The Dying We Do: A Somatic Grief-Work Practice

In the summer of 2021 I taught a series of experimental classes at the Shala called the Dying We Do. They were based on some ideas below around the muscles of grief, softening, and breathing.

Our being-in-grief can take on a shell-like, fixed quality. The hardened shell over time becomes a mix of what philosophers have called ‘the-they’, and our in-the-body responses to feelings of loss. ‘The-they’ can be described as ‘group think’, however, in a weird twist is what we mistakenly take as being our own voice. It is so familiar to us, and we indeed mistake it for ‘us’ because of how much we hear it. Effectively, we internalize this voice.  A teacher of mine once said that the way to know when you are hearing the-they rather than your true voice is when you observe yourself repeating the same thoughts over and over again. They are the voice of preconceptions, past conditioning, biases and something we are all becoming more aware of, the targeted algorithms of marketing. As we regularly face loss, transition and letting go (or not), the-they impede our true voice, within which is the body’s primal way of transforming grief as a regular metabolic process.

Being-in-grief can also be a soft space; in other words, it can happen without the hardening of the shell. Dying practices that allow grief to metabolize in the body AND fortify the body in its unique morphology mean that we can carry on without hardening. We will also begin to hear and listen to a more unfamiliar voice - ah, our true voice emerges.

Also, the hardening, or the grief-shell has another effect. It creates a world in which things lose their thing-ness. I don’t mean things like belongings so much, but the phenomena of the living that is our lives. I am referring to a daughter's head on your shoulder, a meal shared with friends, the opening notes of a favorite song, our raised arms overhead to stretch, a favorite shawl over my legs, a nap, and so on. The things are that which put themselves in front of us, or what we notice each day, that create our day. The grief shell pulls the things in our world away from us. As the grief-shell dissolves and we live in the world of phenomena, our world comes back to us.