Healing Grief: 3 Paths to Deep Peace
- Shelley Harrison
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Once upon a time, I saw a Jungian Analyst.
Was it what I needed? Absolutely not. I needed my mom to hold me while I wept and wept.
But my mom had just died.
I was in my first of 4 years of healing school at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing which I attended from 1995-1999. My mom died in March 1996. She actually passed while I was away at week 3 of class in Long Island, NY where the school used to meet.
I understand now that she left just after my brother departed from his visit and before I arrived home, because…what mom could face her children and actually let go?
Being in therapy was—and still is—a requirement at BBSH. Students are required to do a total of 18 sessions over four years. Why? Because doing an intense four-year immersion in energy healing brings up all of one’s personal wounds. We need space and support between classes to process it all.
There was a list of ‘approved’ practitioners. I was pretty rebellious and didn’t want to be in therapy, but I was fascinated by archetypes already, so I chose to search for a Jungian Analyst.
The first two I met turned me away. They felt I was too young to do this work. (I was 25 at the time). There is this kind of rule in Jungian psychology that you need to be in the second half of your life, or have passed certain milestones in life to do depth work.
The third analyst I met with took me on.
She was sweet. We talked about my dreams. It was not terribly helpful.
How can one be helped by the depth of shock and grief I was in, by sitting politely across from an older, intellectual, woman in an armchair and talking?
What I Really Needed (and what I offer you)
I now know I needed:
🌿 Somatic grief work (feeling grief in the body rather than just talking about it)
🤲 To be held and to weep deep, heaving sobs
👩👩👧👧 A circle of older women to hold me in the mothering energy I had just lost
🔗 Relational cord healing
🌳 Generational trauma healing-working with your family energy field or family system through Family Constellations.
The 3 ways I can support you in your grief are: Somatic grief work, relational cord healing and working with your family energy field.
🌿 Somatic Grief Work
What is somatic grief work? Your soma is your body. So this means rather than talking about how sad, bereft, lonely, enraged at the gods, disoriented you are, I hold the space to guide you to gently drop into where all of this is being held in your body.
😣 Are you bracing and tensing to keep yourself from overflowing or falling apart?
💔 Are you in deep “Alarmed Aloneness,” the neurobiological circuit of grief/panic triggered by loss?
😡 Are you boiling over with a “fight” response, wanting to rail against fate or someone you hold responsible, even ‘god’?
🥶 Or are you frozen in shock because this loss has hit you like a truck?
You can’t talk these physiological body responses out. Our nervous system perceives deep loss as a threat to our survival and tries to protect us by setting off the alarm bell within.
Death is so big, and we have so little support in our culture to feel the enormity of it, that we have to tense up and brace ourselves to hold it in.
It’s exhausting. When my mom died, grief and shock left me walking around like a cardboard cut out, and having panic attacks when I tried to get my shit together and go to the grocery store. I was unable to get my brain to make decisions and fled the scene before I fell apart, only to go hide in my bedroom.
With somatic experiencing work (trained 2018–2022), I guide you to digest grief a little at a time. You can drop into your body without being overwhelmed by a tsunami of emotions.
And yes—I don’t mind if you cry big. Use up my whole Kleenex box if you need to.
🔗 Relational Cord Work
We can do energy healing to repair the relational cords with your deceased loved ones.
Relational cords are the energy/consciousness ties that connect from your chakras to others’.
Sudden loss can feel like these cords have been ripped out, leaving you “torn apart.”
Gradual loss can leave cords feeling tangled up inside you, as we cycle between reaching out, “please stay,” and letting go, “I release you.”
Repairing these cords helps release unresolved tension and restore a sense of connection and peace.
This work can help you transition your connection with your loved one to one of spirit, without going into a spiritual bypass to avoid the deep feelings of loss.
Relational cords persist after death in our energy fields. They should shift from connection out of the front of our chakras in the front body, to the back of our chakras in our back body. Our loved one is now ‘behind us’ as an ancestor or source of support.
🌳 Generational Trauma Healing
This is soul-level work with your parents and ancestors.
“Meeting” a parent or loved one in the energy field we create through a Family Constellations process can help you process grief and move toward peace faster.
I know it helped me when my dad died in November 2023. I requested this work in a group format with friends and a facilitator. My friends held the energies of:
🧑🦰 Me
👶 My child self
👨🦳 My dad
⚰️ Death
👩 My mom (already deceased)
💑 My dad’s partner
👦 My brother
In that brief, hour-long session, I moved through an intense charge of grief. After my dad’s death, I marveled at how complete I felt, I was not completely derailed by grief.
When I recall him now, I feel love, gratitude, and laughter, not sorrow. I feel this is because of the deep shift and sense of completion and acceptance I came to in the Family Constellations process.
I also gained clarity on how to move with his partner, who was attending to him, and I got to “see” and feel my mom and dad together again, which brought deep comfort.
Moving Through the Seasons of Grief
Like the loss in Fall, grief is meant to move into the stillness of Winter, and then into the rebirth and new growth of Spring. We are not meant to stay stuck.
When loss is given its sacred due, and you have the right conditions to process it fully, your life energy returns and rises again—with new wisdom and depth born of your journey through the dark.
Ready to Move through your Grief toward Peace?
If you need deep support to process your grief in these 3 ways, step into the 1:1 Pain to Purpose Healing Journey with me.
🌟 Book a free 30 minute discovery call here.
“When loss is given its sacred due, your life energy will return and rise again.”
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