1) Pain or Discomfort in the Body:
If you’re experiencing pain that’s lingering or random with no logical explanation, this part of your body may be trying to communicate information about the grief you hold there. This is a sign your body is holding on to something painful.

2) Over-Exertion without Rest:
If you’re constantly staying busy, working or doing something without adequate rest, this behavior of urgency and distraction is keeping you emotionally depleted so you don’t have enough capacity to process the grief. This is an avoidance tactic.

3) Brain Fog or Forgetfulness:
Simple, easy tasks seem more difficult because you keep forgetting or misplacing objects or information. Have you been going back into the house because you can’t get everything you need the first time? This is a symptom of the over-exertion and shows you’re carrying too much mental baggage and it’s impacting your mental capacity.

4) Surface-Level Connection:
Difficulty connecting with loved ones can be a sign of emotional distress. It could be subconscious, that you’re avoiding the people and even places you love because it triggers a memory or a feeling you don’t want to feel. Usually paired with somatic discomfort, this is a sign going deep with self or others doesn’t feel safe.

5) Maladaptive Behaviors:
Acting out, having a tantrum, or even just regressing to childish behaviors or trauma responses can signal repressed grief. Especially if you’re usually able to stay put together, but the smallest antecedents (that didn’t hook you before) are now major triggers for dysfunction & dysregulation. 

6) Need for Control:
Whether it be the environment or the narrative, you need to control how people perceive your state of being. You control the environment, socially or otherwise. You feel the need to create certain conditions, but they may never satisfy so you keep changing and controlling the change outside of you. This is a projected reflection of not feeling in control of your inner world.

7) Emotionally Numb:
This kind of apathy is a desensitization of the emotions that are ready to be processed, somatically. Because of your neuro-somatic connection the mind mutes emotional intelligence by repressing the feeling and creating a disconnection from the body. If you can’t feel it, it’s not real, right? Wrong. Emotional bypassing builds up and leaks out (as listed above).

1) You’re grieving the loss of something that isn’t typical or expected~ it may not be as obvious as losing a parent, but sometimes it’s the old version of you that died so a more authentic you could exist. Grief doesn’t have to be explained for justified, your feelings are always valid.

2) You feel shame, guilt, embarrassment, or even self judgement for grieving~ this could be social conditioning passed down from generation to generation. These are indicators that you may never have felt truly safe to process your big, confusing emotions when you were younger and were most likely met with criticism. It’s okay to not be okay, and if someone makes you feel bad about it speaks more about how they make your emotions about them.

3) You have too high or demanding expectations for yourself~ healing isn’t linear and neither is grieving. You may think or want to be done with the emotional waves, random nostalgia, and yet another layer to process. The more you get to unfold shows the depth of your love for what is gone or going away. So be easy on yourself and save some grace for you too. 

4) You forget or deny that death is also sacred~ regardless of your religion or spiritual beliefs, we can quantify that life is sacred. The inverse of life, growth, and expansion is death, decay, and transformation. The Angel of Death shows us how much we actually love. Not to punish, but to give you an opportunity to sovereignly grow beyond the grief and continue to love anyway.

5) Your nervous system may be hardwired by trauma~ if the initial shock is too destabilizing, in addition to previous experiences and current health, your fascia might be wound up in survival mode. This goes beyond functional, limiting core beliefs. You may need neuro-somatic or psychological support to re-wire your mind, body, heart connection.

6) You’re experiencing indirect grief~ like how compersion is to feel love for others being in love, we can also empathically feel or mimic symptoms of grief. This goes into energetic hygiene and boundaries, which is why discernment and connection to your own emotions is integral with being sovereign.

1) Calling back your power~ when we leave emotional tabs open, like on a computer browser, overtime that can impact processing speeds. By moving through the stages of grief to find acceptance, this allows you to close those extra tabs so you can recall your emotional bandwidth back to baseline.

2) You take the higher path of healing~ it’s easy to stay victim to circumstance but who does that really serve? To be sovereign means claiming responsibility for oneself and the quality of their life. Your feelings are valid and it’s up to you to choose self-care. Working with your grief, instead of against it, is a virtuous act of self-compassion.

3) It restores balance in your nervous system~ grief can hijack our nervous system making it more difficult to think, connect, remember, and be present. When we can safely sit with the heaviness of loss, it lets that big emotion dissolve, revealing the loving core memory hidden within. When we connect to that memory it allows us to rest in love, shifting from sympathetic to parasympathetic.

4) To be whole is your birthright~ when we lose someone or something precious to us it can feel like that part of us is gone forever. But you are enough, valid, and whole exactly as you are. Shifting the narrative from grief into gratitude is the embodiment of reverence for those that are gone and still here.

5) You don’t have to self-sacrifice~ fortitude is the grit that keeps us pushing forward, but you don’t have to sacrifice yourself to keep forcing your way through life. To grieve is to be human. Temperance is self-restraint which leads back home to you and giving yourself the grace to not be okay.