Running Your First Grief Session

This is the session you’ve been preparing for. You have the method. You have the space. Now you do the work.

Before You Start

Pick one loss from your prioritized inventory. Not the heaviest. Something with moderate weight. Enough that you feel it when you think about it, but not so much that it threatens to overwhelm you. You’re building capacity. The heavier losses will come later, after you’ve gotten some practice.

Sit in your prepared space. Phone off. Door closed. Tissues nearby. Water within reach. Take a few breaths. You don’t need to be calm. You just need to be willing.

The Session

Go to the first moment you learned of the loss. The exact moment. Where were you? What time of day was it? Who told you, or how did you find out? What were you doing right before?

Be specific. Don’t summarize. Locate yourself in the moment. Feel the floor under your feet. See the light in the room. Hear the words that were said. Let yourself be there.

Now move through what happened. Moment by moment. What did you do first? What did you say? What were you feeling? What happened in your body? What were you thinking?

Don’t skip the hard parts. When you hit a wave of emotion, stay with it. Let it come. Breathe through it if you need to, but don’t pull out. The wave will peak and it will pass. Every wave that peaks and passes is weight leaving your system.

Go all the way through the incident. Past the initial news, through whatever happened next: the phone calls, the arrangements, the conversations, the silence. All of it.

Second Pass

Now go back to the beginning. Do it again.

This time, you’ll notice things you missed. A detail. An expression. Something someone said that you forgot about. The second pass always has more texture than the first because your system is starting to open the file more fully.

The emotion may be just as intense, or it may have shifted. Both are fine. You’re not trying to make it less. You’re letting the recording play.

Keep Going

Third pass. Fourth. More detail each time. Slower.

At some point (maybe the third pass, maybe the sixth) something changes. The grip loosens. The same memory that felt like a vice on your chest starts to feel like something you’re holding rather than something holding you. You might notice a moment where you can breathe more deeply. Where the tears shift from anguished to something softer. Where a memory comes back that makes you almost smile.

Don’t force this. Don’t decide it’s happened because you want to be done. It happens when it happens. Your job is to keep going through the material until long after you think you’re finished.

When You’re Done

Stop when the loss feels genuinely different. Not numb. Different. Lighter. Like something let go. If you’re not sure, do one more pass. If you’re sure, you can stop.

You’re going to be tired. Possibly very tired. That’s normal. You just did heavy work. Drink water. Rest. Don’t immediately jump into something demanding. Give your system time.

Today’s Practice

This is the practice. The full session. Repeated re-experiencing on one loss until the weight releases. Set a 90-minute timer as an upper bound, not a target.

Go back to the first moment. Feel what you didn’t let yourself feel. Do it again. And again. Let the weight release. Stop when the loss feels genuinely different. Pushing past that point to “make sure” or “do one more pass to be safe” is past-the-shift, and past-the-shift can reverse what you just got.

Don’t stop mid-wave. If a release is actively peaking, let it finish before you stop. But don’t grind for the sake of finishing the clock either. The release is the endpoint, not the timer.

You can do this. You’ve already done harder things in this work. This one just asks you to feel what’s been waiting to be felt.

When the session is over, write a few notes about what happened. Not a detailed journal. Just enough to track the work. What loss you worked on. How many passes you did. What shifted. Whether it needs more. These notes become invaluable as you work through your full inventory.

And be kind to yourself tonight. You went somewhere that takes courage to go. Whatever happened in that session (tears, anger, silence, confusion, relief) it was right. There’s no wrong way to grieve as long as you’re willing to feel what comes.