Walking Ourselves Through Grief with Lou Hynes (#068)

that we do

yeah I mean, in my work, I talk a lot about just like overthinking and finding your way out of trying to rationalize and think.

And I speak to that because that's something I always struggle with.

You know, I myself love to think and plan and analyze.

And so my work is all centered on like, get out of thinking, get into the body, get into something else that you can actually like process and hear and feel in a different way.

And it sounds like a lot of us, a lot of people are trying to rationalize their grief, the feelings that they have or just, you know, that are inconvenient.

So you just want to like stuff them away in a box.

Don't deal with them.

And.

Yeah.

And we've become a very, I guess, sort of top-down society, haven't we? How we deal with things, how we process things.

We work from the brain and pretty much it stays, you know, from the neck up.

That's how we deal with things.

We've forgotten and lost the art of tuning in to how our body is actually feeling, what we are storing, what... what messages and what signals it's telling us.

And we try to think, like I say, we try to think our way out of it, don't we? And that makes you think that you're either going mad, going completely insane, or you tend to numb and suppress and just pretend that those feelings will go away eventually, which of course we know they don't.

Or we numb through other things as well, you know, scrolling, shopping, eating all the biscuits, drinking that third glass of wine.

There's so many things that we do to which we think we're doing to make ourselves feel better.

And yes, they do temporarily, don't they? You get that little dopamine hit from having that bar of chocolate.

But ultimately, is that merely a distraction from the actual process, the actual sitting with those painful, difficult, hard, challenging feelings and emotions that we're not used to dealing with coping with showing talking about, or any of that.

And so there's so many questions that are coming up for me now.

One is really, when you're supporting people through grief, like, what does that actually mean? What does that look like? So if someone were to come to you going through a grieving process, what is it that you help them to do? Don't eat the cookies? No, I mean, like,

We explore that with no judgment for what they're doing.

I'm like, I do have some cookies that are like tucked away over there, but we'll talk about that later.

So first of all, it's about, I help them create an awareness of what else is going on for them.

More often than not, they come to me saying, I just don't want to feel this sad anymore.