Once, during a very dark time in my life, my therapist told me that I “needed a bigger cosmology”—a comment as confusing as it was compelling. It about eight months months after I had lost a close friend to suicide, and my grief felt ocean sized. It threatened to tear me apart.
I wasn’t sleeping or eating much. Meaning had drained away from my daily life and relationships. Anxious thoughts gripped my nights. Over and over, I chronicled the ways I’d failed my friend, and then on the flipside, the ways she abandoned me by exiting her life how she did. (Please know that I’ve changed some details of this story to protect the privacy of those involved.) The feelings of grief—the sadness, the rage, the regret—they felt so, so big, and like I had no place to put them.
I remember wanting so desperately to rid myself of those big feelings. I tried to imagine just cutting them out of my body and putting them in a box to keep on a shelf in my therapist’s office. It helped sometimes to imagine this, like I could take a break from them and then come back the next week and try to hold them a little with my therapist’s help. At least I wouldn’t be struggling alone with them week after week.
Ultimately, though, something in me had to grow bigger in order to hold all of the emotion that I was trying to process. It was as if I had ceramic bowl in the core of my Self that held all my feelings. In my grief, the bowl continually overflowed, spilling over the sides, making a painful mess throughout my life. I needed to swap it out for a bowl that could hold much, much more. I had to learn how first.
In Somatic Experiencing work, we often think in terms of expanding a client’s capacity to be with big feelings or sensations, kind of like helping them find that bigger bowl inside. It’s a stepwise process that requires working little by little, in a titrated way, to stay in contact with difficult feelings with a lot of support and connection to resources along the way.
I so desperately needed this bigger container as I was grieving the loss of my dear friend—and I remember the moment I found it. I was, once again, in my therapist’s office, hunched over on her green sofa, and, once again, feeling that familiar dread and an overwhelm so unbearable I feared it might literally knock me off my feet. I told my therapist I was worried that my feelings were going to flatten me, crush me into the carpet on her floor.
She smiled quietly in understanding, but then let me know that she was pretty sure that wouldn’t happen. She pointed out how solid and strong my feet and legs looked making contact with the ground. She felt certain they would hold me up.
Something about her confidence in me made me get curious for a moment. What could she possibly be seeing? I looked down at my feet pressing into the floor. I first saw and then felt, from the inside, just how right she was; I felt solid and strong through my legs. I became aware of my own endurance though gail force emotions. After all I had been through, I was still holding myself up! These feelings were not actually knocking me down!
Whereas the grief had felt utterly unbearable before, now I could now see that I was bearing it. I felt so grateful to her for pointing this out, and in my gratitude, I became aware of how, in this very moment, she was helping me hold myself up. Warmth spread through my heart. I had an image of our whole healing community, the lineage of therapists to which we belong. I felt all of them holding me, helping me hold myself, and my bowl expanded even larger. I felt the sky, the beauty of the stars, the magic and mystery of this life. My friend had moved on, but I was still alive.
With this new expanded container, it wasn’t that the grief felt any better. It didn’t feel better. It still doesn’t. But for the first time since my friend had died, I could hold it. And there was enough space in there for a few other feelings too. I hadn’t delighted in this big, beautiful world in so long. But there was all my delight and so much gratitude sitting right alongside this grief. I had found that bigger cosmology, one big enough to hold all of it.
From this place of expansion, that miserable, dark journey through grief took on a shifted meaning, one that included qualities of triumph, transcendence, a sense of arrival. I don’t think I could have found my way to those qualities a moment sooner than I did. I needed all of those hours, session after session, trolling the depths of my anguish, wondering if I could ever come up for air. As I’m writing now, I realize I had been working on making that bigger bowl all along. Every tear, every sleepless night, every well meaning word from a friend, every prayer for my friend’s peace—all of it part of its construction.
I sometimes tell my clients that there is grief in every transformational process, and there is transformation in every grief process. In this moment, I’m struck by what that really means. Grief tasks us to find a way to hold the enormity of our loves and the enormity of our losses. Both can take up whole universes, it seems.
Yet we can expand big enough to hold both. We can. And we do.
With loving reverence and deep gratitude to all my teachers along this path.
Om Namah Shivaya Gurave
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