An Invitation to Cry:

You need a grief practice.

The Holidays are approaching, which means that families and friends are gathering for what is supposed to be a joyful time. For a person in active grief, the holidays can be a bitter reminder of everything they’ve lost. Someone won’t be at the dinner table this year.

My sister died in 2018. Every first on the calendar was a new punch to the gut. Her children’s first day of school. The family’s first Thanksgiving. The first of her birthdays we had to celebrate without her. The first Christmas tree assembled without the warmth of her laughter filling the room.

On that year of firsts, I remember how strange it felt to see everyone going about “business as usual.” The world around me went on without a glitch. This made me feel incredibly isolated. I felt like I was on an island all alone — like I was living in my own little world that only I could see, and everything in it was burning.

I carried grief on my back like a boulder. For years it was my constant companion. Because I could not get rid of it, I knew I had to find ways to be with it. And that is how my grief practice was born.

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The night before my sister’s memorial, I was sitting at the dining room table with my aunt making a video montage to be played at the service. It was late, after midnight I think. My nephew, 10 at the time, came downstairs and stood behind my chair, watching over my shoulder as I did my best to edit the now-limited memories we would have of her. After a few minutes, he took off running up the stairs, his hands covering his face.

I remember feeling like we’d failed him. How unfair it was for a child to feel that they could not let their tears be seen. Ten years old, and he’d already inherited the skill of pretending, hiding, and isolating in the face of grief.

This moment became the beginning of my lifelong work of normalizing the experience of grief, changing the narrative, and defining a new set of cultural practices around loss, grief, and emotional healing.

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I believe everyone should have a grief practice — a set of ways to navigate the inevitable experience of life after loss.

I developed my practice as a matter of necessity. My sister’s death gutted me. There were times it felt so impossible to hold, that I considered not staying around for the task.

Western culture is devastatingly grief-averse. Displays of emotion are viewed as weakness, failure, or a burden to those around us. This will never make sense to me. The person who is willing to lift the heavy thing, journey with it even when it feels like it might literally break you, society calls “weak.” And the person who avoids the work — who won’t let themselves feel the heaviness of grief because they’re afraid they can’t handle its weight— is seen as strong. I pray that this soon becomes a thing of the past.

Everyone’s grief is different, and so everyone’s grief practice must be uniquely their own.

I discovered my personal tools through trial and error. After trying everything I possibly could to deal with my grief, I kept the tools that helped me:

1. Feel better in a moment. When I was in the midst of a storm, all I wanted was for the rain to clear. The tools in this category help me immediately change my internal weather — they are what support me in shifting my mood, raising my vibration, or alleviating emotional pain.

2. Come to peace with the loss. When I say “come to peace,” I mean: stop fighting grief — physically and mentally resisting the reality of it — and instead, allowing it to visit, being with it, breathing through it, and being fully present with the experience.

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There are four elements of my grief practice: Cry, Move, Talk, Create.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be sharing about each of the elements. This essay is the first installment of this series. I will explore how I’ve used these strategies to heal and grow from grief.

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My biggest life accomplishment is that I developed the skillfulness to sit with grief, and that I let it grow me instead of destroy me.

If my grief had a color, it would be a swirling greyblack — ominous and looming, like a storm. The first element of my grief practice is to stop trying to change the weather.

Cry.

I understand the impulse to stop yourself. You feel the tears rising to the surface and you try to move your mind’s focus onto something less painful. You want to crumble, but instead, you smile.

I don’t blame you. Society has normalized emotional repression. All day every day, at least one person you know is fighting an invisible battle within. Someone is making small talk about potato salad when they really want to crumble to the floor and weep for days. Someone is pinging a co-worker on Slack about a missing deliverable, all the while a storm within is raging.

There are many reasons to keep grief locked up and stored away. In the modern world, grief is an inconvenience, to say the least. It’s a guest that comes without warning. It shows up at your door uninvited, tears up the place, and leaves you to clean up the wreckage.

A blessing and a curse on my journey with grief is that I could not contain it. As much as I tried, the levees I put up to stop the flood were not strong enough. Every single time, I gave way to the weight of grief and let it wash over me.

I cried, and cried, and cried.

In those early days, I tried to hide my tears. I’d wear sunglasses, hide my face with my hands, or tuck my face into my sweater like a turtle retreating into its shell. I felt embarrassed to be feeling so deeply. Crying in front of others felt like being in a spotlight on a stage at my most vulnerable state, for all the world to see.

After some time, however, I started to feel the added pressure of having to perform okayness. Pretending to be okay when I was very much not okay was wearing me out. I started to feel angry that I was expected to “suck it up” and get back to normal life after three weeks of bereavement. As if grief was a switch you could turn off at the drop of a hat. As if I could contain all the ache I felt into a neat, pre-packaged period of time.

As an act of social rebellion and necessary self-care, I started letting my tears fall without any effort to conceal them.

I cried everywhere. I let the tears stain my face and my shirt. I cried walking to the train. I cried on the train. I let grief emerge from my body, knowing that there were eyes on me.

I started documenting my grief episodes as a creative way to reclaim my right to grief. After letting myself fall apart, I took a selfie. While it felt strange to see myself in this way — my pain frozen in time — it also felt affirming. The world was trying to erase my sadness, and I would not be erased. Sharing images of me crying became an act of resistance against a world that tries to shame people into hiding their grief and suffering in silence.

Grief is a part of the human experience. It is natural and normal, and it deserves to exist.

I started to think of my tears as a gift. Crying in public was an act of service — an invitation, a permission slip, for the grievers who felt they had to put a mask on their grief.

I wanted myself, and all people, to be liberated from the labor of pretending to be okay so we could focus on actually getting there.

Necessary Disclaimer: Sometimes, crying in public does not feel empowering. Sometimes I do not wish to be perceived. Sometimes my tears are a spiritual experience not meant for display or consumption. Over time I have learned how to self-soothe and maintain homeostasis until I can get to a place where I feel safe to fall apart.

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When sadness swallows me whole — when I find myself dropped in the middle of an endless ocean of grief — instead of trying to fight the waves, I surrender. I do not fight. I do not even try to swim. I let myself sink. And what I learned from many visits to the bottom is this: The more I tried to fight the waves, the more exhausted I became, and the more I felt like giving up. When I stopped resisting, the wisdom of my body took over. Every time I let myself cry, I feel a sense of lightness afterwards. Every time, the waves carry me away — sometimes gently, sometimes violently — and every time, I make it back to shore.

I have several approaches to crying:

• If I feel like crying in public and it feels okay enough to do so, I cry.

• If I feel like crying in public but it would feel better to wait, I use my breath and my mind to “pause” the process until I get home.

• If I feel like crying but I can’t get the tears to flow, I use certain physical postures or change the pace of my breath to trigger a release.

• If I am home alone and crying, I am loud. I will weep and wail and moan. I get down on the floor and wrap myself in a blanket in the fetal position. I let my nose run. I cry until I cough.

• If I am with a loved one, I curl up in their arms and let them hold me while I cry.
  If I am out in nature, I ask the elements to support me. In the forest, I place my hands on the ground and offer my tears to the Earth. At the beach, I submerge my body in the ocean and scream my grief into the water.

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I wish someone would have told me that my tears are not an obstacle to my healing — they are my healing.

Crying is part of our brilliant, immaculate design. When we cry, the body releases endorphins and oxytocin, which help soothe emotional distress and reduce physical pain.

When we are sad, we cry because our tears signal to others that we need help. If grief were invisible and only happened internally, those around us would not know to surround us, to hold us, to pour their love into us, so that we may be nourished in our time of need. Tears are messengers the body is sending to the world. They say: I’m vulnerable. I’m in distress. I need empathy. I need support.

Tears connect us to our inner world, and to the people in our lives who love us most.

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This is an invitation to cry.

The next time you feel the tears swelling up inside of you, breathe and allow them.

When we go against our body’s natural functions — when we ignore the somatic intelligence that our cells contain — we deny ourselves an opportunity for healing.

Crying alchemizes grief. Instead of a boulder crushing you, pinning you to the ground, grief becomes a stone you can hold in your fist. Instead of a flood that destroys everything in its path, it becomes a rainstorm, or just a cloudy day. Instead of a knife to the chest, it becomes a needle poke. A bee sting.

I think of crying in front of my loved ones as a blessing, not a burden. It gives the people who love me an opportunity to feel trusted and connected. It allows them to be a part of a heart-to-heart exchange that sustains the Spirit and gives our lives meaning.

As a reminder: You are worthy of peace. You are worthy of being held up when you are carrying a heavy thing. All that energy you spend resisting your tears? It’s better spent releasing them.

Let it flow.

I love you, big time.
- Jamila

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All of my grief-support posts will be free and available to all. To support me being able to sustain myself while doing this work: