The Energetics Of Grief

The word grief feels far too small for what it attempts to hold. Throughout history, language has evolved to give shape to experience. From Sanskrit, Latin, and ancient dialects, these terminologies have all been crafted in a way that carries a weight, a resonance, and a felt sense for the listener. Words were designed to hold the magnitude of what they named. Yet grief, just one brief syllable, gives the illusion of simplicity. It misleads and it conceals the enormity of what it signifies, how it tears and ruptures, how it rewires the body and in essence fractures the psyche. The word is brief, but its impact is anything but.

For years, I believed that I had known grief. The end of relationships that left a temporary hollowness, the sting of being left out or misunderstood, the disorientation of losing direction in my career — all of these moments felt significant at the time, and I labelled them as ‘grief’ because I didn’t yet have anything deeper to compare them to. They carried discomfort, sadness, even a sense of emptiness, but they did not cut into the very core of who I was.

It was not until I experienced the rupture that comes with unquestionable loss; love torn away, your known identity shattered, the future collapsing in on itself, that I understood how misguided that labelling had been. Those earlier experiences were just echoes, surface-level bruises I mistook for deep cutting wounds. They were emotional weather patterns merely passing overhead, not the kind of storm that alters the true landscape. What I once believed was grief revealed itself in hindsight to be something far more fleeting. It lacked the permanence, the physicality and the existential devastation of true loss.

What struck me most when grief arrived was how deeply it embedded itself into my body. It was not just an emotion; it was a physiological event. My chest felt ruptured, my breath shortened, my posture collapsed as though my skeleton had reorganised itself directly around the absence that was being felt. The body seemed to register what the mind could not yet articulate appropriately. There are reasons why people speak of grief sitting in the chest, tightening the throat, hollowing the stomach. These are not simply metaphors; they are literal sensations and evidence that the body participates in loss in a way we rarely acknowledge.

And yet it was not just physical. There was a simultaneous tearing at the level of my individuality, meaning, and connection of everything that I ‘thought’ that I understood. It felt as though something within the soul (whatever language one uses for that internal essence) had been harshly severed. Many cultures never separated the body from the soul in the first place — really understanding them as one continuous system rather than two completely unrelated domains. In those frameworks, the body is not merely a meaningless vessel but a living expression of our inner world. Loss then reverberates across both: tissue and bone remember, and so does the part of us that loves, imagines, and hopes.

This is why grief feels so disorienting, because you can treat the emotional symptoms, rationalise the circumstances, even consciously accept what has happened, yet the body still aches, and the soul still continuously reaches for what is gone. There is a dual imprinting of sorts, the one etched into the fingerprint of the nervous system and the other into the very architecture of who you believe yourself to be. It creates depth, not in a romanticised sense, but in a structural one. Grief carves out an internal space that did not exist before, which reshapes both our physiology and inner being.

The unfortunate truth is that grief is not one single event. It returns and it continues to offer itself throughout a lifetime, arriving in new forms, each time carving deeper and unfathomable pathways within us. Expressions like “heart-wrenching,” “my heart bleeds,” or “there is a hole in my heart” exist because they hold the most accuracy. The essence of the heart does not forget, and neither does the physical body. We have been taught to view the body as a machine, a hard drive, a meaningless suit, but the visceral nature of grief reinforces that this simply cannot be true.

Loss creates multifaceted crevices, holes, canyons, and a depth that would not exist without complete rupture. Without it, we would remain flat, untextured and shallow terrains. Grief reshapes us, not only emotionally but structurally, changing the way we exist in the world. It hurts, yes, but it also forms the very valleys where meaning, benevolence, and understanding can take root in inscrutable ways.

Over time (whatever this means), I’ve come to believe that the presence of grief does not mean something has gone wrong (despite the brain’s consensus). It means something mattered substantially. The strength and intensity to which grief reaches is proportional to the depth to which we have loved. Its impact in actuality reveals the scale of what was lost, not a deficiency in our ability to cope. Although some days, it surely doesn't feel like this.

What becomes utterly striking is how grief quietly reorganises a person's internal design, not in a way that restores what was, but in a way that demands an entirely different way of existing. You do not “move on” from grief; you move with it, walk alongside it, reaching out for a hand that is not there. You learn to build a life around a fracture, and over time, the sharp edges soften, not because the loss diminishes, but because the body and soul adapt to holding its curves.

There is an unexpected intelligence in this restructuring; the very places that once felt hollow now begin to learn how to create space that could not have been made without a shattering. It does not erase the pain, nor does it justify it or make it fair. But it does acknowledge that grief becomes woven into identity, not as a defining feature, but as a layer of complexity that shapes how we feel and how we recognise others' experiences in this world. At least this is what I tell myself.

If anything, I suppose that grief reveals our capacity as human beings. Our ability to love so profoundly that its absence changes the things that make us ‘us’. Our ability to keep going in the aftermath. And perhaps most importantly, our ability to lay foundations precisely where the damage was caused, and have it be in reparation.

Though grief is not a gift, and it is not a lesson, as people often claim it to be. But it is a breaking force that mutilates meaning in the human experience. The scene it leaves behind is different, uneven, imperfectly marked, but ultimately and undeniably vaster.