Inhibited Grieving: Why You Leave Your Body for Your Head

We have to have an efficient and robust ability to grieve in a healthy way. That was one of my keys to moving so quickly from suffering and running from my awakening to running towards my awakening and moving rapidly towards abiding awakening. A key to this whole process, this process of the separate self being born, living, dying, emptiness, reborn over and over again, is the ability to grieve in a healthy way. Most people that I know have what's called inhibited grieving, meaning that they were taught to avoid grieving instead of trust the grieving process and follow through with the grieving process.

This is a learned behavior from childhood. It's often related to transgenerational trauma or attachment trauma. And what inhibited grieving means is that you have a negative relationship with one or more of the emotions in the grieving cycle. And the grieving cycle, as I define it, goes from fear to shame to anger to sadness to emptiness and relief.

And like death is kind of right between sadness and emptiness, right? And then it keeps going. There's some positive emotions related to it too, but I'm going to leave those up for now. So, inhibited grieving is when we have a negative or judgmental relationship with one of those emotions.

And so, when we are moved, or our body naturally moves into the grieving process because we need to let go of an old self or a story or a loss in present-day life, what happens is we begin to grieve, and then we hit that resistance or that negative relationship with that emotion, and then we go into an unhealthy, addictive pattern of behavior where we leave our body and the somatic experience of the emotion, go into the head, and begin to believe a story or focus on a train of thinking or a certain worry or anxiety.

And so, that's why I think it's so important that to fully awaken and walk into and through abiding awakening and maintain the awakened state or the maintain awakening. It's not really a state, but where it's going to fall short. We have to have an efficient and robust ability to grieve in a healthy way. That is one of my keys to moving so quickly from suffering and running from my awakening to running towards my awakening and moving rapidly towards abiding awakening.