Chapter 4 • Releasing Emotion and Grief Somatically

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We can’t heal (and reconnect) if we’re not willing to feel.

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Living Without Ellie’s Fur Body

Ellie’s fur body needed me more than most dogs ever need a human. She couldn’t walk on her own. She couldn’t even stand. I helped her pee and poop. I held her chew toys and treats in her mouth. I supported her body so she could stand and eat at her little “Fluff Trough®”—a raised food bowl that made it easier for her to eat while standing. Without it, mealtimes would have been so much harder.

At first, she could still get around a little before falling. But as time passed, even that faded until she couldn’t get up at all without me. And for the last month or more of her life, Ellie was also blind.

Most mornings began around 5:30 a.m. She would stir in her crib beside my bed, and I’d lift her up and carry her to the bathroom. Helping Ellie “use the bathroom” was one of the most challenging dances we shared. Like every dog, she would circle before settling into position. Only she couldn’t do it alone. I had to spin with her, like a partner in a ballroom routine, catching her at just the right moment before she plopped down.

Some days were brutal. On mornings when I hadn’t slept because I’d been up with her, or when she growled at me as I tried to feed her, or when our bathroom dance was more messy than graceful, I cried in exhaustion and despair.

And some days were magic. We’d fall into rhythm, her movements and mine aligning, as though we were truly one body. Those days felt strangely elegant and profoundly beautiful.

My favorite time came after our morning bathroom dance. I’d bring her back to bed, and she would nestle into my side. I would half-meditate, half-replace the chew toy in her mouth every few seconds, because she couldn’t hold it herself. Those mornings were quiet, tender, peaceful. I miss them more than anything. I knew she felt safe and loved.

During the day, we danced again and again. I held her perfect little hips and followed her lead. Sometimes I let her try to walk and fall. Other times, I held her steady so she could sniff the garden or explore the neighborhood, just to feel like a dog. My back still aches from those hours, but I would give anything for one more of those back-breaking dances with her.

Me and Ellie napping

In her last couple of weeks, Ellie became increasingly sensitive to sound. On our final day together, we were outside dancing in the backyard. But even the smallest noise sent her into a frenzy—growling, trembling, spinning. It wasn’t new, but it was escalating more. The morning I took her in for her MRI, I wanted her to have a little play on the soft green grass outside the vet. But just as I grabbed her out of the car and put her in her stroller, a loud motorcycle roared past. The noise triggered the most intense display of fear and aggression I had ever seen in her—growling, trembling, utterly terrified.

While I would have loved for our final conscious moment together to be a peaceful play in the grass, I’m strangely grateful for what happened. It was as if the Universe wanted me to see clearly just how not okay she was, that her brain was so easily triggered into terror now, leaving her in pain and fear of everything around her. The intensity of that moment gave me the sign I needed to truly know she was ready to be free of her body.

Looking back, I can see how much I previously didn’t want to face what was happening. My perception was clouded by hope. I wanted her to live so badly that I couldn’t allow myself to imagine that the MRI results might actually ask us to let her go. So while it might seem like I should have been prepared, I wasn’t. And in all honesty, there is no preparing. I’ve supported so many people through this process, and everyone says the same thing in different words: I thought I was prepared. But I wasn’t.

The first week without her physical presence was excruciating, and strangely beautiful. I swung between two extremes: moments of peace and subtle joy, knowing she was free, and waves of despair so deep they frightened me, accompanied by physical pain in my heart that felt almost unbearable.

Towards the end of that first week, I began to feel my head above water. I was able to go to the shops, and I even did some client sessions. But what made those first weeks so painful, and also so valuable for healing, was being in the world we had shared together. Our whole house had become Ellie’s sanctuary. We turned every room into a soft play space—pillows piled in the bedroom, my office, my husband’s studio, the back deck, even a portable setup we carried between the kitchen and living room. It was the only way to keep her safe when she hurled or propelled herself across the floor. So as I faced the task of putting our house back together, I also allowed myself to feel and heal. My husband offered to do much of it, and I gratefully accepted. But in our bedroom and my office, I needed to do it myself. I wanted to honor the sacred spaces we had created together. To sit with the memories. To cry, to smile, to let myself feel.

Phase 2: Releasing the Emotions of Grief Somatically

If Phase 1 is the shock of survival, where it feels impossible to breathe or function, Phase 2 is where the full force of grief begins to move through us. This is the phase when the reality of living without their fur body begins to sink in. The pillow forts are gone. The toys are put away. The house is quieter. And suddenly, we feel the absence of them everywhere.

Phase 2 is not neat or linear. It’s messy. It’s raw. One moment you may be sobbing on the floor. Next, you may feel strangely peaceful. And then, before you know it, you’re crying again. That’s because in this phase, your body is trying to release what it has been holding in shock. The tears, the trembling, the exhaustion—these are not signs of weakness. They are signs you are healing.

If we try to keep it in our head, rationalize it, or “stay strong,” we trap that energy inside. But when we allow the crying, shaking, screaming, or silence, whatever wants to move through, we are actually healing. It isn’t easy. It isn’t pretty. But it is necessary.

This chapter is here to walk you through that process, to help you honor the waves of emotion, release what’s been trapped in your body, and begin to discover the strange beauty that sometimes lives right beside the pain. While Phase 2 may feel like the hardest part, when we truly allow it, it becomes the turning point that carries us toward relief, compassion, and even peace.

Allowing Ourselves to Be Sensitive, Empathic and Loving

For those of us who are sensitive and empathic, feeling pain comes easily. We don’t try to suppress it, we sink into it. Sometimes, we even cling to it, as if holding onto the pain proves how deeply we loved.

But grief isn’t meant to be a punishment. It’s not something we “owe” our loved ones. And if we feel our pain without meeting it with compassion, we risk getting stuck in it—looping through the same emotional terrain again and again. I call this recycling emotion, and it creates unnecessary suffering.

We often stay in this loop (unconsciously) until something finally shifts. And that something is love. We keep recycling our pain, almost punishing ourselves with it, until we finally receive the compassion we’ve been needing. Until we feel seen, heard, and honored in our grief. Until someone acknowledges: Your love mattered. Your pain is real. And you’re not alone.

You’ve probably witnessed this in others, those who seem stuck in the same story of loss or heartbreak. Like a broken record, playing the same painful song on repeat. And while it might seem frustrating from the outside, what they’re really longing for is compassion. The moment they feel genuinely seen, heard and loved, the cycle begins to soften. The grip of pain begins to release.

And the same is true for you. There will be moments when you find yourself recycling emotion. It’s completely human. Sometimes, holding onto the pain feels like holding onto them. The antidote isn’t to judge yourself or rush to move on, it’s to meet yourself with deep compassion. To gently offer love, understanding, and care to the part of you still aching. This support can also come from a friend, a professional, or community.

Grievealing Isn’t Just About Feeling—It’s About Loving What We Feel

Grief is a journey of growth and transformation. It’s not just about feeling our emotions, it’s about learning to actively love them. When we surrender to our heartbreak, and learn to meet our heartache with kindness, love, and care, something transcendent begins to happen. Feeling our emotions is just the beginning. Learning to actively love our hurts and broken hearts is the key to transformation. It’s what turns pain into purpose and transforms us into more courageously loving human beings.

I know this might sound like an empty promise right now. The idea that your own love and compassion could radically transform your life might seem cliché or unrealistic. But when I finally allowed myself to grieveal my mother’s death, twenty years after the fact, within months, long-term illnesses healed and patterns began to dissolve.

During that time I had the profound privilege of reconnecting with my inner child, my “Little Zoë”, and nursing her back to wholeness. And to my surprise it was often ordinary, seemingly irrelevant moments that led me back to Little Zoë and my opportunities to grieveal my mum. For example, feeling unappreciated at work would trigger deep memories of being unseen and unloved after “losing” my mum. As I embraced those painful places within me, I often found Little Zoë. Over and over again, I picked up my innocent, precious girl and I loved her. Those ordinary moments became a predictable path to extraordinary healing. Over time, I was able to reframe the most challenging moments of my childhood. I heard her pain, allowed her to say aloud the things she never got to say, and loved her the way she had needed to be loved, both then and now. I didn’t change what happened, but by giving Little Zoë the love she desperately needed in those challenging moments, she was able to let go of limiting patterns and believes and move on.

Grief Guides Us Back into Our Bodies

Grief isn’t something we can think our way through. It’s something we have to feel. And feeling doesn’t happen in the mind, it happens in the body. References: Emotions Are Experienced in the Body)

This is the heart of somatic healing: learning to shift our focus from our racing thoughts to the sensations and energetic blocks within our body. Because grief, trauma, and deep emotion don’t just live in the mind. They lodge in the nervous system, in our muscles, even in our breath. When left unexpressed, they show up as tension, exhaustion, even illness.

The way through grief isn’t to avoid it, it’s to stay present in the body, to let the emotions rise, and to allow them to move. And here’s the paradox: healing isn’t about letting go of our loved one’s memory or their love. It’s about learning to carry that love in a way that brings peace instead of pain.

Pet grief can feel particularly brutal because animals are so pure. Their love enters us without reservation. They become part of us. So when they leave this physical world, it can feel like a part of our own body has been torn away. And yet, that very intensity is the opening. By getting out of our heads and letting ourselves feel grief fully in our bodies, we begin to release the weight of loss without losing the love that is beyond form.

Grief is not rational. It doesn’t follow a script. It won’t be solved by logic. But when we allow our bodies to guide us, through trembling, crying, sighing, movement, stillness, we find a path through. A path where grief is no longer something to survive, but something that awakens us to love more deeply than ever before.

Feeling vs. Resisting: The True Source of Suffering

Most people believe they are feeling their emotions, but more often than not, they’re actually resisting or distracting themselves from them in some kind of mental process. When I ask clients how they feel about a situation, I often hear:

“I feel like my husband was really out of line.”

Instead of actually feeling their emotions, they focus on blame, fixing, or analyzing the situation.

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“I feel nothing, maybe tired.”

They’re exhausted, not from the emotion itself, but from unconsciously repressing it.

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Can you see how they’re just thinking and resisting feeling? This happens with grief too. When asked how they’ve been feeling, people often say:

“I found another one of Ralph’s toys on the floor, and pretty soon I started feeling low and hopeless. And that continued on all morning. I felt terrible all morning.”

Most likely they haven’t been consciously feeling, but resisting feeling.

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We often think that we’re feeling genuine emotion, because pretty quickly the act of resisting or suppressing emotion can be exhausting and even gut wrenching. But we’re not actively feeling and releasing if we can’t give ourselves the time, space and sacred loving support to do so. If we’re still doing the housework, doing errands, or doing anything at all, we’re most likely resisting, not feeling our emotion. We need to stop. Pause. And allow ourselves to actually feel the suppressed emotions.

The real source of distress isn’t the emotion itself, it’s resisting it. In my experience, emotions aren’t as overwhelming as they seem. Even deep heartbreak, when truly felt, is more manageable than the ongoing suffering of avoidance.

We don’t want to allow our pain into the foreground of our consciousness, so we avoid it and suffer with it being in the background leaking our energy and focus. And here’s the irony—when we learn to fully feel our emotions, they can move through us quickly. We often think we don’t have time to stop and process our feelings, but resisting them drains us far more than just allowing them to pass through.

Pure Emotion Rarely Lasts Longer than Ninety Seconds

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, found that the actual experience of an emotion lasts about ninety seconds. When something triggers an emotional reaction, a chemical process happens in the body that lasts roughly ninety seconds. After that, any lingering emotional response comes from our thoughts, our choice to stay in the loop. Reference: Emotion lasts less than 90 seconds

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But when we suppress them or try to control them, they get stuck in loops, causing exhaustion, stress, and suffering. Many people avoid grief because they fear that once they start feeling, the pain will never stop. But that fear comes from experiencing the resistance to grief, not grief itself. Once we learn to fully feel our emotions, we realize they move through us quickly, and often leave us with clarity, healing, and even a deep sense of peace.

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The Blame Trap and Self-Guilt

Blame is one of the strongest ways we resist feeling. And when there’s no one to blame, we turn on ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, and that’s when guilt sets in. “Losing” someone we love is so overwhelming that we instinctively grasp for something, anything, to focus on, just to avoid feeling the full weight of our heartbreak. If the vet made a questionable decision, we fixate on that. If someone in our life wasn’t perfect, we obsess over their mistakes. If no one else is at fault, we blame ourselves.

Blame gives us a false sense of control—the idea that if they or we just do everything right next time, we’ll never have to feel this kind of pain again. But life doesn’t work that way. Even if we were perfect, and we could somehow control everyone else to be perfect, loss would still come. We’ll dive much deeper into blame in 13 • Guilt and Shame: Letting Go of Fault, and Holding On to Love .

Grieveal First, Take Action Second

If there’s accountability you seek or justice to pursue, everything flows better if you grieveal first, and act second.

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It sounds dramatic. But we don’t make our clearest or wisest choices when we’re in the middle of any kind of trauma, including the trauma of grief, when we’re driven by raw pain, anger, or desperation. So tend to your heart first. Stop the bleeding. Let yourself grieve. Then, from a place of healing, strength, and love, you’ll know exactly what to do.

Feeling Your Feelings Is Only Half the Equation

For a long time, it was believed that simply feeling and expressing our emotions was the key to healing — that if we cried, vented, or released the pain, that was the extent of what was possible. But we now understand that feeling alone is only part of the process. True healing comes not just from experiencing our pain, but from meeting it with what it has always needed: Love, compassion, acceptance, and understanding.

Modern neuroscience and psychology have shown that how we relate to our emotions has a far greater impact than the emotions themselves. When we hold our pain with warmth and presence, the brain shifts out of survival mode and into regulation. Self-compassion softens the threat response, supports neural rewiring, and helps integrate emotional experiences in a healthier way. In the next chapter, we’ll explore how this works and how you can practice it in your own healing.

Welcoming the Tidal Waves, and Staying in Our Body When They Hit

If we want to make sure that our grief doesn’t impact our neural pathways negatively, and subsequently our life’s path, we need to allow ourselves to feel the tidal waves of our grief.

It is important to note however, that it’s impossible to feel our grief all the time. Sometimes, when you’re at work, or in the store, a huge wave of emotion will come, and you may choose to suppress it. And sometimes, when and as you choose, we need to actively allow the huge tidal waves of grief to be welcome and allowed through your body.

The Guided Experience below will hold your hand and support you in allowing the tidal waves of grief. The beautiful thing is, when we surrender and let the tidal wave move through, it cleans us out. The pressure releases, and we feel lighter.

How to “Feel”

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