The conventional wisdom about grief suggests that time heals all wounds, that staying busy helps, that eventually we return to our former selves. But what happens when loss arrives not once, but three times in quick succession—stripping away not just loved ones, but our very sense of who we are?
Lisa Jackson confronted this question after losing her husband of 35 years, followed within months by the deaths of her sister and father. The cascade of bereavement left her feeling hollowed out, plagued by persistent thoughts of "What's the point?" She found herself cycling through the familiar remedies people turn to in times of crisis—gong baths, cold-water swimming, comfort food, intermittent crying—desperately searching for a pathway back to the person she used to be.
What Jackson ultimately discovered, however, was not a return to her old self, but something far more profound: a new way of navigating life that bypassed the mind's endless calculations and tapped into the body's innate wisdom.
The breakthrough came when she stopped asking what made logical sense and began asking a different question entirely: What gives me goosebumps? What makes my compass shine? This deceptively simple shift—from mental reasoning to bodily knowing—became her guide through what she describes as grief's wilderness.
The practice yielded immediate, tangible results. When a financial adviser's pitch felt predatory despite sounding reasonable on paper, Jackson trusted the warning signals her body sent and fired him. When interviewing contractors, she hired the tiler whose presence felt trustworthy, regardless of whether he offered the lowest bid. She began evaluating friendships not by history or obligation, but by whether they energized or depleted her.
Perhaps most remarkably, this somatic compass led her to run a marathon carrying a pouch of her husband's ashes—an act that might have seemed irrational to her grief-stricken mind, but which her body recognized as exactly right.
Jackson's experience challenges the prevalent notion that grief is something to overcome or move past. She describes grief as remaining "a solid circle at the center" of her life—not shrinking, not disappearing, but permanent. Yet around that unchanging core, she reports that something wider and brighter continues to grow.
This distinction matters. The cultural pressure to "get over" loss often adds a secondary burden to the already grieving—the sense that they are failing if they do not return to baseline happiness. Jackson's framework offers a different possibility: that grief can coexist with growth, that we can honor what we have lost while simultaneously expanding into new territory.
The body-centered approach Jackson advocates aligns with emerging research in neuroscience and trauma therapy, which increasingly recognizes that the body stores information our conscious minds cannot access. Somatic practitioners have long argued that physical sensations—the tightening in the chest, the lightness in the shoulders, the gut feeling that something is off—represent a form of intelligence that operates faster and often more accurately than rational thought.
For those navigating their own losses, Jackson's story offers not a prescription but an invitation: to experiment with trusting the body's signals, to notice what creates expansion versus contraction, to ask not what makes sense but what feels true. In a culture that privileges thinking over feeling, logic over intuition, this represents a radical reorientation—one that may prove particularly valuable when the mind's usual strategies fail in the face of profound loss.
