I recently finished a cycle of workshops that ended with a session on grief. In preparation, and in deep need of my own, I read Tending Grief by Camille Sapara Barton. I can warmly recommend it. It met me in a place I didn’t fully know I had entered—a place of thick, layered grief. Grief for myself, for others, for the world.
What I’ve come to understand is that grief is everywhere. Some forms are easily identifiable—death, breakups, major losses. Others are more subtle and take time to name. Sometimes you can’t name the grief at all. But once you start listening to grief, once your body begins to speak its language, you start noticing it in the quietest corners. In yourself. In the people you love. In the world around you.
Western culture doesn’t offer much space for grief. It is often rushed, hidden, silenced. But grief doesn’t obey linear timelines or cultural expectations. It waits for space. And when space is made—grief can be transformative. In turn, without any space given to it, it can turn into a destructive force, seeking ways out, exploding, sometimes violently toward oneself or others.
Here are some thoughts on grief, grief that in one way or another I have been witnessing, in myself and/or others.
The Grief of Returning to Yourself
Since I began training as a consent educator, I’ve learned that grief naturally arises when we reconnect with our bodies. When we begin to listen again to what our bodies have always been saying—to their wisdom—there is often sorrow. Sorrow for the times that we couldn’t listen, that we were silenced, that we weren’t allowed to grieve, our ancestors weren’t allowed to grieve, the times we didn’t know better than to submit to the system in order to survive. Sorrow for all the violences imprinted onto our bodies.
There’s grief in recognising how often we’ve crossed our own limits. How often we’ve had our boundaries disregarded. There is grief in realising that we were taught to override ourselves—by systems, by authority figures, by cultures that demand performance, rationality, and compliance. There might be ancestral grief, too. Or what Camille calls the Void, grief for not knowing your ancestors' history, for the Void that wants to be filled. The Void that came into existence through the systematic destruction of ancient cultures and wisdoms, not only cultures erased by European colonialism, also cultures, native wisdoms within Europe, erased by the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the With hunts.
There is grief in the remembering and grief because we cannot remember. Grief in acknowledging the wisdom our bodies held all along, and how long we were separated from it. Grief for struggling to reconnect to that wisdom. Perhaps this grief has lived for generations already in our ancestors bodies that have been separated from that knowledge. Perhaps we know ancestors who are or were still connected to that wisdom, ancestors we can turn to for guidance. And perhaps we don’t. But our body stores this knowledge somewhere. I believe that we can access it.
Grief isn’t a mistake. It’s part of the healing. It signals a reconnection. And transformation. It makes space for something new to grow.
Shared Grief
We do not only experience grief that belongs to us, arising through our own individual experiences. There is also shared grief. There is a lot of shared grief in the world right now—grieving lives lost to genocide, fascism, and systemic violence. For futures stolen. You do not need to be directly affected by this for the grief to touch you. Our bodies feel it. Our spirits know it. We are not separate.
Many of us might choose, consciously or not, to turn away from that grief. Perhaps because it feels too heavy, too monstrous, makes us feel helpless…because it is continuous, without end.
I believe the opposite to be the case. I sense the power of grief—its power to connect us. To mobilise us, to help us imagine otherwise. But in order for this power to unfold, the grief needs to be acknowledged, given space. It needs to be witnessed.
In all the organising, I believe we need space to process grief together—individual and shared grief—so that it can lend us its transformative power. So that it might lead us back to our bodies’ wisdom, our spirits’ wisdom, our collective wisdom.
To Love Someone Long-Term Is to Attend a Thousand Funerals of the People They Used to Be
The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer.
The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore.
The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be.
It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.
Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame.
Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.
—Heidi Priebe
Grief wants to be seen, acknowledged, witnessed. It does not need to be solved.
Grieving with someone might take us into a deeply felt grieving process of our own.
When you're there, with all your love and all you can do is to be there. It is painful to witness that your love is not a cure. It doesn’t take away the grief, it doesn’t take away the anxiety, the pain. But it might soothe it. It may invite a healing process, allow for new experiences to enter into the body. The experience of not being alone.
Descending with someone into their pain, their grief, asks of me to know my emotional landscape. It asks me to trust the process and to be present and grounded within myself.
It asks me to trust that grief knows best what it needs. Our bodies hold the wisdom. Our grieving bodies.
But we need to create spaces that allow for our bodies—and for the grief—to speak.
And then there is grief. Grief because we hurt others.
There is little space for this grief. We hurt each other, not because we mean to (of course people harm intentionally, but that’s not what I am talking about) but because it’s part of our human experience. Because we navigate care and boundaries imperfectly, because we have conflicting needs or strategies. Because we say things that we didn’t know would hurt another person. Because there might be a gap between our intentions and the impact of our actions.
The lack of space for this kind of grief might keep us stuck in shame and guilt—or ignorance. Exploring the shame and guilt we feel can help us find what lies beneath. It might not always be grief, but it often will be. And while shame and guilt are likely to keep us from being accountable, grief might be able to tell us what it is that we need in order to both be accountable toward the person we’ve hurt and to be compassionate with ourselves.
Grief can be a doorway to accountability, softness, and change. It can shift how we relate to ourselves and to each other.
Anticipated Grief and Anxiety
Another form of grief that surprised me is anticipated grief. The kind that lives in the body before anything is lost. The fear of future hurt. The anxiety that comes with imagining how things might fall apart.
This form of grief feels slippery. It often coexists with doubt and nervous system overwhelm. It can distort the present, making it hard to discern your needs from anxieties, understand where your boundaries lie. This grief feels confusing, chaotic, anxious. I found that what helps is to go backwards, slowly, until I reach myself in the present again. I find myself overthinking or anxious about something in the future. I ask myself what scares me, and then I ask myself what it is that I feel in the now. And sometimes I find a lot of sadness — sadness that projects from the past into the future. From past experiences into the future, anticipating that it will happen again. But I am a different person now. So what can this anticipated grief tell me about what I need now? Is this sadness, this grief telling me something my body already knows? Perhaps I have to let go of something but I am not ready to because I am scared of the pain of the loss?
Or am I caught up in “what if” scenarios that create an anticipated experience of grief?
I wonder, is that experience of anticipated grief connected to the realisation that things are changing, in flux, beyond our control, that we will commit mistakes, fail?
In my experience, giving room to this grief too helps me to ground myself in the present. It tells me that change will come when it needs to, and that that’s okay. It helps me feel whether in the now I am where I want to be or not. And perhaps it tells me that I need to do some work, that I can take agency in how I want to show up. Maybe it helps me to continue searching for new ways—that there is hope, and that I simply haven’t looked in the right direction yet.
Letting Grief Do Its Work
What I keep learning, again and again, is that grief doesn’t need to be justified. It doesn’t always need to be explained. It simply wants to be felt. Acknowledged. Witnessed.
Grief is a close cousin of love. It arises when something or someone matters to us. It can move us toward transformation, if we let it. But for it to do its work, we need to make space—for ourselves, for one another, for slowness, for expression.
Grieving in connection—being allowed to sit in the pain without needing to make it okay, without needing to explain—can be profoundly healing.
I wish we had more space for that.