09/21/2026
How Grief Moves Through a Whole Person
by Pamela Ann Noxon, Holistic Grief Coach & Educator
Picture a kaleidoscope - the child’s optical toy that is a tube with glass, mirrors, and small pieces of colored glass inside, that shift into new patterns every time you rotate the tube. Every little piece of colored glass inside it represents a piece of who you are — where you grew up, your culture, your spirituality, your family history, your nervous system, your personality, every life experience and relationship you've ever had - including the relationship you had with your Loved One who has passed away. Now picture loss reaching in and giving that kaleidoscope a hard, sudden turn. Everything shifts. Nothing looks quite the way it did a second ago….and it just keeps shifting.
That image is at the center of how I think about grief, because grief is not one unified reaction happening in one place. It moves through several interconnected parts of you, each of which experiences and processes loss in its own way, on its own timeline, often with zero coordination between them. Let me walk you through how I see the experience of loss and grief.
Your body carries grief physically — headaches, digestive upset, a tightness in the chest, exhaustion that a full night's sleep doesn't touch. In acute cases, it can even show up as broken heart syndrome, a real, documented stunning of the heart muscle. The body can also dissociate under the weight of loss, disconnecting from full presence as a way of protecting you from more than you can hold at once.
Your brain is undergoing real, measurable change — rewiring stress and memory systems as it works to relearn a world that no longer includes someone it expected to keep finding there. This is what I mean when I say grief functions like a learning process, not a feeling that simply passes through you.
Your mind tries to think its way through loss. It replays memories, second-guesses decisions, hunts for explanations, tries to solve grief like it's a problem with a discoverable answer. It rarely is one, and trying to force it usually creates more suffering, not less.
Your emotions show up in a wide, sometimes contradictory range — sadness, anger, relief, guilt, even dark humor, occasionally all in the same hour, and occasionally not at all, when numbness takes over as protection from more than you can process. Your feelings can overwhelm you and be hard to tease apart and identify, let alone express.
Your spirit may wrestle with meaninglessness, or anger at whatever you call the divine, or a spiritual disconnect. Sometimes it's a feeling of failure, as if you should be "beyond" this kind of pain because of your spiritual practice. Grief often triggers a spiritual crisis or ‘dark night of the soul’ that can be incredibly hard to navigate without some form of spiritual counsel or coaching to help you find a perspective you can live with.
Your nervous system reacts to the loss of safety that major loss brings, often shifting into hyperarousal — restlessness, anxiety spikes, sensory overwhelm — or hypoarousal — shutdown, numbness, disconnection — as it tries to regulate an experience that has destabilized its whole sense of safety. Your brain cycles through trying to run old programs with your Loved One in the picture seeking for them to exhaustion.
And your soul is what tries to hold all of this together, reaching for connection and wholeness even while your mind, body, emotions, and nervous system are each doing their own uncoordinated thing. It can be a discordant symphony without a conductor or guide to bring all elements together.
Here's why this matters so much to me: a holistic approach doesn't try to force all these parts of you into alignment on one neat timeline, and it doesn't just address one of them — usually the mind, which is where most conventional "talk it through" approaches live. A holistic approach to grief support works with all of them, using different tools suited to each one: body-based regulation, nervous system co-regulation, cognitive reframing, emotional expression, spiritual and meaning-based work, soul-level practices. Because if you're only supported mentally while your body and nervous system stay completely dysregulated, you're still going to struggle, and fall back into dysregulated states, no matter how much you talk and no matter how much insight you gain.
Grief doesn't move through you in one single wave or in a straight line through stages. It moves through your body, your brain, your mind, your emotions, your spirit, and your nervous system, separately and simultaneously. That's exactly why support that only addresses one part of you so often falls short of what you actually need.
As grief shifts and changes and creates new patterns over the days, weeks, months, even years after loss, I urge you to find the support you need. And to show up for yourself [as best you can] with self compassion and a careful witnessing of each element; your mind, emotions, body, spirit, nervous system, and soul. Listen to them all, each speaking their own language of loss and suffering in loss. Grief is hard to navigate, to be sure, but finding the right support that meets your needs, that includes some understanding and acknowledgement of your unique experience, that sees all the colors and shapes and forms of expression your whole self is communicating, with a healthy dose of self kindness and self care added in, makes all the difference.
Sending you love and support. Pamela
How Grief Moves Through a Whole Person by Pamela Ann Noxon, Holistic Grief Coach & Educator Picture a kaleidoscope - the child’s optical toy that is a tube with glass, mirrors, and small pieces of colored glass inside, that shift into new patterns every time you rotate the tube. Every l
