I've sat with grief more times than I ever expected to. Since 2020, loss has moved through my life again and again, and each time, I learned the same lesson in a new way: grief doesn't just live in the mind. It lives in the chest, the throat, the shoulders, the gut. It shows up as insomnia at 2am, as a jaw that won't unclench, as exhaustion that sleep doesn't seem to touch. If you've been navigating loss and found that talking about it — even with a wonderful therapist — hasn't been enough to help you actually feel better in your body, I want you to know: that's not a failure on your part. It's because grief needs more than words to move through.
Why Talk Therapy Alone Often Isn't Enough
Talk therapy is valuable. Understanding your grief, naming it, making sense of the story — this matters deeply, and I don't say any of this to diminish it. But grief and trauma aren't only stored as thoughts and memories. They're stored physiologically, in the nervous system itself. When we experience profound loss, the body often shifts into a state of chronic activation or protective shutdown, and that state doesn't always resolve just because we've talked about what happened.
This is something I came to understand not just through my grief coaching work, but through my own life — through losses that reshaped how I understood healing entirely. I found that the piece so many of us are missing isn't insight. It's a way to help the body
itself feel safe enough to soften, to rest, to grieve fully rather than carrying grief as constant tension.
What Somatic Healing Actually Does
Somatic healing simply means working with the body as a doorway into healing, rather than working with the mind alone. In practice, through yoga therapy, this might look like breathwork that helps regulate a nervous system stuck in high alert, gentle movement that releases grief that has settled into the shoulders, chest, or hips, and stillness practices that create enough safety for the body to finally exhale.
This is where my Root to Rise™ approach comes in — a framework I developed specifically for supporting people through loss and trauma, grounded not only in yoga therapy but in a functional medicine and Ayurvedic understanding of how grief affects the whole system: sleep, digestion, energy, and emotional regulation, not just mood. Grief insomnia, for example, isn't simply & "trouble sleeping." It's often the nervous system standing guard, unable to fully release into rest. Addressing that requires working with the body directly, not just talking about the loss that caused it.
You Don't Have to Carry This Alone
If you're reading this because you've been quietly wondering why you still feel so physically unwell months or years after a loss — the fatigue, the sleepless nights, the tension that won't let go — please hear this: what you're experiencing is real, it makes complete sense, and it is not something you have to muscle through on your own.
Grief has its own timeline, and healing doesn't mean forgetting or moving on. It means finding a way to carry loss that doesn't leave your body in a constant state of bracing. That's the work I care about most, and it's the reason Heal at hŌMe Wellness exists.
If this resonates with you, I also write more personally about grief, healing, and what I've learned through my own losses on Substack, and I'll be sharing more soon about a dedicated program for grief-related insomnia.
Want to be the first to know when in-home sessions open, along with updates on Root to Rise™ and our grief insomnia program? Join our waitlist today at healathomewellness.com.