The Sacredness We’ve Forgotten: Letting Grief Be Wild Again

Our culture is deeply uncomfortable with grief.

Not because grief is rare — but because it is powerful.

Grief does not ask permission.

It does not arrive neatly packaged or politely scheduled.

It does not move in straight lines or respond to timelines, productivity goals, or well-intended advice.

Grief is wild.

It breaks open days that were supposed to be “normal.”

It interrupts conversations, plans, and futures we once trusted.

It makes the body heavy, breath shallow, time strange.

It asks us to feel what we would rather bypass.

And so we have learned — collectively — to hide it.

We lower our voices when we speak of it.

We apologize for it when it shows up too long, too loud, too honestly.

We translate it into more acceptable language: stress, burnout, fatigue.

We are taught to tuck it away in the name of comfort, strength, resilience, and productivity.

“Be strong.”

“Stay busy.”

“At least…”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

These phrases are not cruel — they are learned defenses.

They are the tools of a culture that does not know how to sit with pain without trying to fix it.

But grief was never meant to be fixed.

Grief is not a problem to solve.

It is a sacred response to love.

It is what happens when someone — or something — mattered so deeply that their absence reshapes the landscape of your inner world. Grief is the echo of connection. It is love with nowhere to land.

And when we try to tame it — when we rush it, suppress it, medicate it, or intellectualize it away — we don’t just silence grief.

We silence ourselves.

We disconnect from our aliveness.

Because grief lives in the same place as joy.

The depth of your sorrow is directly linked to the depth of your capacity to love, to feel, to be moved by life. When we numb one end of the spectrum, we inevitably numb the other. A heart that is not allowed to break is also a heart that cannot fully open.

This is the part we rarely talk about.

When grief is pushed down, it doesn’t disappear.

It settles into the body.

Into the nervous system.

Into the breath.

Into the muscles, the gut, the chest.

It shows up as anxiety, exhaustion, disconnection, irritability, numbness.

It shows up as a quiet sense of being “not quite here.”

It shows up as going through the motions of life without truly feeling inside of it.

And slowly, subtly, we forget what it feels like to be alive in our own bodies.

But grief — when honoured — does something different.

When given space, grief teaches us how to slow down enough to feel.

It teaches us reverence.

It teaches us humility in the face of love and loss.

It softens us. Cracks us. Opens us.

Grief invites us back into relationship with ourselves.

It asks us to listen — not for answers, but for truth.

It asks us to let the body lead, to let tears fall without explanation, to let silence be enough.

It asks us to remember that being human was never meant to be tidy or efficient.

There is nothing weak about grief.

There is nothing shameful about needing time.

There is nothing broken about a heart that continues to ache.

In many cultures — before productivity became a moral measure of worth — grief was communal. It was ritualized. It was witnessed. It was honoured as a passage, not a pathology.

We sat together.

We wailed.

We rested.

We told stories.

We let grief change us.

Somewhere along the way, we lost that knowing.

But the body remembers.

The soul remembers.

And grief will keep knocking — not to punish us, but to bring us home.

To our tenderness.

To our truth.

To our capacity to feel joy again — not despite grief, but because we allowed ourselves to move through it.

Grief does not mean you are broken.

It means you loved.

And love — real love — is always worth the cost.

If we could remember one thing, let it be this:

Grief is not the opposite of life.

Grief is proof that life mattered.

And when we allow grief to be wild, untamed, and sacred — we don’t lose ourselves.

We find ourselves again.