For anyone dealing with personal or collective grief, and wondering where all the feelings are supposed to go.
The song and the slow glide
'I don't know if we were meant to carry so much grief in one body… Yet, we are not alone.'
These words are from a song by Alexandra/Ahlay Blakely that I have sung with others at song circles, protests, and community gatherings. Groups assemble to process sorrow that feels too vast, frightening, or unfathomable to hold in isolation. The song includes a section that is essentially a tuneful wail, created to reconnect us with the messy, loud, and physical reality of mourning.
Reclaiming ritual, authentic expression, and communal grieving can be a form of resistance to the legacy of Victorian Britain, where emotional repression and sanitised mourning rituals became the default expectation.
I have been thinking and feeling a lot about grief recently, following an important loss in my own life.
My family has always been small, and familiar with bereavement and generational trauma. For the last twenty years, my Gran was my last living close relative. She died recently at the age of ninety-five. The loss was a slow one, with many of our final moments stretching across months, years, and even decades. It has been a long time since the last of our trips to the garden centre for coffee, cake, and unnecessary purchases of hand cream and silly ornaments. It has been months since we had a two-way conversation that I could be fairly sure was understood. It has been six years since I cleared out the last of my many childhood homes, which contained three generations of photo albums, favourite mugs, books, and school reports.
This bereavement has felt less like a sudden crash and more like a slow, quiet glide, though it carries an immense gravity. She died while I was on my way to say goodbye, but I take comfort in knowing she was not alone, and that we had spoken openly about dying while she could still communicate. When I arrived at the nursing home, I sat beside her bed and chatted with a relative and the local minister. The moment felt strange and surreal, yet also entirely ordinary and natural. We played one of her favourite songs as she was taken to the funeral home, and the staff lined up along the corridor to say goodbye.
At the funeral, I felt safe and supported, yet I was struck by a familiar disconnect between what my body wanted and what felt acceptable in the formal setting of a crematorium. I would not have been judged for showing emotion, and I did not feel an urge to collapse. Yet something in my body registered the solemn propriety of the room and I thought, 'this feels too distant and polite – how am I supposed to be fully present here?'
When grief becomes inconvenient
That moment brought back reflections on the need for open ritual and authentic emotional expression in our wider culture.
Social media and public health campaigns often remind us of the value of talking about our feelings. That can be helpful, though it can also begin to sound like a platitude. What happens when an expression of grief is loud, inconvenient, or distressing to those around us?
While accessible mental health care is vital, elements of psychology and psychiatry have historically pathologised responses to loss and trauma that are entirely natural reactions to intolerable circumstances. When someone’s sorrow does not fit neatly into a clinical timeline or a quiet room, our culture often tends to treat the person as disordered, rather than recognising that their nervous system might just be attempting to process an overwhelming change.
Allowing ourselves to reconnect with the full spectrum of being human means making room for despair, rage, exhaustion, and hope, without demanding that everyone maintain an orderly surface.
Mourning as a collective act
This personal loss sits alongside a second layer of grief: the experience of collective despair about continuous violence and war, and the political impulse in several countries, including the UK, to suppress or criminalise public mourning and protesting.
Protesting injustice is fundamentally an expression of grief. I have cried at almost every national march I have attended over the past two years, feeling the heavy disbelief of having to ask elected representatives to value human lives around the world. There have also been weekends when I have bowed out because my nervous system was at its limit, followed by the familiar sting of guilt, wondering if stepping back was an indulgence when people are facing catastrophe.
This historical weight is personal for me. My Jewish, undocumented immigrant Gran was brought to Scotland at the age of four in the 1930s. That history of displacement and lack of safety shaped her whole life, and gave her an acute awareness of world events. Seeing authoritarian politics gain ground, where vulnerability is branded as weakness and public sorrow is met with hostility, feels painfully familiar. It reinforces the message that we are expected to swallow our pain and carry on alone.
So, our resistance and our healing need to happen in community.
Healing in the presence of others
Nobody can process our grief for us, but trying to carry the weight of systemic and personal loss in solitude is an unsustainable burden. In a social landscape that capitalises on division, isolation tends to leave us more vulnerable.
This is where somatic practice and shared voice become grounding lifelines. I often find it challenging to express big emotions through words alone; I tend to feel things acutely, save them up, and channel them through creative expression. Embodied practices, especially when they involve singing, humming, or shared sound, have a way of cutting straight through intellectual defences. They can give the body a safe container to release the physical bracing, the tightened throat, and the locked diaphragm that unexpressed grief brings.
In my coaching and facilitation work, I see how transformative it can be simply to be witnessed in your full, messy humanity without someone rushing to comfort you, fix you, or tidy you up.
We do not have to move through loss with stoic decorum. Creating spaces where we can cry, sing, rage, or sit in silence together lets our bodies know that we are not carrying the weight of the world by ourselves. When we allow our grief to be held in the presence of others, it can help keep our humanity intact.
Working together
If you are dealing with bereavement or the strain of holding heavy emotions alone, somatic practice offers a grounded space to breathe, release physical tension, and be supported.
Explore 1:1 support on my Coaching page, learn how breath and vocalisation regulate the nervous system on my Breathwork page, or book a free discovery call to discuss where we might start.