somatic grief: my own Roman Empire
Welcome back, feelings-havers! Today we're talking about everyone's favorite topic: grief. You know, that feeling you TOTALLY have time to process in between work emails, meal prep, and managing to hold your life together.
Spoiler alert: your body is processing it whether you have time or not. And if you've been on my table with mysteriously tight hips, a jaw that won't unclench, or shoulders living somewhere up by your ears, there's a decent chance we're dealing with grief that's set up permanent residence in your tissues.
But first, let's redefine grief, because I think we've been doing it wrong.
grief isn't just about death (though it includes that)
When most people hear "grief," they think: death, funerals, black clothing, casseroles. And yes, that's grief. But grief is actually much bigger and far more common than we give it credit for.
Grief is the process of acclimating to change. Any change that involves loss—which is…most significant changes in life, even the happy ones.
It's the loss of freedom when you have kids and suddenly can't just randomly go to the movies. It’s having your sweetie move in and losing the peace of having a bedroom floor without their socks littered about… It's the loss of your pre-injury body, the one that could run or lift or move without thinking about it. It's watching your parents age and realizing they're not invincible. It's the end of a relationship, even one that needed to end. It's losing a version of yourself you'll never get back—the 25-year-old who could stay up all night, the person before the diagnosis, the you who existed before [insert life-altering thing here].
Grief is what happens in the space between what was and what is. It's the emotional and physiological process of adapting to a new reality, which is literally always destabilizing.
Here’s where we get stuck: in our world, we're taught to "get over it," "move on," "stay positive." So we shove it down, keep going, and pretend we're fine. Which might feel like it works, until your body starts screaming at you in the form of chronic pain, mystery tension, or that weird thing where you can't take a full breath.
Your body doesn't forget. It just stores what isn’t being processed (with the idea that you’ll get back to it when you slow down, if you ever do…).
where grief lives: the somatic patterns
While emotional grief is what you feel (sadness, anger, longing), somatic grief is what your body does with those feelings—how it holds them, expresses them, protects you from them, or gets stuck trying to process them. Grief has favorite places to set up shop in your body. The patterns are shockingly consistent across humans, and once you know what to look for, you'll see it everywhere (sorry in advance).
The chest and diaphragm: the grief lockbox
Remember how we talked last time about the diaphragm being the bridge between your heart and your gut? Yeah, grief camps out here HARD.
When you're grieving, your chest literally tightens. The intercostal muscles between your ribs contract. Your diaphragm gets rigid instead of fluid. You end up breathing shallowly from your upper chest because taking a full breath feels like it might crack you open.
This makes sense—you're protecting your heart, basically armoring your chest so the feelings can't get out (or in). The problem is that this restriction becomes your new normal. You forget what a full breath feels like, and now you're stuck in sympathetic overdrive (callback to my posts about the vagus nerve and dysautonomia!).
You might feel like crying when I release your diaphragm. It's not dramatic; it's just what happens when something that's been held finally has permission to move.
The throat and jaw: everything you haven't said
All those things you wanted to say but couldn't. All the screams you swallowed. All the conversations you'll never get to have. They live right here—in your throat, your jaw, the muscles of your face.
The temporomandibular joint (TMJ) becomes a holding tank for unexpressed emotion. Your masseter and pterygoid (jaw) muscles stay chronically tight. Your throat constricts like you're constantly trying not to cry or yell.
Fun fact: the vagus nerve runs right through here, which means chronic jaw and throat tension directly impacts your nervous system's ability to regulate. Your grief is literally affecting your digestion, your heart rate variability, and your capacity to feel safe in your body.
The shoulders and neck: carrying the weight
We say "shouldering a burden" for a reason. Grief is heavy, and your trapezius muscles—those big diamond-shaped muscles across your upper back and shoulders—will absolutely try to carry it for you.
This ties into that forward head posture we talked about (because of course it does). When you're grieving, you often collapse forward, rounding through your upper back, rolling your shoulders in. It's a protective posture, but it also compresses your breathing, restricts your throat, and creates a feedback loop of tension.
Your neck muscles end up doing way too much work trying to hold your head up against gravity while also trying to hold your entire emotional state together. No wonder your neck hurts.
The hips and psoas: the fear underneath the grief
The psoas—that deep hip flexor running from your spine to your inner thigh—is sometimes called "the muscle of the soul," and honestly, it's earned the title. Interesting tidbit: research suggests that the very first muscular cells that develop in vitro become the iliopsoas! (I will undoubtedly post a very nerdy and impassioned essay about the psoas eventually…)
The psoas is directly connected to your fight-or-flight response. It's what contracts to pull you into a fetal position when you're scared or overwhelmed. And grief, underneath everything else, often includes fear: fear of more loss, fear of the unknown, fear that you won't survive this, fear that you'll forget, fear that you won't be able to handle what comes next.
Chronic grief keeps your psoas in a low-level state of activation. This shows up as tight hips, lower back pain, and a feeling of instability in your core. Your body is literally braced against the next blow.
I want to mention that there is a whole WORLD of context in your pelvic floor as pertains to grief, but it’s outside my scope to say anything with confidence… if you’re curious, I have practitioner referrals and resources to share.
the feedback loop of grief (and how to interrupt and complete the cycle)
Here's the trap: grief creates physical tension. Physical tension restricts breathing. Restricted breathing keeps your nervous system in sympathetic activation. Sympathetic activation makes it harder to process emotion. Unprocessed emotion creates more physical tension. Round and round we go.
The good news? You can interrupt this loop from multiple entry points. You don't have to "fix" your grief (you can't—grief isn't a problem to solve). But you can create space in your body for it to move through you instead of getting stuck.
self-care strategies that actually help
1. Breathe like you mean it (the grief-processing edition)
I'm not going to rehash the entire breathing post (but like, it’s there for you…), so here's the grief-specific version:
When you're grieving, you need to practice exhaling fully. Grief gets trapped in the exhale—the letting go, the release, the emptying out. If you're only breathing into your upper chest, you're not actually completing the breath cycle.
Try this: modified Box breathing, with an emphasis on the exhale.
Inhale through your nose for 4 counts (belly rises)
Hold for 4 counts
Exhale through your mouth for 6-8 counts (longer than the inhale—this is key)
Hold empty for 2 counts
Repeat for 5-10 rounds
The extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system and gives your body permission to release what it's been holding. You might cry. You might sigh. You might yawn. This is all good. Let it happen.
2. Move your hips (because the psoas needs to remember it's safe)
Your hips hold fear and grief in a very primal way. Static stretching sometimes helps, but often what you really need is movement—dynamic, exploratory movement that reminds your nervous system that you can move through space safely. I call this “getting your wiggle on.”
Try: Hip circles, figure-8s, or just swaying side to side while standing. Put on music if that helps. The goal isn't to "stretch out" your hips—it's to have a conversation with them. Move slowly, curiously, without an agenda. Notice what feels stuck or scary. Pause, and breathe into those places.
**Pigeon pose is great if you can breathe in it. If you're holding your breath or clenching your jaw, you're just teaching your body to associate hip opening with more tension. Back off, modify, or try something else.
3. Give your jaw permission to move (and make weird sounds)
Your jaw has been clenching to keep everything in. What if you let it do the opposite?
Try this: Gentle jaw stretches—open wide, move side to side, make circles. Then (and this is where it gets weird): make sounds. Sigh. Groan. Hum. Let your jaw hang open and make the ugliest, most ungraceful sounds you can.
This isn't about singing or speaking clearly—it's about letting your throat and jaw remember they can move freely. Bonus: humming stimulates your vagus nerve, which is exactly what your grief-dysregulated nervous system needs.
Do this alone in your car or shower if you need privacy. But do it.
4. Chest opening with a side of crying (it's fine, I promise)
Lie on your back with a foam roller, yoga block, or rolled towel lengthwise along your spine. Let your arms fall open to the sides. Breathe.
This position physically opens your chest and stretches your pecs, but more importantly, it puts you in a vulnerable position—heart open, throat exposed, belly soft. Your nervous system might have feelings about this. Let it.
Stay for 5-10 minutes. Breathe into your ribs, your heart, your belly. If you cry, that's not a malfunction—that's the point. Your body is releasing what it couldn't before.
a note on timeline (hint: grief doesn't have one)
There's this cultural expectation that grief should be done by now. That you should be "over it." That there's a timeline—a few weeks, a few months, maybe a year tops—and then you're supposed to be fine.
This is garbage.
Grief doesn't follow a schedule. It comes in waves. It shows up years later when you least expect it. It lives in your body long after your brain has "moved on." And that's not a problem—that's just how bodies work.
Your tissues remember. Your nervous system remembers. And sometimes your body needs to process something your mind already thinks it's dealt with.
So if you're three years out from a loss and suddenly your hips are impossibly tight, or your chest feels like it's in a vise, or you can't stop clenching your jaw? That's not you "regressing." That's just your body finally feeling safe enough to let you feel it.
Be patient with yourself. Grief isn't linear, neither is growth, and neither is healing.
the bottom line
Grief lives in your body whether you acknowledge it or not. It settles into your fascia, restricts your breath, and shapes the way you move through the world. You can push it down, ignore it, and keep going—and your body will keep score.
Or you can create space for it. Breathe into it. Move with it. Let it be messy and non-linear and inconvenient.
You don't have to "process" all your grief right now (please don't—that's not how this works). But you can start creating a little more room in your body for whatever needs to move through you.
And if you're on my table and I'm doing something weird with your diaphragm or hips, and you suddenly feel like crying? Now you know why. Let it happen. I've got lots of tissues, and I promise I'm here for it.
I am here for all your parts, all the light and dark. May you find ways to be with the intensity of your experience in all its beauty and its suffering. I am here to support your process, because in the end grief and healing have something very important in common:
Change.
✨ Stay well, stay curious, and give yourself permission to feel things in your body ✨