Understanding Grief and Grieving and how to support it naturally

GRIEF & GRIEVING

~Deep in your wounds are seeds, waiting to grow beautiful flowers~ 🌱

If you’re a human being who has been born into this world, you likely know or have known some level of trauma, grief, or heartbreak. 💔

We live in a world of suffering tinged with joy, and joy tinged with suffering, multitudes of tiny everyday heartbreaks, national and global heartbreaks, invisible heartbreaks unknowable to anyone and sometimes not even ourselves. Grief can be fresh and open and taking us into its teeth this very minute, and it can be aged and lingering, woven deep into our DNA, reluctant for us to release it.

When we experience loss, we may repress or choose not to deal with it, and so it can remain out of sight but never truly be gone. Whether we choose to avoid or confront our grief, we can’t go under or over or around it; we have to have to go through it.

The process of addressing grief and heartbreak varies among individuals, families, geographies, cultures, and spiritual traditions. Within each path towards resilience, there are infinite moments to choose managing and coping, respite and distraction, healing and recovery, accepting and transforming, reopening and reengaging. Our bodies may serve us as places of learning and growth, storing feelings and lessons in the body, reminding us later and in the future. So, too, can unresolved grief become stuck and stagnant, leading to respiratory and other dysfunction in the body.

We are regularly and in real time being broken open and healed over, and if we are brave and have the support, we can remain open, aware, and growing during the process.

How Grief Feels

Grief is a multifaceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical dimensions. It is a stress reaction with deep psychological changes… Stress hormones like cortisol are released, sleep patterns are disrupted, and the immune system can become weakened. Physical manifestations of grief may include loss of appetite, palpitations, breathlessness, weakness, tension, and restlessness. Grief is a state of yearning, it has no time value. You may notice that you experience recurrent floods of distress lasting from 20 minutes to an hour- with or without physical symptoms of rapid heartbeat, breathlessness, sweating and “butterflies.”

 “Grief feels like fear.” Grief can come in waves; welling up and dominating emotions; subsiding; and recurring. Again…Grief has no time value. There is no “normal.” Grief wraps your heart like gossamer. “Sorrow… turns out to be not a state, but a process- It needs not a map, but a history.” 
~C.S. Lewis~

How to Deal With Grief

Grief takes a different path for each of us. Grieving takes time as does healing. Most of us know of the 5 steps of grieving- what we may not realize is that the five steps are not like a stairwell with a bottom and a top. Grief steps are a compendium with healing along the way. You may or may not reach the top.

Robin Rose Bennett: “I counsel people who have been trying to let go and yet feel totally stuck, that the task is not to let go but to allow their own heart to expand in order to hold the pain and not be engulfed by it—to metaphorically grow the heart so that the pain can be there, held in their love, which is so much greater than they can imagine.”

Grief's timetable may be resistant to staging. What works for me may not be effective for you. Shocking upset may be eased by using herbs that act on the nervous system to calm and soothe the nerves. We may feel that we want to deaden the pain. Heart Pain hurts, it makes you feel sick. It makes you afraid. There are ways to help severe reactions as you move through your day.

The trouble with grieving is that we cannot plan how we will feel at one moment or in a situation. We may feel shock at first… or at times when we think of our loss. As days go by, we may feel listless, purposeless, or isolated. Grief can last a lifetime… an eternity.
It is important to remember that even though grief is unpredictable, we do know that our immune system becomes challenged if grief is unrelenting. Here is how that happens:
The three stages of adaption are Alarm, Resistance, and Exhaustion. When we are stressed, our bodies react by producing fight-or-flight hormones.

This is the right time to consider Aromatherapy and Herbs, such as Nervines. Herbal medicine can not ease the pain of loss but can help move us through and uplift us as we experience change.

RESPONDING TO IMMEDIATE TRAUMA

Bleeding Heart -- Dicentra formosa when given during a time of acute crisis will help to calm shakiness and fear. Once the body has settled out of immediate shock and panic, the medicine works differently -- helping to bring the tears you have been holding back flowing to the surface. A beautiful gift, but one to be received when you are in a place where its safe and right to let the tears flow.

Pasque Flower --Anemone pulsatilla, will help someone when intense grief or terror come on suddenly, as if brought in by an ill wind.

Ghost Pipe -- Monotropa uniflora -- When pain, physical or emotional, is so intense as to overwhelm a person completely, Ghost Pipe helps to regulate sensory gating so that the pain is processed differently

Skullcap can be administered liberally to help bring calm in an intense situation.

Wood Betony (Stachys betonica) helps to anchor a person in the physical body after a traumatic event.

NOURISHING AND SETTLING THE HEART

In Chinese medicine, a person's emotional self is connected with a spirit called Shen, and the heart is sometimes envisioned as a clay vessel that stores the Shen. When the vessel is shaken, the Shen becomes scattered and disturbed -- which is marked by insomnia, restlessness, irritability, emotional upheaval, and decreased attention span. Schizandra and Reishi are both used traditionally to settle and nourish the Shen. Both also support the liver, aiding with the processing of difficult emotions. Both are also adaptogens, helping the body to regulate its response to continual stress.

Hawthorn helps to nourish, cool, and repair the heart and blood vessels. Its berries feed the heart, its leaf and flower bring lightness and relaxation to the cardiovascular system, and its thorns provide protection.

Motherwort calms and protects the heart, especially when there is anxiety driven by unsettled emotion. It combines really beautifully with Passionflower when emotional anxiety is driving circular thinking and creating insomnia.

MOVING GRIEF

Aromatic plants help to move emotions and energies -- hence their use as smudges and ceremonial incense around the world.

I have been burning Cedar as a smudge as well. Other evergreens bring similar medicine.

Monarda spp. are used in the Muskogee Creek tradition to clear the ways in which death hangs over and clings onto the living.

Sweet smelling aromatic plants like Sweetgrass and Cottonwood and Rose help to remind the heart and the spirit of the sweetness and beauty of the world.

David Winston recommends a blend of Lemon Balm, Rose petals, and Hawthorn flower, berry and leaf in tincture. Robin Rose Bennett recommends a formula containing dried Linden Blossoms, dried Violet leaves, and dried Hawthorn berries, flowers or leaves in tea form

Essential oils such as rose, neroli, lemon balm, frankincense, geranium, tauma life blend, peace and calming, stress away, valor, forgiveness blend, joy blend, release blend, lavender, grounding blend, hope blend, chamomile, cedarwood, balsam fir, etc. Are all very helpful in calming the nerves, helping with sleep, bringing emotions to the surface, easing fear, etc.

There are several at adaptation, nervine, releasing, and calming herbs in all forms such as tinctures, teas, hydrosols/sprays, essential oils, massage oils, bath soaks, and supplements that can help our bodies and minds during times of transition, huge change, heartbreak, and soul-shattering loss 😢

Be gentle with yourself, you are doing the best you can. "Your wings were ready, but our hearts were not" 💔