“What feels so impossible to us is that we can’t comprehend the loss.”

In this episode, I’m digging into the impossibility of grief and how we navigate incomprehensible loss (as in, difficult to understand or make sense of). Everyone experiences grief and loss in this life, but not everyone has yet to experience the big losses that shift the ground beneath our feet and completely reconfigure who we are and how we relate to the world around us. These are the losses we’re addressing in this conversation, along with how we do what feels absolutely impossible in the presence of such massive emotions: surrender and allow ourselves to be unraveled by them. Even the most brilliant minds will be utterly overwhelmed by the prospect of letting go and succumbing to the impossibility of grief because it feels like you’ll just—poof!—cease to exist if you do. If you’re navigating loss and grief, this episode is for you.

Access our potent Journey Mapping program to get support with navigating the aftermath of grief and loss.

Read my memoir, Unravel: Rising Up and Coming Back from a Season That Damn Near Killed Me, to hear my story of healing from loss.

Grab a copy of our book, Awesome Life Tips®: 365 Tips for The Dark Night of the Soul, for daily support with challenging chapters.

Listen to the Tales from the Journey Podcast to hear other stories of rising up and coming back from big losses.

What to listen for:

My story of experiencing incomprehensible and traumatic loss
Why our bodies buckle under the weight of impossible grief
The impossibility of making sense of some losses
My instinct to go into the emotions rather than try to bypass them
Big emotions, like grief, will always give way to some sense of calm

“The amount of time that I spent on my kitchen floor or my apartment floor just sobbing and screaming and nearly hyperventilating. And every single time I did this, there would always come a moment where it passed. I would not find peace, happiness, or contentment, but I would reach a calm state. All of that wave would have moved through me and out, and I would stop, and I would be able to breathe again.”

Anger is a part of grief, and often at an irrational level
Some personalities are more “feely,” which brings more ease
Processing our grief in real-time keeps it from getting stored
The power of surrendering to our raw emotions

“This is what feels so impossible to us because we cannot comprehend or understand the loss. It does not make sense to us. Even if we can intellectually understand what happened, our body has to go through its process, which is confusing and hard. But you will find the endpoint if you feel your contractive emotions all the way through, productively and without story or interpretation. And at that endpoint, there might be peace. There will definitely be a sense of calm. You will feel tired and worn out by what you just went through, but you have moved it out of your body. You have begun to heal.”

We’re never really free from big griefs like these
Time doesn’t heal all wounds; intention does
Continuing to grow with and alongside your grief