16. What Is Mourning? Why Is Grief Essential for Healing and Learning?
Short Answer
Mourning is not only what happens when someone dies or when a relationship ends. Mourning is also a daily practice: learning to welcome pain, trust it, and allow it to do the work it is already there to do.
For me, mourning is a doorway to healing. It is not about enjoying pain or becoming passive. It is about stopping the fight with reality and making space for what is already here. Paradoxically, the more room I give to mourning, the more available I become for acceptance, creativity, connection, and celebration.
For many years, I experienced pain as something to fix, avoid, or get rid of. Through Nonviolent Communication (NVC), my relationship with pain gradually changed. Today, I experience mourning as the human capacity to welcome pain and digest an unpleasant change in reality—whether it is the end of a relationship or simply missing a train and arriving late for work.
Rather than seeing mourning as something negative, I increasingly experience it as a natural and essential movement of life. Mourning is how I digest painful realities and learn from them. When sadness, disappointment, grief, fear, or helplessness are welcomed with awareness, empathy, and compassion, something often begins to move. The pain softens, reality becomes easier to accept, and new creativity and possibilities gradually emerge.
More Personal Answer
When people hear the word “mourning,” they often associate it with death, funerals, or the loss of someone we love.
In Nonviolent Communication (NVC), I experience mourning as something much broader.
For me, mourning is part of the natural movement of life.
I see mourning as the human capacity to welcome pain and digest an unpleasant change.
Over the years, I have come to see mourning not as something “negative” that should be avoided, but as one of the most essential movements of being alive.
When I pay attention to my body, I notice that pleasant feelings often carry a quality of expansion:
warmth, openness, excitement, relaxation, flow.
And unpleasant feelings often carry a quality of contraction: sadness, fear, disappointment, insecurity, grief, heaviness, irritation.
I experience mourning and celebration almost as two complementary movements of life. Mourning is a contraction; celebration is an expansion.
Just as the lungs continuously breathe in and out, and the heart continually contracts and expands, life seems to move in these two directions as well.
Celebration cannot exist without mourning.
Rather than seeing pain as something wrong that needs to be fixed or gotten rid of, I increasingly experience it as part of life’s intelligence.
Pain—and the contraction that comes with it—is how my body is already trying to care for life and support healing.
Mourning as Welcoming Unpleasant Feelings
One of the simplest ways I describe mourning is: welcoming unpleasant sensations and feelings.
For many years, when unpleasant feelings appeared in me, I would often immediately go into my head, thinking: “What’s wrong?” “How do I fix this?” “How do I get rid of this feeling?”
And I notice that this often created a second layer of suffering.
The sadness itself was painful. But then came: “I shouldn’t feel this.” “Why am I like this?” “I need to solve this immediately.” “I am failing”.
Over time, I began experimenting with a different relationship to pain. Instead of trying to fix or eliminate the feeling, I like to begin by simply meeting it.
Almost like saying: “Feeling (pain), there is room for you to be.”
This does not mean I enjoy pain. It does not mean I become passive. It simply means that I stop fighting the reality that the feeling is already here.
Learning to Trust the Body
One of the biggest shifts in my life has been gradually developing more trust in the body. I increasingly experience feelings and sensations as part of the body’s intelligence.
Just as physical pain may tell me that something needs a careful attention, emotional pain may also be guiding me toward deeper awareness, care, honesty, or unmet needs.
I increasingly experience pain as a movement trying to reconnect me with something important.
This is one of the reasons I connect mourning so deeply with empathic listening: I notice that when people try to “fix” me too quickly while I am in pain, something in me often tightens, resists, or disconnects.
And I notice the same thing internally: If I try to fix myself too quickly, something in me also resists, tightens, and disconnects. When I immediately try to repair, suppress, analyze, or control my feelings, I often move further away from myself.
Sometimes what helps me most is simply presence.
Naming what is here.
Welcoming it.
Allowing it space.
And I repeatedly notice something fascinating: when sensations or feelings are welcomed, they begin to move.
Nothing in the body is static.
A feeling may intensify, soften, transform, move into tears, trembling, anger, silence, relief, or spaciousness.
A feeling is an emotion. It is in motion. It is alive. A feeling cannot remain exactly the same for more than about 10–15 seconds before it begins to shift—even if only in a tiny, almost imperceptible way.
When what is alive in me is deeply welcomed, I often experience the body naturally entering a healing movement.
So when an unpleasant feeling or sensation arises, I like to breathe while welcoming it with the message: “Feeling, there is room for you to be.”
And then to keep breathing, allowing the feeling to do the work it is already there to do.
This movement is what I call “healing,” and for me, it may be the most meaningful movement I search for in anything I do. I experience it as a natural movement connected to life itself.
It is not a movement I “do,” but rather it happens to me.
And for me, this movement carries the intelligence of nature, the body, life, God — or whatever name each person prefers to give it.
Mourning is a door to healing.
Mourning as Digesting an Unpleasant Change in Reality
Another way I sometimes describe mourning is: mourning is the time needed to digest an unpleasant change.
For example, someone says “no” to me, a cake I bake burns, a relationship ends, I get sick, a vacation plan is canceled, I fail an audition, or life unfolds differently from what I imagined.
I often experience children as naturally skilled at mourning. A child may cry intensely because a toy broke. And a few minutes later, they may already be laughing and exploring something new.
The emotion moved.
Many adults, including myself, struggle more with mourning because we learned to resist emotions, fear them, judge them, or disconnect from them.
And I notice that the more I argue with reality internally: “He shouldn’t have left me.” “They shouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.” “I should already forgive her” “I shouldn’t feel sad.” – the more suffering tends to increase.
As Byron Katie says: suffering is arguing with reality.
For me, mourning and suffering are not the same thing.
Suffering carries resistance, inner conflict, judgment, or mental struggle. It is a bitter pain, filled with resentment.
Mourning, on the other hand, is a sweet, self-connected pain. It is a pain that connects me to reality.
Painful, yes. But also intimate and alive.
Mourning and Conflict
In conflicts, I often notice that mourning is missing.
Instead of mourning disappointment, hurt, fear, helplessness, or unmet needs, human beings often move into blame, demands, criticism, or withdrawal.
For example: “You never listen!” “You ruined everything!” “You don’t care about me!”
When I listen underneath these reactions, I often imagine there may be mourning around: connection, trust, closeness, understanding, support, care, or shared dreams.
And when mourning becomes possible, something often softens. Not necessarily the situation itself.
But my relationship to reality begins to change.
And from there, new creativity and dialogue sometimes become possible.
The Mourning Process
The mourning is a movement between layers of feelings and consciousness. I may move through:
- denial or numbness,
- anger,
- disappointment,
- despair, hopelessness, powerlessness or depression
- sadness,
- acceptance,
- hope and new creativity (Movement towards abundance)
And I move through these layers in a non-linear way. I may feel anger, then sadness, then numbness, then despair. Or I may return to anger again.
The key in the mourning process is to meet myself, moment by moment, in whatever layer I am experiencing right now.
For this reason, I often like to welcome even my “jackals”: the blame, the frustration, the unreasonable thoughts, the hate, the irritation, the despair.
Not because I want to act violently. But because authenticity often creates movement.
The more I accept and allow myself to experience what is here, the faster the mourning process unfolds.
Mourning Requires Space
One of the hardest layers in mourning for me is often powerlessness or despair. And I notice that many people become uncomfortable around these emotions.
They immediately want to create hope, solutions, positivity, or movement.
But I increasingly experience that some forms of healing require accompaniment and space rather than fixing.
Sometimes what supports me most is: silent presence, empathy, listening, gentle reformulation, or simply someone staying with me without trying to change my experience. Just: “I’m here.”
One of the deepest mourning processes I experienced happened after a painful breakup. While beint with the presence of a friend, I found myself repeatedly remembering and sharing beautiful moments from the relationship: cooking together, walking in nature, moments of intimacy and tenderness.
The memories brought heavy waves of tears.
And part of me almost judged myself for “making myself suffer” by deliberately thinking about all those beautiful moments.
Yet at the same time, I could feel that something important was moving inside me.
The pain was being digested.
Life was reorganizing itself.
And after four days, I experienced a surprising sense of completion and peace. It was the fastest mourning process I have experienced so far.
I deeply believe that human beings are not meant to mourn alone, but in the company of other human beings.
Meeting pain alone is simply too difficult.
This is one reason why so many cultures have developed ways of mourning together—in families, communities, and rituals
Acceptance and new creativity as the Fruit of Mourning
I become concerned when I hear sentences such as: “You should accept her.” “Come on, it’s time to accept that you lost him and move on.” “Can’t you accept me as I am?”
As I see it, acceptance is not something we do. It is not an active choice I can make, but something that happens to me. It is the result of a mourning process.
It is a very special spiritual experience in which I am no longer fighting reality. I am with reality as it is.
I no longer experience acceptance as something I should force.
For me, acceptance is often something that slowly emerges after reality has been met again and again with awareness, honesty, empathy, and time.
And acceptance does not mean: “I like this.” “I approve.” “This doesn’t matter.”
For me, acceptance means: I stop fighting the fact that this is what is happening.
And strangely, when that inner fight softens, new life often begins to emerge:
new creativity, new movement, new connection, new possibilities.
Mourning as a Daily Practice
I no longer see mourning as something reserved only for dramatic life events. I experience it as part of daily life.
I may mourn small daily disappointments just as much as major life events, such as the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship.
I may mourn for example: a painful sentence my partner said to me. The fact that my son left his shoes in the living room. Feeling too tired to complete a piece of work. Not having enough time to say goodbye. Or larger realities such as: the fact that I am aging, loneliness, missed opportunities, or simply the complexity of being human.
For me, mourning increasingly becomes a practice of meeting myself honestly and gently, moment by moment.
Again and again saying: “Feeling, there is room for you to be.”
And paradoxically, I notice that the more space I give to mourning, the more alive celebration also becomes.
Because when I stop fighting the natural contractions of life, I become more available for its expansions as well.
I reconnect with the natural movement of life—like the rhythm of the breath, or the beating of the heart. Expansion and contraction. Celebration and Mourning.