Reclaiming Our Grief Journey: Learning to Hold Both

Recently, I asked someone how they had been navigating their grief. Their response stayed with me.

They told me they were hoping that, eventually, enough time would pass that they wouldn’t think about their loved ones so much.

I understood what they meant. When the pain of loss feels unbearable, the idea that time might soften it can offer some hope. And certainly, our experience of grief changes over time. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that response.

Is that really the best we can offer people who are grieving? The hope that one day they simply won’t think about the people they love quite so much?

Where is the roadmap for something different? Where are we teaching people how to actively engage with their grief? How to expand their capacity to be with sorrow rather than continually trying to escape it? How to cultivate an ongoing relationship with someone who is no longer physically present?

And perhaps most importantly, where are we helping people recognize that they have the capacity to do this work themselves?

What If We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question?

So much of our cultural narrative around grief is oriented toward the passage of time. We hear that time heals. That the pain will become less intense. That eventually we’ll find a new normal. That we’ll learn to move forward. And while there may be truth in some of these experiences, I think we’re missing something profound.

What if the goal of grief work isn’t to think about our loved ones less, but to learn how to be in relationship with them differently?

What if grief isn’t simply something that happens to us, but an experience we can consciously engage with?

What if, rather than measuring our progress by how infrequently we feel sorrow, we begin to recognize our growing capacity to hold sorrow alongside love, gratitude, joy, and even wonder?

This is a fundamentally different orientation. It doesn’t ask us to erase our grief. It doesn’t require us to find the silver lining or make meaning before we’re ready. It invites us to become active participants in our own experience. To recognize that the relationship doesn’t necessarily end when the physical presence does. It changes. And we can learn to participate in that changing relationship.

Reclaiming Our Capacity for Connection

There is another piece of our cultural narrative that I want to challenge.

When we want to feel connected to someone who has died, we are often directed toward something or someone outside ourselves. Religion. God. A spiritual leader. A medium. Someone who might help us communicate, interpret, or make sense of a connection we are longing to experience.

These paths can be deeply meaningful, and I’m not suggesting we abandon them. I believe there is room for many ways of understanding and experiencing connection. But I do wonder what happens when we come to believe that connection requires an intermediary.

What if we already have within us the capacity to cultivate a deep and meaningful relationship with our loved ones who have died?

What if we don’t have to wait for a sign, a message, or someone else’s interpretation to feel connected? What if connection can be something we practice? Through memory. Through attention. Through the body. Through nature. Through quiet moments of awareness. Through the ways we continue to love, learn from, and carry our loved ones into our lives. We can speak to them. Write to them. Ask ourselves what they continue to teach us. Notice how our relationship with them is evolving as we evolve. We can create rituals that feel meaningful to us, without needing someone else to tell us what those rituals should look like. We can learn to trust our own experiences of connection, whether we understand them as spiritual, emotional, relational, or something we don’t yet have language for.

We don’t have to outsource our relationship with the people we love. And we don’t have to have all the answers about what happens after death to continue cultivating that relationship.

Expanding Our Capacity to Hold Both

When my son Noah died, I entered a reality I could never have imagined.

There was no way around the sorrow. No amount of understanding, spiritual exploration, or personal growth could change the fact that I wanted my son here, physically, with me. I still do.

But over time, I have started and continue to recognize that my relationship with Noah didn’t have to be defined only by his absence.

There is still love. There is still connection. There is still so much to discover about myself, about him, and about the nature of this human experience. The sorrow didn’t disappear. My capacity to be with it has begun to change. And alongside that sorrow, something else is expanding. Love. Awareness. Curiosity. A different kind of relationship with life itself.

This is what I mean by holding both.

Not choosing between grief and joy. Not replacing sorrow with gratitude. Not forcing ourselves to find meaning in something devastating. But developing the capacity to experience seemingly contradictory truths at the same time. I can be devastated that Noah is no longer physically here and feel deeply connected to him. I can long for the life we didn’t get to share and remain curious about the relationship we are still cultivating. I can experience profound sorrow and profound love.

One does not cancel out the other.

And perhaps, this is where some of our most meaningful grief work begins.

What Does It Actually Mean to Work With Our Grief?

I think we need to reclaim the phrase grief work.

Because when someone asks how our grief work is going, what are we actually talking about? Are we simply surviving another day? Waiting for the intensity to diminish? Hoping that eventually life will become easier? Sometimes survival is all we have capacity for, and that is enough. But I want us to know that other possibilities exist.

What if grief work could also look like Soul Work:

• Learning to notice sorrow in our bodies and creating enough safety, resourcing and capacity to be with it, rather than immediately trying to make it go away.

• Intentionally cultivating our relationship with our loved ones through reflection, memory, conversation, ritual, expanded states, and practices of connection.

• Exploring how our loss has changed our understanding of ourselves, our relationships, and the world.

• Recognizing the beliefs we’ve inherited about death, grief, and connection—and deciding which ones still serve us.

• Practicing the ability to experience love and sorrow simultaneously, without needing either one to disappear.

• Allowing ourselves to be witnessed by others who understand, while also discovering our own inner wisdom.

This is active, intentional work. Not because grief is a problem we need to solve, but because our relationship with grief and life, like any relationship, can deepen through attention, curiosity, and practice. We can learn new ways of being with what is. And we can do so without making our sorrow evidence that something is wrong with us.

Introducing Holding Both

This is the foundation of a new gathering I’m creating for parents whose children are in spirit.

Holding Both is a space to explore what becomes possible when we stop orienting our grief journey around getting further away from our loss and begin cultivating a deeper relationship with our children, ourselves, and one another.

Traditional grief support groups serve an important purpose. Being witnessed, sharing our stories, and connecting with others who understand the unimaginable experience of losing a child can be profoundly meaningful.

Holding Both includes that, but it also offers something more intentional. We are coming together not only to share our grief, but to actively explore how we want to live in relationship with it. And how we want to continue living in relationship with our children.

Gathering in the dome at Bawbs Acres, surrounded by nature, we will create space to be exactly where we are while also exploring new possibilities. Each gathering will include time to be witnessed in whatever is present, teachings and reflections drawn from Soul Work: A Field Guide to Freedom, somatic practices and meditation, and unstructured time to connect with ourselves, the land, and one another.

We will explore practical tools for expanding our capacity to be with difficult emotions, deepening our awareness, and cultivating connection with our children in ways that are personally meaningful. There is no prescribed belief system. No requirement to understand death or the afterlife in a particular way. No expectation that we arrive at acceptance, peace, or transformation. And certainly no expectation that we stop grieving. We are not gathering to learn how to let go of our children. We are gathering to explore how to keep loving them, consciously and intentionally, in a relationship that continues to evolve.

We will practice together, so that what we discover can become part of how we live beyond our gatherings.

A Different Story Is Possible

Through my work with the Human Experience Labyrinth, I’ve come to understand that suffering and transformation are not separate experiences, but rather intimately intertwined. We don’t have to move beyond sorrow to access meaning. We don’t have to resolve our grief before we can experience connection, love, or even joy. We can be in many places at once. And we can learn to navigate those places with greater awareness and intention.

I want to live in a world where, when someone asks how we’re navigating our grief, we have more possibilities to draw upon than the hope that enough time will eventually pass.

A world where we understand that grief is not simply a process of adjusting to absence, but can also be an ongoing exploration of love and relationship. A world where we trust ourselves to participate in that exploration. Where we have tools. Where we have community. Where we have permission to question the narratives we’ve inherited. Where we don’t have to choose between honoring the depth of our sorrow and expanding our capacity for life. Where we can miss our children with every fiber of our being and still cultivate a living, evolving relationship with them and deepen our own relationship with life.

We are not powerless in our grief. We may not have chosen what happened. We cannot change the reality of their physical absence. But we can reclaim our agency in how we relate to that reality. We can learn. We can practice. We can connect. We can discover what it means to continue loving someone beyond their physical lifetime. And we can do it together. That is the invitation of Holding Both. Not to leave our grief behind. But to discover what becomes possible when we learn to hold both the sorrow and the expanding love.

An Invitation to Reflect

Whether you’ve lost a child or someone else you deeply love, I invite you to sit with these questions:

1. What have I been taught about what it means to grieve well? Have I unconsciously measured my progress by how little I think about or miss my loved one?

2. What does my relationship with my loved one look like today? In what ways might I want to intentionally nurture that relationship?

3. When sorrow arises, what do I typically do with it? What might it feel like to approach it with curiosity rather than resistance?

4. Where have I looked outside myself for permission, reassurance, or connection? What might it mean to trust my own experience?

5. What would change if I stopped asking, “How do I get through this?” and began asking, “How do I want to be in relationship with this?”

You don’t need to answer all of these today. Perhaps one question is enough.

And perhaps that is where reclaiming your grief journey begins.

Holding Both is a new in-person gathering for parents whose children are in spirit, held at the dome at Bawbs Acres in Corbett, Oregon. Together, we’ll explore grief, continuing connection, and the practice of being with both sorrow and love.

To learn more about Holding Both and my other offerings, visit drtiffanyryan.org/event-list.