve to grieve, and the world deserves the honor of your mourning.
There is so much to grieve and so much to praise.
