Somatic Exercises for Grief and Loss

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Welcome to episode 73.

Brian
Hi, Brian. Hello, Ani.

Ani
How are you?

Brian
I'm doing great.

Ani
Today, we're talking about somatic practices for grief and loss, and I was really curious how you came up with that topic.

Brian
Well, there's so much press on anxiety.

Ani
Anxiety does get a lot of press. The marketers for anxiety- Anxiety gets a lot of press, doesn't it?

Brian
There's articles, and we've done a few podcasts, at least on anxiety. And we haven't done one on the other side what a lot of people think of the other side of the spectrum, grief and loss. However, they often can be paired together also. People can experience grief, depression, loss, and anxiety also. But I thought we'd just take a moment to just focus in a little bit more specifically on experiences of grief and loss and how somatic exercises or somatic practices can be used for people who are experiencing grief and loss. Yeah.

Ani
I'm really glad that you picked this topic. And I think it's interesting that a lot of times when we're experiencing grief and loss, it can feel very lonely and alone. And I think you're right. The press out there is more screaming at us about anxiety. And we need resources for grief and loss. Yeah.

Brian
So I think about grief and loss and depression on a spectrum, if you will. The spectrum looks like this, like sadness, grief, depression. If we look at it from a Chinese medicine perspective, too, sadness is associated with the metal element, which is often associated with the season of the fall or autumn, where the leaves are falling off the trees. There's this sense of loss that can happen. I know a lot of people experience a sense of sadness or a deep or interesting nostalgia that can happen in the fall a lot of times for people.

Ani
A lot of people pass away, too. There's just this natural passing away that happens. That time here, right? People lose people that time here.

Brian
Because we're natural beings. Of course, humans are also in the natural cycle of life and things. Loss is really correlated with a sense of sadness, like an emotional response of sadness. Does that make sense? When sadness persists, sadness persists, again, from a Chinese medicine perspective, it becomes grief. Sadness can be thought of as a transient, more transient experience. Like, oh, at the moment, I'm experiencing sadness. And grief might be more thought of as a more entrenched experience of sadness. So It's happening for longer periods of time, longer durations.

Ani
It also feels deeper. I'm just thinking about clients we've had who have worked through some kinds of awareness and breakthroughs, and they get to what's on underneath. And grief is actually a common thing that is hiding, waiting for us to acknowledge it under another layer. Under another layer, yeah. Yeah. The client will often say how it feels so deep. That's actually the thing I hear most often about grief is it's like I'm feeling... And they'll label it grief, and they'll say it just feels so vast.

Brian
Yeah. And oftentimes, grief can really become or run into depression. Sure. So that sadness can become grief, and grief can become depression. And there's some interesting research coming out now showing that depression, we look at MRI research, like fMRI stuff. Look at parts of the brain that have to do with sensory awareness in the body, like specifically parts of the brain, like the insula, which is a part of the brain that picks up sensory information from the body and then starts to make some sense of it and the routes it to other parts of the brain for processing. That part of the brain actually is not working. It's not activated for people who experience depression. And so when researchers started looking at that and they started doing some studies and some research, how does that actually show up with people? One of the conclusions that they really came to, and I wasn't surprised when I heard this, it made total sense to me, but it was also an awareness, is that depression is really a protective response. It's a protective response to not feeling the pain of loss. That makes a lot of sense.

Brian
Or not feeling that deep grief. So like what you said, the grief is the hiding under there. When we experience depression, what's actually happening in the brain is the parts of the brain that sense the body aren't working. The brain actually cannot even feel the body.

Ani
That It makes a lot of sense to me.

Brian
That's associated with depression. When someone is clinically depressed and they have an fMRI, it's not just happening, and they're not making it up. Their neurological workings of their brain are not working in such a way where they can even sense into their body. The psychological system is using depression as a protective response to not feel the pain, not feel the pain of loss.

Ani
I can see that because when my clients will uncover what they determine as grief, the next thing that happens is this fear that it's never going to go away. It does. But at that moment, they're like, Oh, my God, it's grief. And the next thing is, it's so vast, it's never going to go away. I can see that the body would help protect us against that because I think that's terrifying.

Brian
Yeah, it can feel existential, really. That loss can feel... Especially if the loss is associated with a close family member, someone you really care about, someone you are energetically connected with. That loss can really feel like a part of ourselves is also really lost. The psychophysiological mechanism is to, again, shut down the parts of the brain that would experience that as a protective response. Now, of course, the other side of that is, sure, you can't feel the pain of the loss and grief, but you also can't feel joy. You can't feel anything else either.

Ani
I was just going to say that. We have a really good friend and a client who we helped develop a nonprofit around helping people with grief and loss. One of her, I guess, favorite things I could say... It's such an honor to be able to do with people is to tap into that, what you just said, that if you don't feel the grief, you can't feel the joy. I know that's not really what we're talking about here today. I think it's so worthy of mentioning because grief can have this endless, like you said, existential quality to it. And it also, on the other side, can have this opening up to more of the world and life and joy than you ever thought possible.

Brian
Yeah. It's not only you can't feel... You can't feel anything else. So it's not even joy, but you can't even feel satisfaction or motivation, or a craving or a whatever. You literally can't feel anything at all. And oftentimes, when people are experiencing depression, they have, interestingly enough, higher pain markers. So this is interesting, right? Because it's a protective response to not experience the pain of the loss. But people tend to also have higher ratings of physical pain, like back pain, neck pain, those kinds of things, right? So there's proprioceptive pain that's going on. Some of that, too, is because depression is actually linked with a hyperactivation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is also being muted by that pain response. I actually just heard something interesting today. I was listening to some research that love, actually, the sensations and the feelings and the experience of love actually decreases pain perception. For someone who's experiencing experiencing pain, if they think about someone that they really, that they deeply and really love, it actually lowers their perception of pain. Because there's neurohormone profiles associated with experience of love that are going to affect that.

Ani
For some people, with that cue, they'll think of somebody they lost Yeah, exactly.

Brian
Which will create more of that numbing. Really, if we're experiencing depression, we won't be experiencing love because we can't experience it anything at all, really shutting down the whole sensory system.

Ani
That makes sense why somatic practices would be so powerful then, because it starts to wake us up in a gentle way. Yeah.

Brian
Because really, when you're experiencing depression, you're really in a tough spot in that the same pathway to experiencing joy and happiness and lightness will also open up experiencing the pain of grief and loss.

Ani
A hundred %. And that joy, like we talked about in other episodes, is so far away on the spectrum of consciousness, we're going to feel everything, not just hop straight to the joy.

Brian
It's really important when we talk about somatic exercises or somatic practices for grief, loss, depression, It's really important to think about slowly, slowly getting the system working. 

Ani
You know how I like to think about this? It's like an ice cube. You warm it up rather than smashing the ice, you warm up the ice. It just starts to flow. Yeah.

Brian
For someone who's experiencing depression and a lot of a shutdown of their sensory nervous system, to try to get them activated too quickly can be traumatizing for people because it opens up the sensory system too fast.

Ani
Oh, that doesn't feel safe.

Brian
Then they deeply experience that grief, and then that creates more trauma. It's really about, I love what you say, about warming up the ice cube. We really have to take it slow. So we love to talk about somatic exercise is that they always meet people where they are. What are some really simple ones? Some really ones that I really like are just some really easy and gentle self-massage practices. Oh, I love that. In a way, actually, as easy and gentle as just placing a hand on not even doing acupressure or deep rubbing. I'm trying to do something specific. All you're doing is just taking your hands- Self touch. Taking your hands and self touch. You're just putting your hands on your body and noticing what they feel like. Feel the weight of the hands, feel the gentle pressure. You try them on your neck.

Ani
Yeah, your eyes. My favorite one is my thighs.

Brian
Thighs, over your heart, over your belly, wherever. It doesn't really matter. It's like wherever would feel supportive and it feels like it would start to melt the ice cube a little bit. It's just practicing some of that really nice gentle self-touch. Then when it feels able, you can start to add just a little, maybe a little bit of rubbing, some gentle rubbing or some gentle pressure, release, pressure and release. So that you go from a gentle holding into some slightly more information, let's say, for the sensory system. It might not feel like much because if the part of the brain is shut down, that would receive that information, and it might not feel like much is happening, but something's happening.

Ani
I see out there people talking about how important self-love is when you're experiencing grief and loss. I think this is the embodied practical, what that looks like.

Brian
Yeah, I love it. That self-touch, self-massage, gentle. Think about gentle meeting yourself where you are and then slowly starting to warm up the system. I like to think about it like maybe a car that's been out in the cold for a really long time, and we're trying to get it started in the spring. We got to be gentle. We got to plug the heating block in, push it into a warm garage before we start it up and start running it. We want to just put it in be gentle like that. Mindful movement practices are another favorite one of mine. Oftentimes, when people are depressed, they don't feel like doing things, and that's a part of being depressed. Movement seems very laborious And oftentimes people are like, Oh, you got to get out and exercise. You're the best. Get to the bus, get out, go outside, do things.

Ani
Go exercise. And that's going from zero to 100.

Brian
Right. That's just like trying to turn over that car after it's been frozen for the winter and get it moving.

Ani
And then it increases the cycles of shame that can be going on because the efficacy of what you're trying to accomplish, if you're just going to go out and exercise, then it becomes potentially self-sabotaging, which we turn within. "I can't do it. There's something wrong with me. This confirms there's something wrong with me and all of that stuff."

Brian
There's actually a really wonderful term called sense foraging, where every day you mindfully intend and purposely experience sensations that you wouldn't ordinarily experience on a daily basis.

Ani
That's such a great word. I've never heard that before. It's like mushroom foraging.

Brian
 yeah. With self-touch, you can put your hands on a part of the part of the body you wouldn't normally put it in and do a little movement. You could take a wet wash cloth and put it on there. It's just like- 

Ani
We should do a retreat where we just like sense forage for a week.

Brian
Forage for like a week. Yeah. Mindful movement. If you get up and you just start walking around, you can say, Wow, okay. Instead of thinking about what I ordinarily think about, how does it actually feel to have my feet on the cold tiles thing? If I stand near a window and feel a breeze, what does it feel like to have that breeze? If I open my eyes in my kitchen that I look at every day, what colors can I see in my kitchen that I've never even noticed before here. If I sit where I ordinarily sit during the day and I open my ears, what sounds can I hear that I don't ordinarily hear? So you're purposely going out of your way to start picking up different sensory experiences. What that does is it starts to break through what we call the default mode network. The default mode network is the part of the brain that's always running, and it's the part of the brain that would keep us in that depressive protective state. It's the autopilot. Yeah, it's the autopilot. We need to begin to disrupt that autopilot. The way you do that is with novel sensory stimuli.

Brian
That's so cool. You could do that by self-massage. You could do that with mindful moving, coordinated breathing, like a core centering practices. You can do that with mindful, again, breathing practices, where you can start to feel the breath move in and out. You could blow on a pinwheel. You could blow, cool a cup of tea and feel the breath go out as you watch the ripples on the tea. You could blow dandelions. There's so many different things that you could do to stimulate novel sensory information.

Ani
Yeah, that's really cool. I love how easy that is. It's so simple and available to anybody.

Brian
Yeah. Oh, so available. And little movements, little movements, like even just little side bending movements. So we're talking about mindful movements. Just you can do these sitting down. Don't even have to get up.

Ani
You don't want to. That's another thing with depression, you don't feel like moving. You can do these really subtle things, and you don't have to move a lot, but it just starts to prime the pump.

Brian
Right. So some of my- I like what you're doing right now, by the way.

Ani
I'm not ignoring you. I'm interrupting you for a second. One of the reasons I like this, specifically for grief and loss, is because it starts to open up the lungs.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. Starts to open up the lungs. You can also do things where you open and close the front of your body. It's just a simple, up a little taller and extend the spine to open the front of the body a little bit.

Ani
Little work on the heart space.

Brian
I'm demonstrating this here, and this might feel like big movement for some people. I'm making the movements a little bit bigger because it translates better on camera. If I was just doing little movements, it might not look like I'm doing much. For you, if it feels like, Oh, God, these little movements are plenty, then these little movements is perfect. Ask yourself, Is this creating a new sensory experience for me because again, we're just sense foraging with it. Then they can combine your breathing with it. Like, inhale, open, exhale, close, inhale, lean one way, exhale, lean the other way, thing back and forth. These little small movements are great ways to begin to initiate that activity through the insula.

Ani
If you're listening and you're thinking you'd like to see what Brian is talking about, come on over to our YouTube channel. Somatic Coaching Academy, you can watch the video.

Brian
A nice breath practice, too, unless you had a question or a thought about the movement practices.

Ani
No, I have another thought when you're done.

Brian
I was just going to just share one of my favorite breath practices for working with people who are experiencing is ocean breathing. The reason I like ocean... It's really when you're breathing, you're like, I'm trying to get close to the microphone and do an ocean breath. Where you breathe through the back of your throat, so it sounds like the ocean. The reason I like that is because, again, now you're creating a new auditory sense that you can hear, but you're also creating a new physical sensation in the back of the throat, too. It's a way to focus mindfully on breathing, then you're also lighting up some other sensors as well. It's really good to practice that breathing through the nasal passages because there's linkages into the hypothalamus parts of the brain. We've talked about another podcast as well.

Ani
Yeah. Then you might think about yourself at the beach, which was a really pleasant experience for a lot of people. A calming, healing experience for a lot of people.

Brian
What did you have now? You had a question or a thought?

Ani
I was just wondering about different practitioners doing somatic practices or knowing somatic practices might be useful for. I'm imagining that there's practitioners who could have somatic practices in their toolbox. That'd be really powerful for people with grief and loss. I mean, some of the ones that come to mind for me, which are probably pretty obvious, they're like, social workers, psychologists, and those kinds of things, case workers, but also I'm thinking teachers. We don't talk a ton about what practices are appropriate for children on the podcast. We talk to our students about those kinds of things, but a lot of kids deal with grief and loss. Having a teacher who can sit by them. She was talking about it, right? Yeah. You can do ocean breath with them or something like that. No, since somatic practices in their back pocket, the value of that is huge. I'm also thinking about volunteers. I volunteered for hospice for a long time. I know you do a lot of work with hospice as well. I was just thinking about how beneficial it would be regardless of the physical or cognitive state of the people who I was helping in the hospice programs to be able to sit and do somatic practices.

Ani
There's documented research about how powerful that can be for people to bring peace in those times.

Brian
Certainly, nurses also come to mind. Yeah. You know, nurses, these practices can be so powerful for RNs, LPNs, any type of nursing professionals that are working with patients in hospitals and clients in hospitals that are getting ready for tests and surgeries and those types of things that might be experiencing anxiety or stress or, again, loss, bereavement, those types of things. I love that you're mentioning hospice, right? Because that's a full on experience of loss and grief for not only, obviously for the families that are losing their loved ones.

Ani
Yes, for sure. When you said nurses I'm thinking about massage therapists and other practitioners who people will go see as self-care, acupunuctures and things like that. I remember for myself when I was doing more hands on work, if I'd have a client who came in who was experiencing some grief and loss, I wanted to leave them with a gift. Not like the session isn't a gift, but I wanted to impart something for them, a gift, and to be able to show them something that they could do, even simple hands-on practice for themselves would just feel to me like such a valuable offering to that person that they can take home with them.

Brian
For sure. This episode has felt valuable to you, and you're working with people who are experiencing sadness, grief, depression, loss. Remember that somatic practices, the way that we use them is meeting people where they are, starting off slow, warming up the physiology as if we're an ice cube, we're just slowly trying to melt it, and then always meeting and progressing people as they can go. The idea is sense foraging, picking up new sense information on a daily basis, which starts to heal and rebuild the insular pathways. Always want to have support as people are warming up their system. They want to make sure they have some type of psychotherapeutic emotional support system has got to be in place for people and to help support people as they move through a process that can ultimately bring them back to a sense of happiness and joy and engagement and life and vitality and all those things that are possible for everyone on the planet. They're possible for everybody, even though it might feel that there's deep, dark times. These practices are time-tested. They work. They work if we just practice them and do them.

Ani
We invite you come learn learn how to do this so that you can give this gift to others because it really does truly feel like a gift that we give to others and to ourselves. When you come and get certified in Somatic Practice Essentials, that's our level one program, what you'll find is not only do you leave with a toolbox of wonderful things that you can do with individuals and in classes and workshops and things like that, but also the experience that you have along the way of learning these practices and practicing the practices, you become a person that you're proud to be. The whole process is phenomenal, and you have things to give to other people, and you certainly have given yourself a gift as well. Yeah. Thanks for picking this topic. It was such a great one, Brian. Thank you. I really loved it. We hope you did, too. If this was a powerful topic for you, please share it with somebody who could use it, and we'll see you next week. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.