Sitting With Loss: Breathing Through What Remains

This guided meditation invites you to gently explore the themes of loss and grief through mindful awareness of the body and breath. With each inhale, you create space for what’s present; with each exhale, you soften into acceptance. Through stillness and subtle movement, you’ll learn how to hold difficult emotions with compassion rather than resistance.

A tender reminder that resilience isn’t about avoiding pain—it’s about staying connected to your breath, your body, and the life that continues to move through you.

Transcript

Then the invitation is to close the eyes.

If it feels safe and comfortable for you to close the eyes and get settled in,

We send the gaze inward because that's where our attention is going to be.

It's going to be on what's going on inside of us physically,

How our breath is moving,

How our mind is dealing with all of this,

And any feelings or emotions that arise along the way.

There's a whole chemistry of things that make up your moment-to-moment experience,

And your practice is the place where you get to explore them.

I would ask you to consider what we call a wise intention for practice,

And an example of that would be to allow yourself to be here in practice today in the kindest,

Most compassionate way that you can.

Coming from a day of activity,

A day of potentially dealing with judgments and deadlines and results,

But here it's just taking the moment as it comes,

Good,

Bad,

Or indifferent,

And working our way through it with a bit of kindness and a bit of patience.

Start to feel your breath moving.

The breath is going to be our initial anchor that we started practice with today.

You can kind of just feel the breath move in,

The breath move out,

And it's if you're lightly holding your attention to this sensation of breathing that's taking place in this moment.

Noticing if the body's feeling a bit restless as you're just starting to transition and shift gears.

Today's practice is going to kind of move us through the theme of loss and grief.

I think that there's a lot of changes happening,

Big moments happening in our lives currently,

And there can be this sense that it's all happening so quick and it's not what we know.

I'm going to invite us with opportunities to explore how that shows up for you.

We like to think of things here in practice as that they're on a continuum,

Right,

Like they're on a sliding scale.

As we begin to work through this theme and this topic of practice today,

Know that you can take as little or as much from that as you'd like,

And that part of your practice will be kind of seeing what you can comfortably hold and sit with today.

Even as the idea of that theme settles in,

Notice the way that reverberates through the breath.

Any pausing,

Any types of sensation that might be responding to that idea.

And as you're feeling the breath move in and move out,

You feel its rhythm,

Right,

The tempo that it's setting for you today.

Each inhale breath creating space.

So,

Imagine as you breathe in that that breath is taking up the space in your body and maybe moving beyond the body,

But it's expanding with each inhale.

Subsequently,

Each exhale becomes overlaid with a sense of acceptance to simply what is in the moment,

What's present here in the moment.

And keeping with this sense of expanding and taking up space with each inhale and each exhale kind of representing a sense of acceptance for the moment.

Invite into your mind a memory or a time in which you kind of can recall experiencing a sense of loss or a sense of grief that you've had to contend with.

And as I kind of alluded to earlier,

It doesn't have to be the worst thing that's ever happened,

But just enough so that you can kind of work through feeling this with the breath and with the body.

Using our thoughts as a tool in this way,

We're trying to really find the balance between the memory and the noticing of how that lands in your breath right now.

Noticing the parts and the experience that might resist or even kind of shy away from allowing this to be here in the present.

Letting the exhale soften that and open you to the acceptance for this being here in this moment.

And allowing these thoughts and sensations to arise in the moment and to meet them with a bit of compassion and friendliness begins to cultivate,

It begin to cultivate space for you.

Noticing that even as you're sitting here with the breath,

There's still a bit of aliveness moving through the body,

Through the mind,

Through the ambient sounds of the room.

Keeping with the same idea,

I ask you to kind of soften your attention from the breath and now begin to move into feeling how these sensations and sensations thoughts and arise in the body as a matter of sensation.

And it's if your attention is like a spotlight that moves down the body,

Checking in with and noticing how you're physically receiving the theme of practice today.

The idea of sitting with a recent loss of some kind or a recent moment or dealing with grief.

Letting your attention move from the crown of the head.

Noticing any sensations you might feel there or the absence of them.

Sensing and feeling the weight of the eyes and their sockets.

Noticing your visual field.

Noticing that the areas of the body where maybe some of these thoughts start to to find space in.

Our eyes is often one of those areas places they can feel heavy.

Same with our jaw.

You might sense or notice tension there that you're holding.

Moving down into the neck and the shoulders.

All the way down into the chest where your heart is.

Where your heart beats.

Feeling the rhythm of your heartbeat.

Any tension there.

Any weight there.

Usually when things change or aren't going our way,

Our heart holds a lot of that.

Can you let your non-judgmental attention just be in the space with your breath?

Breathing into the heart.

Breathing out with the sense of acceptance for the moment and compassion for holding this moment along with the aliveness and the energy of the present.

If the mind is distracting you or pulling you to another place,

Remember that bringing your attention back is a part of the practice and doing it in a kind and loving way.

Moving from the heart,

We started to expand our attention down through the arms into the hands,

Noticing if you're gripping with the hands.

Can you soften those?

Can you feel the weight of your arms and the tension there?

The aliveness of the pulse of your body here in the arms.

Feeling the breath in the belly,

Moving in and moving out.

Scanning for and looking for any tension that might be there.

Any gripping of the belly,

Any discomfort,

Or its opposite.

There can be a spaciousness,

A hollowness that sometimes finds its way here in the belly when we're dealing with challenging thoughts or feelings.

Letting the attention move now to the pelvis,

To the legs,

And to the feet.

Using the sensations and the weight of this part of our body.

Feel where they're connected to the earth or to the surface beneath them.

How they anchor you,

And the lightness of the heart and the breath,

And everything above you has worked your way to this space.

And then as if you were zooming out with a camera lens,

Sense your whole body from head to toe.

All the sensations that have arisen up to this point serve as a reminder that both situations can be true.

You can sit with discomfort and be okay.

That stillness and movement can be right next to one another.

That one part of your body can be alive with sensation and the other can be quiet.

And most importantly,

None of that is wrong.

If anything,

This is what your resilience is.

Your ability to be with all parts of yourself.

To let the breath move you.

To watch the changing natures of the sensations in your body.

To give yourself a bit of space from the flow of life moving through you.

And as you're seated here,

Begin to just let your body slightly either rock forward and back or side.

A very small little movement,

Just enough so you can feel the body kind of swaying in space.

And it's done in such a soft and subtle way to remind us that we're never really stuck.

We're always able to find a little bit of movement to keep the flow of things moving through us.

And in this way we gently soothe a bit ourselves with this movement.

This soft little rocking is a reminder that we continue to move forward in spite of the outcome being different than we might have expected.

In spite of things not going our way in these circumstances we've encountered.

And you can be with what is while continuing to move and be alive.

You can begin to let the body restill itself and let the attention soften a little bit.

Allowing in a sense of gratitude and appreciation to enter the space,

To enter your mind,

To move through your breath and through your body and into your heart.

For sitting with the moment,

For being mindful,

For bearing witness to all parts of yourself.

For inviting in the opportunity to do that from a space of compassion and curiosity.

To cultivate a different relationship with yourself.

One that's fueled by presence rather than avoidance.

And compassion rather than resistance.

And in the same way that you felt all the previous thoughts,

Allow your attention to follow this sense of gratitude and appreciation.

For being here in the moment.

For the opportunity to explore all of your aliveness,

For the access to the tools.

For your curiosity to show up today.

Feel it in your breath,

Follow it into your body.

Notice where it lands and how that might be different from other things.

And letting your attention softly land back to just feeling the breath.

Noticing here as you observe the breath that you're still here.

You sat with whatever came up and your breath and you are still here.

Your attention stayed where you needed it.

All of it a reminder of your own human resilience.

Not the absence of discomfort,

But the capacity to be present with it.

And still connected to the rest of you.

May we continue to cultivate that skill beyond the practice.

You can wiggle the fingers a bit.

Slowly start to blink the eyes open.

Let the rest of your visual field kind of re-enter the space.