Grief does not stay in the chest, where we expect it. It moves. It settles in the jaw, the hips, the place between the shoulder blades.

This is not metaphor. It is physiology. The body holds what we have lost in the same way it holds everything else: in tissue, in posture, in the way we breathe or fail to breathe. Grief is not only an emotional experience. It is a physical one. And for many women, it is the body that carries grief the longest, even after the mind has begun to find its way through.

We are not always taught this. We are taught to grieve upward, to process, to cry, to speak to someone, to move toward acceptance. These things matter. But beneath them, below the words and the crying and the slow re-engagement with life, the body is still holding. Still contracted around the loss. Still waiting for someone to acknowledge that it, too, has been through something.

There are things grief does to the body that are worth naming. Breathing becomes shallower: the diaphragm tightens, the ribs guard, the breath stops reaching all the way down. The hips, which hold so much of our emotional weight, stiffen. The jaw clenches through the night. The upper back curls forward, as though the body is trying to protect something at its centre that is no longer there to protect.

None of this means anything is wrong with you. It means your body is doing what bodies do: it is trying to hold you together in the only language it has.

What gentle movement can offer in grief is not a solution. Grief does not need solving. It needs room. And what a thoughtful practice can do is create room, in the breath, in the hips, in the places where the loss has settled and calcified. Not to push through, but to soften around. To let the tissue release what it has been gripping, slowly, at whatever pace the body allows.

This is not about sweating grief out. It is not about distraction, or endorphins, or any of the functional reasons we give movement in difficult seasons. It is about the body being accompanied. About not leaving it alone with what it is carrying.

After loss, the body often feels foreign. Strange and heavy and not quite your own. Returning to it, gently, without demand, is an act of care for yourself that goes beyond fitness or form. It is the act of staying present with what has changed. Of not abandoning the physical self because the emotional self is in too much pain to tend to it.

You do not have to be ready. You only have to be willing to begin, very slowly, to breathe again.

<i> When you are ready, the practice will be here. There is no rush. </i>