Before you begin, press play and listen: Eivør Pálsdóttir: Tròdlabùndin (Trøllabundin) Feel the low hum in your bones. The drone. The guttural breath. Grief is not just emotion. It is frequency. It is weight. It is stored. Let the sound move through you as you read.
The body holds what the mind can’t
Grief doesn’t live in the mind alone. It settles into muscle, fascia, nerve endings. It makes homes in the gut, the spine, the soft space behind the knees. It shapes how we breathe, how we move through rooms, how we withdraw from them.
For years, I thought of grief as something emotional, something you could work through if you just named it clearly enough. I found that grief doesn’t move like that. It lives in the body’s rhythms, in the subtle ways we hold tension, in the quiet refusal to relax fully into the ground beneath us.
I learned this the hard way.
My iliopsoas had seized up completely, my whole back locked, frozen in place. I did everything: fascia release, rolling, myotherapy, massage, kinesiology. Every treatment helped a little, but nothing truly released it.
Until my kinesiologist, a master of her craft, found the root of it. The iliopsoas is the body’s fear muscle. It clenches in trauma, locks down to keep you safe, mine had been holding something for too long. Her partner did deep tissue work, finally reaching the knots in my core but the real release didn’t come from manipulation.
It came from grief.
Once I could move again, I started trauma-informed yoga, doing hip release work designed to unravel stored emotion, and the first time I dropped into a pose, I howled. Not from pain, or from any one sadness I could name. Just decades of held sorrow, moving at last and it kept happening. Three, four times, grief moving like waves through my body; stuff I hadn’t processed and I didn’t even know I was carrying until it emerged.
The body holds grief in ways the mind can’t fully grasp.
Sometimes it shows up as tightness in the throat or heaviness in the chest or a flinch, a shallow breath, perhaps a sudden need to leave the room. Sometimes, it doesn’t show up as sadness at all, instead it arrives as restlessness, irritability or the impulse to overwork, over-schedule, or over-explain. Anything to avoid the quiet space where grief might catch up.
The myth of suppression
This is what Gabor Maté calls The Myth of Normal. What we call “normal” is often just a culture-wide trauma response: a demand that we suppress grief, awe, fear, and tenderness just to survive.
We live in systems that have no time for grief, no space for pause.
So grief goes underground. It embeds itself in muscle, fascia, and the nervous system. It becomes chronic pain, tension, insomnia, migraines, autoimmune issues. It becomes a deep inability to rest, because stopping means feeling, and feeling means being overwhelmed.
As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma isn’t just something we remember—it’s something our bodies carry, shape, and express.
We might think we’ve left the past behind, but our nervous system remembers what the mind forgets. The tension in the jaw, the restless legs, the unexplained exhaustion, these aren’t random. They’re the body speaking its history.
And because no one taught us how to let grief move, we think something’s wrong with us when it demands to be felt.
But what if nothing is wrong? What if your body isn’t failing you, but trying to free you?
Why the body sings grief
I listened to Trøllabundin over and over again when I was working through this.
Not because it made me feel better, but because it resonated with something deeper
: a raw, bone-deep sound that vibrated where words couldn’t reach.
Low drones, throat singing, deep percussion: these aren’t just sounds, they are somatic experiences that bypass rational processing and speak directly to the nervous system. Grief is not something to think through, it is something to move through, and sound like breath, touch and movement can help carry it.
A practice for noticing grief in the body
This is not a “fix”, this is a noticing
Find a quiet space
Sit or stand with your feet fully on the ground
Take a slow, full breath, then another
Ask yourself:
Where is there tension?
Where feels heavy?
What is my body holding right now?
Don’t try to name it…just notice…if grief rises then let it. Tears, tremors, a deep exhale, let them belong, no fixing or forcing, just listening.
Composting the body’s grief
This season of unravelling isn’t just about naming grief. It’s about learning to let it move, in the ways it needs to.
For some, that’s yoga or deep massage: bodywork that doesn’t try to “fix” but allows space for release. This trauma informed yoga practice was part of my own process, helping to soften what had been held for too long.
For others, it’s walking until the weight in the chest lightens. For some, it’s sound—low, raw, primal—like a hum in the bones. Whatever it is for you, let it be real, felt and allow you to be released. Grief is not a problem, it is a process, and the body knows the way through.
Season of Unravelling: a playlist for grief, kinship and awe
Grief moves through us in waves, rising, receding, reshaping the ground beneath our feet. So does awe. This playlist is a companion to the first season of The Art of Unravelling: a sonic drift through sorrow, tenderness, resilience, and quiet wonder.
Some songs hold the ache of endings. Others hum with the persistence of life, with the strange, unbidden beauty that insists on finding us even in loss. Together, they form a kind of tide, pulling us under, lifting us up, and carrying us forward.
Let it play…let yourself drift.
Find this in book form
The Season of Unravelling has its own home beyond Substack now. It’s the first in a four-part Almanac, the expanded long-form telling of this whole year-long inquiry, with Unravelling, Drifting, Seeding, and Resonance each becoming their own book.
This first one, The Season of Unravelling, is 59 pages: longer than a single Substack post, shorter than a commitment. It weaves the original posts into one fuller arc, with the threads, the practices, and the reflections that the weekly format never had room for. It’s available to purchase on Amazon.
The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.