How to Feel Grief Without Getting Stuck in It

The way to move through grief is to feel it fully, in the body, the emotions and the mind, instead of pushing it down. According to Satyen Raja, founder of the Coherence Institute, grief turns self-defeating not when you feel too much, but when feeling hardens into a story you keep retelling.

Key points

• Grief is not only a thought. It lodges in the images and thoughts of the mind, in the emotions, and physically in the body as heaviness, restlessness and irritation.
• Pushing it away does not make it leave. Satyen's instruction is the opposite: let the images, feelings and endless thoughts arise, including the ones that blame.
• There is a real line between embracing grief and lamenting it. Embracing is feeling what is here. Lamenting is building a new story and expressing it again and again.
• Embracing grief is done with your whole humanness, not your intellect. Nature, witnesses, writing and speaking to the person you lost are all ways in.

In this piece

• Where does grief actually live?
• Why doesn't pushing grief away work?
• When does feeling grief become self-defeating?
• What does embracing grief look like in practice?
• What becomes possible when grief is felt all the way through?

Where does grief actually live?

Grief is often talked about as sadness, a mood that comes and goes. Satyen Raja, who developed Rapid Coherence Integration™, describes something more layered. In a recorded conversation on grief, he placed it in three places at once.

The first is the mind:

You see, grief gets lodged into our system, deeply and gets lodged into the images in our mind, all the thoughts we had about, let's say, whoever it is.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

The second and third are the emotions and the body:

It's also a feeling in our emotions, that deep sense of loss and down. It's deep in our body. We feel it in heaviness and restlessness and this deep irritation and unsettled feeling.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

That last list is worth slowing down on. Heaviness is expected. Restlessness and irritation often are not. Many people do not recognise their own snappishness, their inability to sit still, or a low, unsettled hum in the chest as grief at all. They assume something else is wrong with them.

Knowing where grief lives changes what it means to feel it. It is not enough to think about the loss. Grief asks to be felt where it actually sits.

Why doesn't pushing grief away work?

The most common response to grief is containment. Stay busy. Keep it together. Get through the week.

Satyen's instruction runs the other way:

Wisdom would have us not run away from that. Truth would have us face that. Love would have us embrace through awareness, self-awareness, presencing with yourself.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

He is specific about what "facing it" includes. Not only the tender memories, but the thoughts most people would rather not have:

I have to allow myself to think the thoughts. It's my fault, not my fault. Or how could I?

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

The guilt, the second-guessing, the replay of what could have been done differently. His guidance is to let these come too:

All the endless thoughts that can arise out of those circumstances. Let them arise.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

He warned in the same breath that stuffing them does not work, because they keep coming back.

Emotion research points the same way. In a well-known study, psychologists James Gross and Robert Levenson asked people to hide their reactions while watching sad film clips. Suppressing the outward expression did not reduce the sadness they reported feeling. The feeling stayed. Only its visibility changed.

Grief that is held down is not grief that has left. It is grief waiting for a quieter moment.

When does feeling grief become self-defeating?

This is the question most grieving people eventually ask. If the answer is to feel it, how much feeling is too much? Can you drown in it?

In the conversation, Melissa Koay asked exactly that: at what point does embracing the pain become self-defeating? Satyen's answer was precise:

It becomes self-defeating when you continue to let it go on and on and you create a new story and you're expressing it again and again in some way.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

Melissa offered a word for it, lamenting, and he agreed.

This is the distinction the whole piece turns on. Feeling grief and lamenting it can look similar from the outside. Both involve tears, both involve talking about the loss. But they are doing different things.

Feeling is present tense. It is the heaviness in the chest right now, the image that just surfaced, the thought that just arrived. It moves, because it is allowed to.

Lamenting is a story. It has a shape that returns: the same sentences, the same grievance, the same ending, told again and again. It feels like grieving, but it keeps the grief in a loop rather than letting it move through.

Research on bereavement supports the distinction. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and colleagues followed bereaved adults and found that those who coped by ruminating, circling again and again on their distress and its causes, tended to stay in low mood for longer. The problem was not feeling. It was the repetition.

Feeling moves. A story loops.

This frees people from two opposite traps. One says grief should be kept quiet and got over quickly. The other says every expression of grief is healthy, however long it runs. Neither is quite true. The work is to feel fully and to notice when feeling has turned into a script.

What does embracing grief look like in practice?

Satyen is clear that this is not an intellectual exercise. Grief is met, in his words, with:

Total humanness, not with your intellect, not with your ideas.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

Understanding why you feel something is not the same as feeling it. Many people can explain their grief in detail and still have not let themselves sit inside it.

He also named concrete ways in:

You let yourself feel death. Your own, who you've lost, and you sit in it. In the forest, the nature, with others witnessing, expressing it, writing it, speaking to them.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

Nature. Witnesses. Writing. Speaking directly to the person who is gone. None of these require special training. What they share is that they give grief somewhere to go that is not back into the loop.

It can help to have a way to tell, in the moment, which side of the line you are on.

• Is what I'm feeling happening now, in my body, or am I retelling something I have told many times before?
• Would I use the same words I used last week, and the week before?
• After I let it move, is there even a little more space, or do I feel more tightly wound?
• Am I pushing any of the harder thoughts away, the guilt, the "how could I", while only allowing the gentler ones?
• Is anyone witnessing this with me, or has it only ever lived in my head?

None of these are tests to pass. They are ways of noticing, so that feeling can stay feeling.

What becomes possible when grief is felt all the way through?

Satyen's view is that the freedom most people hope grief will eventually give them is found inside it, not around it:

Embracing it is really where we find freedom in the death.

Satyen Raja, recorded interview on grief with Melissa Koay

That freedom is not the absence of love for the person who is gone, and it is not the end of missing them. It is the end of being at war with what you feel. When grief is allowed to move through the mind, the emotions and the body instead of being held down or replayed, what tends to follow is steadiness: equanimity alongside the loss, and a clarity that is hard to reach while the same story is running on a loop.

The Coherence Institute's work rests on the view that what hurts can be moved through rather than managed around. Some of the people who have experienced that are described on our results page.

If grief has become too heavy to carry on your own, reaching out to someone qualified to walk with you is part of meeting it, not a failure to. And if it has been living only in your head, the smallest next step may simply be to let one other person witness it.

This article discusses themes related to health and wellbeing. It is not medical advice. See our full disclaimers.