The Caring Death Doula
In a world that rushes past death and ignores grief, The Caring Death Doula stops to listen with tenderness, truth, and time. Whether you are grieving right now or here to learn how to help those grieving, join your host, Frances, a certified grief educator on the journey of finding connection, conversations, and comfort. Let's make grief and death a natural part of our conversations.
The Caring Death Doula
Regulating Grief: Simple Body Practices That Soothe A Stressed Nervous System
In today’s episode, we explore how grief shows up in the body and why physical symptoms like tightness, shallow breathing and brain fog are normal responses to loss. We guide simple practices—butterfly hug, shaking, and box breathing—to help the nervous system find safety.
• recap of grief’s physical signs and why they occur
• reassurance that symptoms are normal, not a flaw needing to be fixed
• butterfly hug for grounding
• shaking to discharge stress and release tension
• box breathing to steady breath and heart rate
• tips for using practices at home, work, or anywhere
• encouragement to listen to the body and build trust
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Hello and welcome back to the Caring Death Doula. Thank you for joining me today. In our last episode, we went through how grief is not just emotional. How when we don't deal with grief, when we put it aside, when we force it down, when we don't face it, we don't accept or acknowledge it. Not that it's our fault. Often we just can't handle it right now. You know, oftentimes that first year you are numb, you are in a fog, and you can't deal with it. So grief is not just emotional, it's what we talked about in the last episode. It's physical. And we went through the physical symptoms. There's the fight or flight where you have the different racing heart, racing thoughts, sleeping difficulties. And there's the freeze or shutdown where you feel numb, disconnected, brain fog, loss of joy, loss of motivation, and there's tension and pain. There's tightness in your chest and your throat. And you have that, I'm carrying the world, or I'm carrying my family. That weight on your shoulders or neck can make them tight and aching, digestive issues, headaches, jaw tension. This is all can be from grief. And then there's the changes in your breathing. Remember, we talked about that you could be shallow, you could be irregular breathing. Sometimes you even hold it. You might be doing a lot of sighing because that's a natural way for your body to try to attempt to regulate. You might do those deep sighs just out of the blue, any time of your day, in the middle of conversations, in the middle of doing anything. And there may be that feeling, the loss of the feeling of feeling safe, safe in in your familiar environments and also unsafe in your body. And we talked about how this is all this is all normal. This is all okay. There's nothing wrong with you. There's no need to panic or be afraid that there is something wrong with you. This is all natural to the process of grief because remember, grief is not emotional, not just emotional. It's physical, and we don't talk about that. We don't listen to our bodies. We don't know how to listen to our own bodies. We don't know how to support others in these symptoms. And we can sometimes be harsh with that lack of understanding. So I want to. There's nothing wrong with me. What I want to talk about today, give you a few more ways that you can just begin that healing journey. Ways to help your body regulate your nervous system. And it can start today. And these are practices that you can do anytime. So please continue to do them, add to them. Learn to listen to your bodies. Now put your hands, crisscross your hands on your chest. And this is called the butterfly hug. And you're just gonna pat each hand, and you're just gonna breathe. You can close your eyes. This can also be done with the bare feet adding to it, the bare feet in the ground. But even if you're just at your desk at the office, or just anywhere, you just need to take a moment, get away if you need to, slip into the bathroom, and just do the butterfly where you just pat yourself and just breathe. Now, another thing you can do is you can do the box, the box breathing. Okay, so just kind of get comfortable, kind of loosely shake your body, your arms. Remember, shaking is also a very beneficial thing that you can just do in you know 30 seconds or less. Just bounce, bounce on your on your toes, just bounce into your heels, just bounce. Shaking. You can even keep your your feet flat on the ground and just kind of wiggle and shake. Shake your hands, your arms, your body, whatever feels comfortable, just shake the hips, shake your legs. So get a little bit loose, get get comfortable, and then let's do some box breathing. Now, this is when you're going to breathe for a count, four or five count, then you're gonna hold it for four or five, and then you're gonna release it for four or five count, and then you're going to hold it again at the bottom, and then you're gonna inhale. So I'm gonna count and we're gonna do this a few times, and let's just see how you if you can feel better. Okay, so let's breathe. Inhale, two, three, four, hold, epic, two, three, pick, four, epic, release through your mouth, two, epic three, epic four, epic, and hold, epic two, three, epic, four, pick. Inhale, two, epic three, epic four, epic, hold, epic two, epic three, epic, four, release, two, three, four, epic, hold, epic, two, epic three, four, epic. How do you feel? Don't you feel better? So these are just some ways that I'm hoping you'll you'll try and you'll you'll listen to your body. Start learning to listen to your body. Try these different practices, see what works for you, see when they work for you. They'll work in different situations, but they they should always work. Because you're taking a moment to pause, to just tune into your body, to be in the present, to just relax, to turn everything off, to tune everything out, and just be in yourself, be in your in the moment, be in your body, healing, resetting, relaxing. I hope this helped. I am the caring death dealer, and I am here for you.