We Need New Models for How to Grieve

Grief is not just sorrow—it is transformation. It is the full-body, soul-deep experience of loss or change that brings us face-to-face with the parts of ourselves we didn’t know were waiting to be met. For me, grief is not simply an emotional reaction. It is the internal earthquake that shakes the foundations of who we are, carving out space for something new. Grief is time stretching itself out, ushering us through the process of letting go—of who we were, of what we hoped would be, of the illusions we once held tightly. It is painful, yes. But it is also powerful. And if we allow it, grief can be the very path that leads us back to wholeness.

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These days, grief is ever-present, yet rarely is it acknowledged. The speed of modern life, the demand for productivity, and the pressures of performance have pushed grief into the margins. It’s as if mourning has become an inconvenience. In a society obsessed with moving on, we’ve collectively lost the ability—and the permission—to sit with sorrow.

Across history, grief has long been honored as a sacred rite of passage. In ancient traditions, it was seen not as something to fix, but something to feel. In Hindu and Vedic rituals, entire communities participate in prayers and mantras over the course of days, sometimes weeks. Among many Indigenous tribes in the Americas, grief is a communal ceremony—marked by crying, singing, storytelling, and symbols of transformation like cutting hair. These are not just symbolic acts; they are energetic portals—ways of helping the soul move through the liminal space between loss and rebirth.

Even in the Abrahamic faiths, grieving has a timeline and a structure. Jewish mourning rituals like shiva offer both the mourner and the community a rhythm of presence and pause. Islam emphasizes prayer and remembrance over the course of several days. These traditions teach us that grief isn’t meant to be private or rushed—it is meant to be honored.

But when cultures lose these rituals, when grief becomes invisible, the consequences are devastating. Take Japan, where the erosion of Shinto and Buddhist death rituals has coincided with an epidemic of overwork and suicide. The body knows when grief is not expressed. The spirit remembers what the mind tries to forget.

The collective trauma of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic taught us this. Post 2020, we are grieving more than just people—we are grieving the lives we thought we would have. The pandemic unearthed a collective ache that had long been buried beneath deadlines, distractions, and digital noise. Add to that the daily toll of burnout, racial trauma, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, and we are left with a deep, unspoken suffering that simmers just beneath the surface. We are trying to keep up in a world that won’t slow down, even as our hearts are breaking.

Millennials and Gen Z are feeling this most acutely. The quiet quitting era isn’t about laziness—it’s about spiritual fatigue. It’s about people choosing their peace over performing in a system that doesn’t see their humanity. The workplace, once a place for identity and community, has become another site of disconnection. In this disconnection, our grief festers, and grief that stagnates can manifest into illness.

Read More: Let’s Talk About Our Grief

When we suppress our grief, we store it—deep in the nervous system, in our cells, in the body’s memory. Studies have shown that chronic, unresolved grief weakens the immune system, disrupts sleep and digestion, and contributes to long-term mental health conditions. In extreme cases, grief can even break the heart physically—takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” is real. The costs of ignoring grief are far too high.

But there is another way. We need new models for how to grieve—ones rooted not in isolation or shame, but in community, ritual, and reverence. We can also choose to meet ourselves in grief. We can schedule time to sit with sorrow. We can light candles, play music that speaks to our soul, cry, scream, journal, move our bodies, and let it out. We can intentionally create sacred containers to grieve—not as something to check off a list, but as an act of devotion. And while grief is deeply personal, it doesn’t have to be solitary. Sometimes the most powerful way to include community is by allowing ourselves to be seen in our sadness—by gently naming that hard things have happened. When we share even fragments of our truth, we open up new pathways in the brain and heart that make connection possible. We begin to build a new kind of intimacy—one that says, “I’ve been through something too.” Whether in trusted friendships, support circles, or spaces specifically designed for those navigating loss, community offers us mirrors and medicine. When we do this, we shift from being victims of loss to becoming stewards of our healing.

Acknowledging and releasing our grief can help us return to nature. We can let the wind touch our skin, the earth ground our steps, and the sun remind us that life goes on. We can reintegrate, knowing that we’ve moved energy and honored our truth.

This is how we begin again. This is how we transmute pain and confusion into power.

Now more than ever, we need to reclaim grief as a sacred practice. We must remember what our ancestors knew: that grief is not separate from life, but woven into its fabric. We are being called back to our humanity—to our hearts, to our softness, to our capacity for compassion.

To honor grief is to honor the complexity of what it means to be alive. To cultivate a reverence for our human experience and surrender to the guaranteed oscillation between all the emotions that one can experience while on earth, even joy, not just individually, but collectively.

Grief is not the end of the story. It is the threshold. On the other side of that threshold is freedom.

Excerpted from Living in Wisdom by Devi Brown. Copyright © 2025 by Devi Brown. Reprinted with permission of Balance Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.