I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace (about grief)

There is a false sense of morality attached to the idea that graceful grieving is a sign of emotional or spiritual maturity. It works along the lines of always needing to see the reason why things are going wrong, or forcing spiritual practices like gratitude when right now you don’t feel grateful for anything. We focus so much on emotional regulation and look for a spiritual practice that catapults us from painful experience to having processed the lesson, that we miss how important the messy parts actually are.

Don’t get me wrong, true spiritual practices and beliefs can make us more resilient when facing hardships, but they do not make us immune to them.

Emotions are messy, in a good way.

Even though we like to think we can control them, belittle them, push them away or avoid them altogether, they eventually return to the surface. Because emotions are a reaction to what you are experiencing, they carry important messages from your subconscious about your state of well-being and your environment. That’s why emotions are always valid, but not always true.

Feeling your feels is the most radical act of self-love. When you let the raw, unedited emotions come up and start listening, you can trace them all the way back to where they came from in the first place. You will find the parts of yourself that, since childhood, you were told are too much, wrong or shouldn’t exist. When you bring your awareness to those aspects, you provide them with a safe space to speak-up and reintegrate these parts. Suddenly being upset about a messy house is not about the mess but about our sense of powerlessness. A rejection from a job is a sense of not being good enough, and grieving a partnership is belief that we are unlovable.

The messiness is the process – lying in bed and avoiding the world, screaming in the pillow and the nagging fear of uncertainty.

The answers you seek will come naturally to you by going through it. It’s a law in this universe that what you give awareness to must change because now it’s no longer suppressed. There is no trophy to be won from forcing yourself to suffer with grace. True grace, or true love, is allowing yourself to be whatever you are right now.

When you let yourself truly feel your feels instead of suppressing them, for fear of judgement or rejection from others, you have a chance to make peace with yourself.

It all begins with asking yourself: “how does this make me feel?” and giving yourself the space to process whatever it is that you are going through in the best way you can. Even if you admit, in the words of the great Taylor Swift: ‘I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace’, the answers will come, and you will make it through.