the ground under grief

somatic support for rage and grief

Recently a member of my ongoing somatic learning group, Anchor Community, wrote me an email asking how one might use somatics to express rage and grief. With her permission, I’m sharing our exchange below, slightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Dear Abigail

I'm trying to distill a lot of thoughts/curiosities into something more precise, focussing on the main theme of embodying anger/rage/despair. You talk about this a lot which I appreciate as I don't see enough messaging about how it doesn't serve us to always expect or aim to feel good/comfort/ease (have you read Sarah Polley's book Run Towards the Danger by the way? The titular essay is so interesting in terms of the idea of what we gain when we move towards discomfort or, even, pain). In any case, I notice in my relationships with friends, and with my psychotherapy clients/yoga students, that people--namely women--are really struggling to access, much less embody/express, emotions like anger and rage and sorrow and despair.

Enough ink has been spilled about the various aspects of the why of this so I'll assume we're on more or less the same page about that (thinking about the interrelated/interlocking forces of capitalism and misogyny and classism as well as the underscoring fear of death so poorly held in western culture). What I'm curious about is how you see us learning to hold these fiery, essential states of being in our body/mind in ways that allow us to metabolize them and wield them in ways that do serve us. Anger and rage are such maligned conditions in the overculture, and in such specific ways when it comes to women, that the internalized shame and self-imposed censorship or denial of these feelings is, seemingly, endemic across other aspects of lived experience.

Your work has helped me step into conversation with myself outside of words (a challenge for a writer/reader/lover of words); somatic tarot and embodied philosophies of who we are as life forms existing interconnected to so many other forms of life remind us that every archetype has (to have) it's light and dark side, and we have to feel all of it to feel any of it. Still, we can know this intellectually but fall short of knowing it somatically, in our blood and in our nervous systems. There's a sort of cognitive bypassing that happens for so many of us because these states are too associated with 'crazy' or 'psychotic' which is too akin to outcast. But in this self-silencing, we are rendered so much less powerful than we would otherwise be, than the world needs us to be.

So....what are some of the practical steps and abstract ideas that you believe can help even those most disconnected from their own righteous anger and sorrow to become more able to sit in those feelings, to welcome them knowing how much they have to offer when we breathe through them without becoming owned by them?

warmly-

Emily

Dear Emily,

Thank you for this email. I've been thinking about it. There's a lot there.

Fundamentally, this is a primary reason I always teach gravity as an engaged relationship at the beginning of every practice and also as the first skill when I am teaching more in-depth. Rage is a huge feeling - and most of the wellness industry is aimed at getting people to not feel it, or to contain it. But as you've written, it's a necessary state to feel and express. I think that when we first establish a relationship with gravity, and learn to feel it as an unconditional and essentially infinite source of support, we are given necessary space and support to feel these overwhelming and all encompassing emotions that have, as you rightly pointed out, been shamed and silenced in us.

Importantly, an embodied relationship with gravity is not just a force pulling down, but is also a force pushing back up into us. It's a true reciprocal relationship with the earth: the more we yield our weight to the earth and feel - I mean really FEEL - that we are earth, we are breathing, moving, feeling earth - the more we can receive the unconditional support the earth offers. Far from being a heaviness, gravity then becomes equally light - there's a buoyancy that only becomes possible when we let ourselves be heavy. This is one of the many places a paradox points us to the truth: there is both heaviness and lightness made possible by allowing the force of gravity to move through us.

Rage is by definition an overwhelming emotion. But rage has power to it. To be able to be empowered by it, and not overpowered by it, requires an established connection with the earth. Gravity is that foundation. Gravity is the force that shapes us, quite literally¹. When we embody this active relationship with the earth by developing our sensing awareness of gravity as it moves through us, we have someplace to go within the overwhelming emotion of rage.

So, whereas much of the wellness industry teaches grounding as a way to enforce calm, I hold it as a way to widen our ability to hold all emotions. Rage and grief are not the same, but they often live together, and both can feel like a black hole has opened up within us and is threatening to pull the very marrow from our bones. When I am in the pull of either, or of both, finding the ground beneath me is what saves me. It doesn't save me by calming me down. Rather, it lets me find the earth that holds me, and because gravity is a force that both pulls down and then pushes back up into me, it helps me find what is there to fuel me beyond the grief and the rage.

When I say gravity is an unconditional support, I don't just mean that gravity will support us whether we are feeling grief or rage or hope or despair or anything else - although that alone is an important switch from the mainstream wellness industry that, sometimes explicitly, always implied, says we only deserve comfort if we are calm. But this is not just a refusal of that. By finding gravity as a source of support both beneath us and within us, then my rage and grief and anything else is able to become more than just my own. It's not just my rage, it isn't just my own grief, now it is the earth, now I am the earth, and I am feeling all there is to be felt, but I am not just trying to hold it within my own individual body. I am feeling, breathing earth. There's rage here. There's grief. There's also incredible beauty, and the ferocity of life's commitment to continue living.

Personally, what we have been navigating and witnessing would break me if I didn't have the practiced skills of finding that relationship and releasing into it. All of this would be too much - the fear, the anger, the shock, it all would have fragmented me years ago, and this upleveling over the last several weeks would have fractured anything else that seemed solid. And I might still reach that place, I don't know. But when fear or anger or despair threaten to pull me under, I return to the unconditional support of gravity, and the way I am unconditionally pulled here to this planet even while power hungry billionaires race to colonize Mars, and the way I am filled with the unconditional support of the earth even while those same hungry men try and strip away all social safety nets from an unjust society. So for me, personally, I know my work has to include increasing my capacity to find and feel this support in any moment, because I imagine things are going to get more difficult, with more to grieve and rage over. But if I can let the force of the earth move through me, and importantly, if I can let the force of the earth move me, then the grief and rage have space, and despair doesn't.

I hope this helps.

-Abigail

Photo by Antonio Alcántara on Unsplash

1. Some reading on gravity’s effect on our physiology:

Narayanan SA. Gravity's effect on biology. Front Physiol. 2023 Jul 3;14:1199175. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2023.1199175. PMID: 37465696; PMCID: PMC10351380.

Legaye J, Duval-Beaupere G. Gravitational forces and sagittal shape of the spine. Clinical estimation of their relations. Int Orthop. 2008 Dec;32(6):809-16. doi: 10.1007/s00264-007-0421-y. Epub 2007 Jul 25. PMID: 17653545; PMCID: PMC2898950.