The Only Way Out Is Through

An Invitation to Grieve

If you’re human, chances are you’re carrying something heavy. Maybe it’s a recent loss. Maybe it’s anger you can’t quite explain. Maybe it’s a lifetime of sorrows you were never allowed to name.

Whatever it is I want you to know: what you’re carrying is grief, and grief is sacred.

This isn’t going to be a short read. What follows is an invitation into the depths, a map for a journey most of us spend our lives avoiding. I’m going to share stories from my own descent, from the people I’ve sat with in their sorrow, and from the teachers who helped me understand that the only way out of grief is through it.

You’ll find practices here, both simple and transformative. You’ll find permission to feel what you’ve been told not to feel. And if you’re ready, you’ll find an invitation to let grief reshape you instead of trying to get past it.

This is not about fixing you. You are not broken. This is about learning to work with what you carry, so it can change shape in your hands.

Take your time. Breathe. And when you’re ready, let’s begin.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

She sat across from me, looking like she wanted nothing more than to have tears stream down her face, but simultaneously terrified of opening the flood gates because of that voice that still echoed in her head decades after she first heard it, “It’s not appropriate to cry in front of others.” Then came the question. But as soft as her voice was, the question carried the weight and echo of thousands of other voices: “How do I make this go away?”

She had lost her husband after decades of marriage. The grief was everywhere: in her body, in her sleep, in the empty chair at the dinner table. And she wanted it gone.

But as we talked, another layer emerged. This wasn’t her first loss. She had carried others both large and small, and each time she had been told, in one way or another, that she wasn’t supposed to grieve. “Stay strong.” “Don’t dwell.” “Move on.” A lifetime of losses, and nowhere to put them.

I know another woman with a similar story. She lost her husband recently, but what haunts her more is a childhood grief experience when she cried and was told point-blank: “We don’t do that.” The message was clear. Grief was not welcome. So she learned to lock it down.

These aren’t unusual stories. This is what many of us carry: a lifetime of swallowed grief, of losses we were never allowed to mourn, of sorrows we’ve been trained to manage away.

But what if the problem isn’t the grief itself? What if the problem is that we were never taught how to be with it?

Why We Avoid Grief (And Why That’s Completely Understandable)

Of course we want grief to go away. Of course we try to outrun it. We live in what Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, calls a “grief-phobic and death-denying society.” We don’t know how to grieve, and we do everything we can to push off death, to avoid it, to refuse to face it.

The messages we’ve received our entire lives reinforce this: “Stay strong.” “Don’t fall apart.” “Time heals all wounds.” Grief, in this framework, is something to get over, not something to move through. An obstacle, not a teacher. A problem to be solved, not a path to be walked.

This didn’t happen by accident. After the Enlightenment, everything in Western culture became about control, management, and rationality. We disenchanted the world. Grief doesn’t fit that paradigm. It’s messy, unpredictable, and beyond our ability to manage. So we try to manage it away.

What does grief-avoidance actually look like? Staying busy. Numbing out. Toxic positivity. The thrust and push cycle: grief surfaces, we shove it back down, then it surfaces again. We recycle our grief, moving into it just far enough to feel the edge of it, and then pulling back, pulling the grief back into our bodies unreleased.

I know this intimately. I spent the first four decades of my life avoiding grief, though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. There was sadness in me, yes, but I couldn’t name it. There was rage underneath the surface, a deep anger I kept buried under a mask of joyful, playful, cherry energy. I had been abused, bullied, rejected. I had experienced losses that didn’t fit the typical grief narrative. No one had died, so I didn’t think I was grieving. I was just… angry. Suffocating. Trying to hold it all together.

And here’s the cost: if sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time. I was humming. We are all humming. The grief doesn’t disappear when we avoid it. It doesn’t just sit there, waiting. It doesn’t stay dormant. When we refuse to work with it, when we push it down and lock it away, it doesn’t disappear. It finds other ways out.

The anger that erupts at small things. The numbness that settles over everything. The anxiety that hums beneath the surface. The addictions we reach for to quiet the ache. The way we withdraw from people we love. The perfectionism that drives us to exhaustion. The cynicism that hardens our hearts. These aren’t separate problems. They’re grief, unexpressed. Grief that’s been denied a voice, so it speaks in other languages. Toxic languages.

This is what I carried for four decades: not the absence of grief, but its toxic expression. I didn’t know I was grieving. I just knew I was angry. Deeply, rigidly angry, though I masked it with joyful performance. The rage was grief that had nowhere to go, so it went inward, calcifying into judgment, defensiveness, and a need to protect myself at all costs.

The grief didn’t wait for me to be ready. It shaped how I showed up in the world. It influenced every relationship, every decision, every moment I couldn’t be fully present. It wasn’t inert. It was active, distorting, demanding.

And it will continue to do so until we put our hands on it and start to work.

A Book That Changed Everything

Three years ago, I picked up a book that completely rewired my understanding of grief: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. Much of what I’m sharing in this piece flows from what I discovered in those pages. Weller is a psychotherapist and soul activist who has spent decades working with grief, and his framework gave me language for what I’d been carrying my entire life without knowing it.

It was in those pages I finally realized that contrary to the popular saying, time does not heal our wounds. It becomes a product of them.

We tell ourselves that if we just wait long enough, the grief will fade. But it doesn’t. What fades is our capacity to feel anything fully. What hardens is our heart. What flattens is our emotional range.

Here’s the paradox. When we obsess with joy and avoid grief at all costs, we create a façade. We end up with shallow happiness that never quite satisfies, a performance of wellness that leaves us exhausted. But when we go deep into grief, when we allow ourselves to descend into the sorrows we carry, it expands our capacity at both ends of the emotional spectrum. Grief deepens us, and in that deepening, we gain access to genuine joy, not the manufactured kind.

Our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss, when left unattended, block access to the soul. Without some measure of intimacy with grief, our capacity to be with any other emotion or experience in our life is greatly compromised.

Our current emotional arrangement isn’t working. We’re flattened, exhausted, cut off from ourselves and each other. We live in a soul-eating culture, and the ruptures in our emotional lives are frequent.

I didn’t realize until I was nearly 40 that so much of what I had been carrying was grief. I went to therapy. I did the work. But I didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. It wasn’t until I read The Wild Edge of Sorrow that it dawned on me: this suffocating weight, this anger I couldn’t shake, this sense of being cut off from my own life? It was grief. Unprocessed, unwitnessed, unloved grief.

The Clay Metaphor: Grief Changes When We Work It

In my grief coaching sessions, I use a simple exercise. I hand my client a piece of clay and ask them to hold it.

“This is your grief,” I say. “Feel the weight of it. The texture. The way it sits in your hands.”

Then I ask: “What happens if you just hold it? If you never touch it, never work it, never put your hands on it and start shaping it?”

The answer is obvious. It stays exactly the same. Same shape. Same weight. Same feeling in your hands.

But if you start working the clay (kneading it, pressing into it, reshaping it), it transforms. Not gone, but different. The texture changes. The weight shifts. The way it sits in your hands is no longer the same.

This is grief.

Grief doesn’t change shape unless we put our hands on it and start working. As long as we refuse to work with the grief, it remains the same, and it’s going to feel the same. But as we work with it, it changes over time.

This is the work: not to eliminate grief, but to work with it so it can change. Not to make it go away, but to learn how to carry it well.

Because here’s the reframe that changes everything: Grief is not the problem. Grief is love with no place to go. It’s the hurt we feel when something or someone we care about is lost or harmed. Grief is sacred. The problem is that we’ve been taught to push it away instead of learning to carry it.

Grief work isn’t about a cure. It’s about maintenance. Ritual is a maintenance practice that offers us the means of tending wounds and sorrows, of offering gratitude, and of reconciling conflicts. It’s about ongoing conversation with the losses we carry, the love that remains, and the parts of ourselves we’re learning to welcome home.

We don’t abandon the grief. We learn how to hold it, how to work it, how to let it change us.

Grief Is Bigger Than Death

And here’s something most people don’t realize. Just because no one has died doesn’t mean you’re not grieving.

There are numerous gates through which grief enters our lives. Loss is one of those. It could be people or a relationship or a job. These are the chapters of life that close.

But that wasn’t the primary origin of my grief. For me, much of my grief centers on the parts of me that have not known love. These are the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected, exiled, shamed. The outcast aspects of who we are that were deemed unworthy, unacceptable, too much, not enough.

I grew up conservative Lutheran, immersed in liturgical language that shaped my understanding of who I was at the deepest level. Every Sunday, we confessed: “I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess unto Thee all my sins and iniquities.” We focused on how we’d offended God in thoughts, words, and actions, ultimately coming to the conclusion, “I justly deserve Thy temporal and eternal punishment.”

Poor. Miserable. Sinner. That was my identity. Unlovable. Broken. Worthy only of punishment.

But here’s what shame-based theology never told me: I was beloved all along.

So much of my spirituality growing up focused on my brokenness, my frailty, my unworthiness. I learned early that certain parts of me (my needs, my anger, my sadness, my questions) were not welcome. I exiled them. I pushed them into the shadows and tried to become someone more acceptable.

For four decades, I carried this without knowing it was grief. I just knew I was angry underneath the surface. I knew something was suffocating me. I had been abused, bullied, rejected, and I had no framework for naming what I had lost: the sense that I was lovable, that I belonged, that the fullness of who I was could be received.

I was grieving that I didn’t see my own belovedness. Grief for the parts of me that never knew love. Grief for the child who learned he was unworthy. Grief for the decades I spent trying to be someone other than myself. Grief for a belovedness I couldn’t see.

The breakthrough was realizing that the narrative I had been handed was not true. I was not despised by God and deserving punishment. I was human. Beloved. Whole. And the parts of me I had exiled were not problems to be fixed. They were gifts waiting to be welcomed home.

That realization forced me to rethink everything about my life. And I didn’t even realize it was a grief thing at the time. But yes, there was a derangement. A breaking open. A rearrangement of my entire emotional and spiritual landscape.

Some of you might me most attuned to the sorrows of the world. This is especially true following the release of some of the Epstein files. Injustice. Ecological grief. Collective trauma. Systemic harm. The losses we carry on behalf of the world: the violence, the oppression, the ways we harm each other and the earth.

There’s another kind of grief when we don’t receive what we expect. Unmet needs. Dreams that died. The life we thought we’d have. The love we should have been given but weren’t.

There’s even ancestral grief. So many of us have lost the wisdom that our lineages carried and used to pass down. The weight of history. The unresolved traumas that move through generations.

The point is, grief is bigger than death or even loss. Grief is everywhere, and most of us are carrying far more of it than we realize. Which means no matter who you are, grief is here. It’s in the parts of you that learned they weren’t allowed. It’s in the needs you buried. It’s in the losses you witnessed in the world and felt powerless to stop. It’s in the family patterns you inherited without choosing.

And whatever form it takes, the only way out is through.

What It Means to “Go Through”

Let me say that again. The only way out, is through. We’ve heard this a thousand times. But what does it actually mean?

It means we need both community and solitude. Both containment and release.

Containment is the holding space for grief. It’s the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of sorrow without fear of being abandoned or shamed. And here’s the hard truth: we cannot be our own container. Grace shows up in community. We need witnesses. We need people who can hold us steady while we fall apart.

Grief has never been private. It has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are waiting for the presence of others before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.

This is why so many of us recycle our grief. We start to work with it, we feel the edge of it rising, and then we pull back because there’s no one there to catch us. We pull the grief back into our bodies, unreleased.

But we also need solitude. Not isolation, but what Weller calls the house of our aloneness. This is different from the isolation we default to in Western culture. Solitude is a space of fermentation, where grief can ripen and mature. It’s not escapist. It’s not about disappearing into a hole only to reappear and pretend everything is fine. It’s about stepping into a private space so the grief can distill, so it can turn into something more than just an undigested trauma vomit. And when we return, we now have something deeper to share.

It’s in this balance between community and solitude that we find the way forward. We need the vital exhalation of community and the renewing inhalation of our interior lives for our grief to move and change.

We also need derangement: the necessity of being undone, mixed up, rearranged. Derangement is necessary because our current emotional arrangement is not working. We step into ritual, into grief work, into the depths, in the hope of being changed. We don’t want to come out the same as we entered.

For me, that derangement looked like realizing I wasn’t who I thought I was. It looked like four decades of anger cracking open into grief. It looked like learning that the parts of me I had exiled (my needs, my questions, my full humanity) were not problems. They were homecomings.

Carl Jung argues that there are three stages of transformation: insight, endurance, and action. Insights come quickly. But endurance asks us to keep the insight in front of us, to live with it, to let it work on us over time. Only then, after prolonged engagement, do we witness new gestures erupting into the world. This is the work of apprenticeship with grief.

It is out of love that we ultimately reshape our lives. It’s a matter of discipline, a word that shares the same root as disciple. To what will you be devoted? What will you love and serve? Doing the word of grief allows that answer to be your soul.

The Gifts Waiting on the Other Side

And there’s reason to engage in grief work beyond the grief we hold changing shape and texture. Those who do the full descent into grief come back changed and deepened by this work in the ashes. These women and men become our elders, the ones who can hold all of us in times of great challenge.

They become the carriers of medicine for our hearts and souls.

There is something on the other side of grief. Not the absence of sorrow (grief doesn’t disappear), but a deeper capacity. Gravitas. Wisdom. The ability to hold others in their pain without needing to fix it or flee from it.

Those who apprentice with grief gain access to the full range of emotion. Not shallow joy that’s dependent on circumstances, but genuine joy rooted in presence. Not the performance of wellness, but the groundedness that comes from having touched the depths and survived.

Grief is a powerful solvent, capable of softening the hardest of places in our hearts.

If you had met me 15 years ago and engaged me in a substantive conversation, and then met me today and did the same, it would be like meeting two entirely different people.

Fifteen years ago, I was angry. Deeply, rigidly angry, though I masked it with a joyful, playful exterior. I was performing wellness while suffocating underneath. I carried a hardness in me that I didn’t know how to name or release. I responded to the world with judgment, with defensiveness, with a need to protect myself at all costs.

Today, there is deep grief in me. And there is genuine joy on the surface. Not the manufactured kind, but the kind that comes from having descended and returned. I can hold complexity. I can sit with people in their pain without needing them to feel better. I can let my heart break open instead of harden.

There’s a choice we face when we encounter division and harm in the world: do we respond with anger or with grief? Grief gives us a glimpse of the divine heart for the world. When we grieve instead of harden, we see with eyes of fierce compassion instead of judgment. Our hearts break open instead of calcifying into rage.

This is what my grief work has given me: the capacity to stay human. To stay soft. To respond with compassion instead of condemnation. To hold space for the full catastrophe of being alive.

And that means this isn’t just about personal healing. Collective grief work is an alchemical process for social change. When we do our grief work (when we tend to the sorrows we carry, when we welcome home the exiled parts, when we let ourselves be changed), we become people who can hold the world differently.

Grief work is a declaration of and move towards our collective humanity.

An Invitation to Begin

Back to the woman sitting across from me, asking how to make the grief go away.

We’re still early in our work together. I can’t tell you what will happen for her. I don’t know yet how her story will unfold.

But I can tell you what I believe. I can tell you what experience, both mine and that of countless others who have walked this path, says: if we are willing to do the work, if we are willing to move through grief instead of around it, things change. The clay shifts in our hands. We become different people. Not fixed. Not finished. But deepened. Softened. More fully alive.

I know this from what I’ve read. I know it from my own descent and return. I know it from watching others begin to welcome home the parts of themselves they had exiled, watching them stop performing wellness and start living honestly.

But I can’t promise it. I can only invite it.

This work isn’t just about personal healing. It’s about our collective healing. It’s about how we’re going to move forward as a society, as communities, as human beings trying to stay human in a world that often feels inhuman.

And you don’t have to do this alone. In fact, you can’t. Not fully. Grief requires containment. It requires witnesses. It requires a safe space to fall.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself, if you’ve been carrying grief you don’t know how to work with, if you’ve been told not to grieve, if you’re exhausted from pushing it down, if you’re angry underneath and don’t know why, I want to offer you an invitation.

If you’re ready for a container, for a structured space where you can turn toward what you’ve been avoiding, where you can learn to work the clay, where you can apprentice with sorrow in the presence of someone who won’t try to fix you or rush you or tell you to move on, let’s talk.

Schedule a discovery call. Let’s explore what it would look like to let grief reshape you instead of trying to get past it. Let’s find out what medicine you might carry for the world if you let yourself descend and return.

Now, if one-on-one coaching is beyond your means right now, below the paywall are three practices for working with grief: one that only takes 60-seconds, another you can do in a 60-minutes, and an all-of-life transformation. Whether you choose coaching, the practices I provide, pick up your own copy of Weller, or just spend time with this post, they’re all tools to help you do the grief work that enables you to stay human.

Embodiment practices

If you want more than analysis, and you want something you can actually do with your hands and your breath, I put three practices on the other side of the paywall: one that takes a minute, one that takes an hour, and one that changes your life by changing your community.