Forgive your perfect off of rain.
There is a crack. A crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in. Hello and welcome back to the
Tiny Pod. This week I want to talk about
grief. Grief is universal, one of the
most profoundly human experiences that every person,
everywhere will face. Every loss, every ending, every
change can bring grief. Defining grief isn't as simple
as the obvious losses and deaths we experience.
Huge losses bring acute, obvious grief.
But there is also the subtler grief, the quiet, unnoticed
grief of what could have been, the version of life you thought
you'd have, and the absence of things you didn't even realise
you valued. Grief doesn't start in death.
It begins at birth, from our very first moment.
We are navigating loss from the safety of the womb, from that
perfect cocoon of connection, and it compounds in childhood.
Every time a caregiver didn't meet us emotionally or
physically, we experienced a tiny rupture, a tiny loss.
As children, we use coping mechanisms to survive this
grief. Denial, repression, suppression,
avoidance, fantasy, illusion, delusion, compartmentalisation.
And we continue to use these in adulthood, even when they no
longer serve us. As grief compounds, we fear it,
so we deny it or minimise it. Grief is layered in the life you
didn't get to live, the love you didn't receive, the version of
yourself that had to grow up too fast, A soft ache that sits
quietly in the background that you didn't even know you were
carrying because it's always been there, stitched into your
nervous system. Normalised childhoods that
weren't safe, relationships that needed us to shrink, years spent
surviving instead of fully living all acclimatise us to
living in grief. Without consciously naming it,
it becomes familiar. We learn early to adapt, to
carry on, but those unacknowledged unmet needs stack
up like invisible bricks in our nervous system and compound over
time the accumulation of all these micro separations.
The not seen, not held, not understood moments shape how we
relate, how we love and how we respond to risk, to joy, to
vulnerability. Healing these early separations
and integrating all the lost pieces is key to living wholly
and freely. Grief shows up physically in our
bodies as exhaustion, numbness, over functioning, rage, tears
that arrive without a clear reason, and in our physicality,
hunching, rounding our shoulders, weight gain, lack of
energy. This is grief asking to be
acknowledged, felt and moved. The word grief comes from Latin
gravis, meaning heavy, weighty, serious, burdensome.
Grief is heaviness, a weight you carry, something that presses on
you, pulls you down, slows you down and makes everything feel
harder. Obvious wounds we treat with
bombs, with medication and bandages, and yet we hide
internal wounds, even from ourselves.
That is why grief is insidious and often generational.
We carry burdens that were never ours to carry.
Grief is heavy, but if we allow ourselves to feel it, it
lightens and it roots us in what is real, what is present, what
is sacred. Grief is the heart's gravity
pulling us towards authenticity, love towards life lived fully.
Heavy things don't disappear by pretending they're light and
unhealed. Grief carries on into the future
through fear, anxiety, inaction, or avoidance for fear of loss.
Grief is exhausting. It keeps us stuck in the story
of the past so we cannot be fully present.
As we face the truth of our grief and allow it to be seen,
named and honoured, we move through it and free our present
and future from the burdens of the past.
The past has stolen enough. Grief is inextricably tied to
love. It shows up wherever there was
attachment, care, passion, desire, connection, where we
have invested ourselves. Grief is the raw currency of
love. The depth of grief is the
measure of what you dared to feel.
We can get entwined in our grief that it becomes part of our
identity. We may fear who we are without
it and the intention it brings, or use it as an excuse for what
we are not and to avoid the responsibility of being fully
accountable. Without grief to blame or depend
on, we cite time as our solution.
But time does not take away grief.
It can soften the sting, but healing takes work, choice, and
courage from the heart. Grief is where the light enters.
A broken heart is an open heart, and when we open our hearts, we
open to life, to love, to feeling, and to healing.
The Japanese art of Kinsugi, repairing broken pottery with
gold, silver or platinum, celebrates the break.
There's no shame, no hiding. It is a visible part of the
story. The object is stronger and more
beautiful for having been broken.
Grief strengthens us, but it involves action.
The vase didn't sit broken, it was put back together.
Grief work isn't passive. It takes courage and commitment
to feel and to heal. Grief is like a Pebble you carry
in your pocket. It doesn't shrink or disappear,
but your capacity to carry it, your resilience and your
strength grows as you heal. As we heal, the wound becomes
wisdom. Our suffering shapes our
character and our hope and faith grows.
Hope is future, facing the quiet, leaning forward of the
soul, hoping for better, hoping love is possible, hoping
something good is coming. Hope needs time.
It lives in the not yet. It can flicker and be bruised by
disappointment. Faith is present.
It is steady, unwavering belief without proof.
Faith is where you place your weight.
You don't hope the chair will hold you.
You sit. That's faith.
Hope imagines the chair. Faith sits, and love is the
ground underneath both hope and faith that was always there.
Grief work is done with love and faith.
Sometimes suffering feels so great that people abandoned God
rather than choose faith. Yet faithful relationships
remain steady even in hardship. You don't abandoned your husband
or friend or child in hard times.
You are faithful. Faith is knowing without seeing,
trusting the steps even when you can't see the path ahead.
Faith in grief, blame, shame, and guilt takes courage.
And courage comes from the heart.
Grief reveals itself piece by piece, lest the whole be too
overwhelming. This was certainly true for me.
I remember compartmentalising different aspects of my
childhood in smaller boxes that I could carry, and when I put
the whole picture together in its technicolour totality, it
was overwhelming. But I had faith to go deep and
dark and to allow it to get darker before it got light.
If the tree didn't allow its leaves to fall, the whole tree
would wither and die. Grief asks for surrender.
We experience collective grief, which can be debilitating if we
are carrying our own personal grief.
Activism is taking action, and the ability to act comes from
healing grief. When we deny our grief, we dull
our capacity to feel, to connect and to love.
Grief felt consciously strengthens empathy and clarity.
Once healed, collective grief falls like rain on a waterproof
coat. You still feel the rain, but
have both the strength to act and the softness to empathise
without getting pulled down. Healing grief isn't about
erasing it. It is integrating it, honouring
it, witnessing it, letting it be held.
It is courageously traversing the depths of grief until the
darkness becomes light, illuminating what matters and
what you truly value. When we heal our grief, there is
often relief at what we have survived and what we will never
have to face again. The worst has already happened.
We are also surprised at our own strength, how much we have
overcome and are able to choose who we are now, unencumbered by
the weight of unmet grief. And this creates space for
unbridled joy. As Khalil Gibran wrote, the
deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can
contain. Grief is the invisible
architecture of our lives, the shadow of love, the echo of
connection, the silent sculptor of the human soul.
The more we face it consciously, the more whole we become.
And when we welcome it as a companion, a guide and a
teacher, it brings presence and power.
As we release the past, we are free to live fully, deeply now.
I'll see you next week.