Episode 54 - Softening Your Grief With Tapping and Breathwork
HANNAH: If you were, and this can be for yourself or for a client, if they are stuck in grief, right, and your goal is to soften the grief, help them to move through it, what modalities would you use or what would you do?
SILVIA: So again, I can only speak from my own experience how I'm still managing my own grief is to kind of give you a little bit of story here. So my grandma passed away in 2021, and she was like my mom. She raised me up since I was three years old. And so her loss really, yeah, kind of almost broke me. And so what I've learned since then is that for me personally, moving my body and applying breathwork and tapping and dancing and just really moving my body 100% helped me to soften my grief. No one told me how to deal with grief.
This is something that I had to kind of work it out for myself, like, yeah, what could work. And because grief is such a huge emotion, as you know, it's so hard and rigid when it first hits you, and you can't escape it. It takes the life force out of you, and you just feel so heavy. And the grief for me is always like really, not anymore, but it was very long. It just felt really long from my neck all the way down to my waist, and it was very dark. I don't know.
I just... That's how I always felt it in my body, and it's like just there. And whenever I did the breath work or went for a run, because I was like compelled to go and run, it would just move with me. And then I realized, this is what grief wants. It wants to be moved, it wants to be moved, shaken, move about, so that it can soften, so the rigidity can kind of loosen. And that allowed me to breathe. I was like, this is how I need to do this. So I realized this is how... But again, you know, we’re all different.
HANNAH: Yeah, I feel like the hardness, the way... I don't know if I've ever heard someone describe it the way you did, but it totally makes sense to me about softening it, right? Because I still remember, especially in the early days, months and weeks, or days, weeks and months, like I was so stiff. It was like almost as if I was trying to keep myself together. Like I felt like I was about to shatter. And so in order to not completely shatter, I had to hold myself really tight. And to like when I went to my friend's memorial service, it was just like every muscle in my body was like clenching. I was so, so rigid. Because it can be scary to let go.
Yeah, so I'd love to hear more about the breathwork too, because it's like we're holding back a tsunami. And it can be scary to let go of that tsunami, right? Because we don't know what's going to come out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know, does it let it out? I'm totally using metaphors here. But does it let it out like slowly? Or is it like floodgates open? Or, I don’t know what was your experience with that?
SILVIA: So I've learned that it's scary, exactly what you said. It's so scary to go down there, to go so deep into grief and really feel it. And that's why many people just suppress it, avoid it, they make themselves busy.
What happened for me is, when she passed away, I had to travel back to Slovakia, came back home after a week, and I was sitting in the garden, and my inner voice just said, you better feel this. And I don't know, you can call it intuition, your higher self, whatever. But I heard that voice, you better feel this.
And I knew that I'm not going to escape this, and I don't want to. So, I wasn't moving my body right at the beginning. It took me three months to just sit here with that discomfort and the heavy feeling, the rigidity and depression. After three months, I started to move because of the voice. It was so loud, and I was like, okay, I'm sitting with it. What do I do?
And then I started doing the breath work. So, with breath work, the thing is, when you lie down, and you obviously, you know, you trust a facilitator, what happens is you start the breath, and then you go into that beautiful rhythm when your stomach kind of expands, it rises, then you draw the breath into your chest, and you breathe out through your mouth. Your mouth is open for 40 minutes, slightly, so it's a three breaths in, one breath out, with your mouth open.
So, when you lie down, you get into that rhythm, you're breathing through your mouth, your thinking mind, your busy mind, your easy mind shuts down. It's... you enter in completely different consciousness, so your brain starts to relax, and all you're left with is your breath, and you're just feeling the rhythm. And when you enter that state, you have no other choice than feel your grief.
I'll be so honest with you. But the thing is, you don't say anything. You just lie there. And as you're breathing, the grief starts to... it starts to move, and move, and pulsate, and I don't know, that's just how it feels for me. And the more you breathe into your stomach, the more your belly rises, because, you know, for women, we hold a lot of grief in our belly, you know, area.
So, you're pumping the breath in through your belly. So, you're pushing this grief into your chest, out through the mouth. So, what happens then? The influx of energy starts to build, and then your release is, you can, you probably will be crying. Some people laugh, some people want to shake and move their body. It's a powerful release. I'm not saying everything comes out, you just have to trust your body, but something will happen, something will shift, something will soften. So, your grief, if we're working specifically with grief, it will soften. There's no way it's going to stay rigid.
HANNAH: Totally makes sense to me that it would do that. When I think back to when my grief was really hard and rigid, I don't think I ever said, listen to my breath. Because I didn't have the guidance, like no one told me to do that, like I had a talk therapist, like that deals with one tiny facet, right? But I feel like I need to look at all 100,000 facets, but instead I looked at one. So I, looking back, I wish I had someone to do breath work with me, someone to do grief massage, which I learned about only recently. I'm like, well, of course that should exist. Oh my gosh. You know, tapping, like, I need all the things, right? But people need more than just talk therapy. Like, that's not enough. I feel like it might soften a little bit, a little bit maybe, but like, that's just one part of you, you know?
SILVIA: That's right.
HANNAH: Like maybe, I even feel like I could talk better after doing the breath work. So like, breath work and then talk therapy or something.
SILVIA: That's right. It just, yeah, it just opens something else for you when you do it. It helps you emotionally, but it just cleanses the...Because you know, when you're in grief, you're grieving, the parts of the brain, like here, the prefrontal cortex is shut down, because you're almost like in a survival. It feels to me like you're clenched, you know, like you're in like that depressive kind of very sad despair, that kind of state. So, your whole nervous system is like down regulated. You know, you're shutting people off sometimes.
When you do breath work, this part of the brain cleanses, it cleanses the heaviness, the fog, and that's why you can then look at things a little bit different. You can process your grief much better when you have a clarity here. Yeah, like you said, I wish we were all a bit taught more about grief. That we actually do have circuits in the brain for grief. You know, like we can process it, it's just we have to find ways how to do it. And yeah, for me, it felt like I had no creative thinking mind. I don't know how it was for you, but for me, certainly the first three months, I couldn't create anything.
HANNAH: Oh, heck no.
SILVIA: I couldn't process anything. I was just not in the right place. So for me, that's why I said, I think the prefrontal cortex is not functioning properly.
HANNAH: Yeah, because you're in survival mode, like you said, like almost like in the fetal position.
SILVIA: Yeah. Yeah. So doing things like breath work or even like yoga or anything, anything that works with the body, I would say. But also talking is great. Talking is great, you know. You have to talk about it, right? To process it. But like you said, it's just that one part.
HANNAH: I'd love to hear about tapping, then. So how does that work, and how do you use it?
SILVIA: Yeah, so tapping is basically, I don't know if you've tried tapping before, but you tap on these meridian points on the bodies. And so it's like the combination of Chinese medicine and the modern psychology. And so when you do the tapping, it's all about, you know, like when you're suppressing your feelings.
HANNAH: Oh, yeah. [laughs]
SILVIA: You just go, nah, not, I haven't got time for this right now. Those feelings, those emotions, they become stuck. Because our emotions, they need to move. Emotion is, what they call it, it's emotion. It's supposed to move. But when your feelings, when you grieve, and you're like, nah, I don't want to do that, you're suppressing the natural process.
Because emotion has to run through your body, and it takes 90 seconds for the whole circle. So, grief comes, it takes 90 seconds to go through your body, and then it stops. But we are the ones who bring the emotion back up. We are the ones who then force the emotion to come back again and again. So, when you suppress the grief, when you're like, nah, too hard, too painful, the emotion gets stuck in your nervous system, in your belly, in your chest, wherever you're holding it, we all hold grief, different parts of our bodies.
So, when you then do tapping, what you're doing, you're actually acknowledging your grief. You're saying, hey, I see you, I feel you, it's okay, this is really painful, but I'm going to stay here. Because, again, grief wants to be witnessed by you. It wants to be heard. That's all. And felt. That's all you want.
And that's how the tapping works. So, the tapping is for you to acknowledge. It's for you to acknowledge, but also, it releases the toxins, it releases the cortisol. Because when you really wound up, when you're really upset, your body will release a lot of cortisol. So, by tapping, you're acknowledging what you're feeling, but at the same time, you're helping your nervous system to calm down. You're helping your brain, or the brain helps you, because you're just stimulating the brain.
So, the brain releases the cortisol and adrenaline, or lowers it, not releases it, lowers it, so that you can manage your grief. So, you can manage your grief through tapping, through breath. Breath work is more somatic. Where you leave the body to do it. Yeah. So, tapping, it's also somatic, because you touch, you're doing the touch, so you're kind of touching these points on the body. But it's a beautiful, beautiful technique. And the release, it's just amazing. It's so good, so good to feel, you know, like, you go, okay.
HANNAH: That is beautiful. I love the word acknowledge, because I do think we ignore, ignore, ignore, suppress, suppress, suppress, or not everyone does that, but a lot of people do, and I sure did. And yeah, that just makes it so much harder. Would you take me through a brief tapping exercise?
SILVIA: Yeah. So we normally sit, sitting up. And we're working with grief. So what I would really say is, you know, if you can, you can either close down your eyes or you don't want, you don't have to, but whereabouts do you tend to hold your grief in your body?
HANNAH: Gosh, I don't know. I know I, maybe my chest, I definitely hold tension in my chest. I don't know if that means the grief is there, but I'll say my chest.
SILVIA: Yeah. There could be a lot of different emotions, but yeah. So I want you to give a number to your grief. How intense is it for you right now? On a scale from 0 to 10, what would you say? 10 being like, it really, it's really intense. It's really hard.
HANNAH: In this very moment, it's probably like a 2 in intensity.
SILVIA: Yeah. All right. So what we then do when sometimes people go, obviously because, yeah, we're fine now, but normally, yeah, like people would go, oh, it's like 8 or 9. So it can be really high for some people. So what we then do is we start tapping, and we're tapping on this point here. It's called karate chop.
HANNAH: On the side of the hand.
SILVIA: Yeah. And it doesn't matter which hand. And what we're doing, we, as you're tapping there, the signal enters the part of the brain that controls fight or flight. So we're processing now your grief and letting the brain know that we can do this. We're safe. So. Okay. So we can do really quick tapping, and you can repeat after me out loud if you want to, or just in your mind. It doesn't matter. It works anyway. So here's what we say.
SILVIA: Even though.
HANNAH: Even though.
SILVIA: I feel my grief so strongly.
HANNAH: I feel my grief so strongly.
SILVIA: I truly and deeply love and accept myself.
HANNAH: I truly and deeply love and accept myself.
SILVIA: Even though this is so hard.
HANNAH: Even though this is so hard.
SILVIA: I truly and deeply love and accept myself anyway.
HANNAH: I truly and deeply love and accept myself anyway.
SILVIA: I can feel my grief, and it's so, so, so rigid in my body.
HANNAH: I can feel my grief and it's so, so rigid in my body.
SILVIA: I truly and deeply love and accept myself.
HANNAH: I truly and deeply love and accept myself.
SILVIA: I hold my grief in my chest.
HANNAH: I hold my grief in my chest.
SILVIA: And it's really, really, it's really powerful, very strong.
HANNAH: And it's really powerful, very strong.
SILVIA: It's very hard and rigid.
HANNAH: It's very hard and rigid.
SILVIA: But I truly and deeply love and accept myself.
HANNAH: But I truly and deeply love and accept myself.
SILVIA: I am completely safe to feel my grief.
HANNAH: I am completely safe to feel my grief.
SILVIA: I am safe to feel it.
HANNAH: I am safe to feel it.
SILVIA: I just want to breathe deeply.
HANNAH: I just want to breathe deeply. Do you usually do tapping and then the breath, or vice versa, or is it just kind of you feel whatever?
SILVIA: So it's what the person also prefers. Sometimes I do, for corporates actually, corporate businesses, I do like half an hour, we do tapping, half an hour breath work. They're both equally powerful. Yeah, you could try both or just one at a time. Yeah, it's all really good, really good to practice. Sometimes you just have to kind of be ready for, you know, for the big emotions, because that's what people are scared of.
Oh, yeah. I have so many women coming to my workshop, and they will tell me, you know, I'm not scared of breathwork or tapping. I'm scared of what will come out. And sometimes they'll be like, I've done it, but not for me. And that's okay, you know. It's okay whenever you're ready. Sometimes we're not. You can be sure that emotions will come up in both modalities, both of these. But in breathwork, it's...Because it's so... You're just lying there in a completely different state. It just comes out of you. So it can be very intense. But ultimately, you're going to feel empowered and softer and less tense. So, you know, that hour of discomfort is worth it. That's how you heal.
HANNAH: Right. Yeah, it's kind of like a short-term versus a long-term. Because in the short-term, it is really scary to face those big emotions. And I can totally relate to what those women were saying. I don't know what's going to come up. What if I realize I need to make huge changes in my life? You know, like, oh gosh, I'm really unhappy. Like, I need to make all these changes. That's a scary thing to face because it is a lot of work. It can be a lot of work to make big changes. But in the long run, ultimately, it's for the best. Ultimately, you'll be happy. Ultimately, you'll deal with your emotions better. But yeah, I'm just kind of thinking back to how I felt. And oh yeah, like that's, it's hard. It's hard to do that.
SILVIA: I know, I know, I know. And I have to kind of, you know, like stop fluffing it up sometimes. Oh, you know, it'll be fine. I mean, I'm not saying I'm fluffing it up, but sometimes I'm cautious of how I say, you know, things about what the breath work does because I know some people are scared. And but then I'm like, just come and, you know, it's going to help you.
I said a long term, long run, it will help you. You're going to even feel the difference in the first session. And you go, I want to feel that. Like, it's not pretty sometimes, but I don't know. You just have to be sometimes in this little bit of discomfort. Like, you have to go through it. And I wish I knew this, you know, like 10 years ago.
HANNAH: Me too. All I did was watch. I was for sure suppressing, suppressing, suppressing, ignoring, ignoring, ignoring. And I would just watch. Like, I had like an iPad. It was a Kindle Fire, technically. But I would just carry it around and watch Netflix on the toilet, in the shower. Like, as I went to bed, as I woke up, as I made breakfast, as I ate breakfast. Like, there was not a second that I was home that I wasn't using that as a distraction device.
And sometimes, like, distraction can be necessary in the short term. But I did that for, like, two to three years. So, to the point where, like, I knew I wanted to stop, but I didn't know how. Because the quiet of Netflix being off was absolutely terrifying. And I didn't have anyone to guide me, really. I just had a therapist being like, oh, I understand that's really hard.
Yes, I know that's really hard. Which, again, is important, but that's all I had. So I couldn't face the quiet. So having someone like you to guide them through that, gosh, I would have loved that. I wish I had that, you know?
SILVIA: And like you said, when you're that quiet, and when you do breath work, or any of these modalities, the quiet, you know, it will come up. It will come up, but then again, you have the facilitator there to guide you and hold you, you know? And the spaces that I, you know, like the workshop that I run, I always... there's so much love and compassion, and yeah, it has to be there. From me, you know, I hold people in compassion.
And yeah, it's important for them to know that I am here for them. I am here and they are safe to let go and release. Even though it's a group and they don't know each other, these women, some of them do, it's amazing how when they enter the room, there is a sense of safety and trust. And they do let go, which is really amazing in a group. And it doesn't matter what their release is like, whether they are crying, screaming, no one cares.
You are there for your own experience. And I am there kind of going round, even just that gentle touch, like rounding them, giving them a little bit of that reiki energy, just so they know I am here. It's really important.
HANNAH: That sounds so powerful. The idea of being in a group, and doing that in a group, grief groups I have been to, you still had to be really rigid, right? Because the only thing that was really socially acceptable was for tears to quietly streak down your face. You can't scream. I didn't feel like I was allowed to scream, you know? So if I was in a space like you described, and it's like scream, cry, everything is acceptable.
SILVIA: If the release is coming, just let it go. And then I have a room. I'm not kidding. A room of women crying, laughing, shaking their bodies. And that's totally good. It's totally fine. That's why they're there for to soften that grief. In whatever way you want to soften, come out. That's how they do it. And what comes out of your body, will never make you sick. The things that we hold on to, the emotions we hold on to, that's what makes us sick. So, when you manage to let it go, and you let your body to release, it's good.
Crying is good. Yelling is good. Let the grief express itself, because then it will not make you sick. It will just be softer and softer, and you'll be managing it beautifully. Of course, there will be, you know, I'm sure you have times when it like, here it comes again, and two, three days you're like... And I'm like that too. It comes and goes. But I welcome it now. I'm like, okay, it's time.
Time to feel it. Time to bow my eyes. Time to do breath.
And then it goes again.