When you start dropping attention into the body, you may discover you’re sitting on a large backlog of grief. Tara Healey knows this firsthand — her first sustained somatic practice at a Vipassana retreat opened ten straight days of crying. Her guidance for this is not to dive endlessly into the grief but to pace it.
“For every 10 minutes of being with grief or a hurt heart or broken heart, give yourself 10 minutes of yummy self-care. So, you’re not just diving down in grief… it’s balanced one to one with self-care.”
The principle is balance. Feeling grief is necessary and the body will move it if given time and space, but immersion without care can overwhelm the nervous system. Pairing each stretch of difficult feeling with an equal stretch of nourishment keeps the process sustainable and gentle.
This sits alongside her broader insistence on choice and timing. You are the wisdom holder of your own body — if you sense you’re not ready to feel something, you can wait six months, two years, or never. Some people carry things their whole life and never need to process them, and Tara trusts each person to know when the time is right.
“You are the wisdom holder of your body.”
Related Concepts
- The body holds emotions whether or not you put attention on them
- Attuning to your heart surfaces unprocessed grief
- Somatic awareness is a key to presence and to the wisdom of emotions
- Feeling nothing is itself somatic data worth exploring
- Body awareness is built in short enjoyable reps, like going to the gym
- The gut points you toward what you want before the mind knows it