When grief lives in the body

Ask someone how their grief is going and you will usually get an answer about their feelings.

Ask what their body has been doing and you get something else. The jaw that will not unclench. Sleep that arrives at four in the morning and leaves at five. Food that has stopped being interesting. A chest that is tight for no reason anyone can point to. The particular exhaustion of people who have not actually done anything all day.

Grief is not only a state of mind. It shows up as a physical event, and for a lot of people it shows up there first, before they have any language for what is happening. That is what the Embodied Practices track is for.

What this track actually is

Four sessions across October 15, each around forty minutes, each one hands-on rather than explanatory. Nobody is going to lecture you about the nervous system. You are invited to do something with your body and see what it does back.

Two things worth saying up front, because they are what people ask.

You do not have to be good at this. No movement experience, no meditation practice, no flexibility, no equipment. Every invitation is optional in every session.

You do not have to be visible. Cameras stay off if you want them off. Several of these sessions are led by people who assume you might be lying down.

The four

Being with Grief, Being with Breath, with Sundari Malcolm, a birth, grief and death doula and the author of Grief Gems. This is the gentlest doorway into the whole day and a good first session if you are unsure about any of it. Breathwork and meditation, aimed at settling the body rather than at insight. Her framing is the reason we put it early: not to fix grief, not to find meaning in it, just to be with it. As she puts it, sometimes what we need most in loss is to allow ourselves to be exactly where we are.

Towards Healing and Resilience in a Chaotic Climate, with LaUra Schmidt, founding director of the Good Grief Network and lead author of How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet. Somatics and journaling, applied to eco-distress and the heavy feelings that come with watching the planet change. If you have ever been told you are catastrophising when you are in fact reading the news accurately, this hour is built for you.

Honoring Ancestors and Legacy through Embodied Practice, with Brenda Salgado, a spiritual leader trained by Purepecha, Xochimilco and Toltec elders in traditional medicine and the founder of the Nepantla Center for Healing and Renewal. Building a home altar or a sacred space, and grief rituals rooted in cultural or religious tradition, whether that tradition is yours or somebody else's. Practical, and among the most requested things we do.

When your Body is a Hard Place to Be: A Practice for Those with Health Challenges, with Sasha Soreff. This one deliberately argues with the rest of the track. We are all told to get into our bodies as a route to presence. But what if your body is the source of the pain, the fear, the stress? Sasha holds a space for people for whom "be in your body" is not soothing advice, using empathy and self-determined movement, including imagined movement. Stillness is welcome. Come as you are.

Why this is where people are most surprised

The Embodied Practices sessions are the ones attendees tell us about afterward, and usually with a note of surprise, because they came for the talks.

Our guess at why: a conversation about loss asks you to describe something. A practice does not. You can arrive with no words at all, which is the state a great many people are actually in, and still participate fully. For anyone who has been carrying something for a long time without a vocabulary for it, forty minutes of not having to explain yourself is its own kind of relief.

There is also the ordinary physical fact underneath it. Grief is stressful in the measurable sense, and it lands on sleep, appetite, immunity and the rest. Something that settles the body is not a soft alternative to the real work. Quite often it is the thing that makes the rest of the day possible.

If you only do one thing

Come to one of these. Even if you spend most of it with your camera off and your eyes closed.

The Embodied Practices track is part of the Reimagine Summit: Grief in Our Time, Thursday, October 15, from 10 AM to 3 PM Pacific. Online, free to attend, seven tracks, more than thirty sessions. Come for all five hours or drop in for forty minutes.

Have a look around the schedule · Download the full schedule (PDF)

The Reimagine Summit: Grief in Our Time · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 10 AM to 3 PM PT · Online · Free to attend, donations welcome