It’s not just a feel-good thing to experience happiness and joy in the midst of loss and grief, it’s actually part of how you heal your life.
Like other traumatic experiences, we carry our losses and hold our grief not only in our minds and emotions, but also within our animal body, that is, physically.
We are not just parts, we’re whole beings in which thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and spiritual orientations constantly interact with each other to keep us going from breath to breath, moment to moment.
If you stay too long in pain and despair without allowing happy moments and tapping into your store of inner joy regularly, you can actually change your neurochemistry and biology in non-life-supporting ways.
“You are also your own personal planet.” I love this so much 💞 I also really agree that these two facets of life are deeply entwined. The more we lean into our one little [very brief] life, the more we can embrace it, accept it, and be moved by it. Lovely exploration of this truth!
Do joy and grief really co-exist?
This is what I think is an important take-away:
It’s not just a feel-good thing to experience happiness and joy in the midst of loss and grief, it’s actually part of how you heal your life.
Like other traumatic experiences, we carry our losses and hold our grief not only in our minds and emotions, but also within our animal body, that is, physically.
We are not just parts, we’re whole beings in which thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and spiritual orientations constantly interact with each other to keep us going from breath to breath, moment to moment.
If you stay too long in pain and despair without allowing happy moments and tapping into your store of inner joy regularly, you can actually change your neurochemistry and biology in non-life-supporting ways.
“You are also your own personal planet.” I love this so much 💞 I also really agree that these two facets of life are deeply entwined. The more we lean into our one little [very brief] life, the more we can embrace it, accept it, and be moved by it. Lovely exploration of this truth!