“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be. How full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is ... On my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart — my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here — is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction, not merely of the spirit, but of the body, of aches and lagging strength.””

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Notes on Grief

embodied grief care in racialized communities focuses on:

*Co-regulation and our bodies as a source of healing.*
*Ritual and collective practice as central to grieving.*
*Trauma-responsive + culturally-intentional care.*

After years of living in the West Indies I started noticing how many monumental (and non-monumental) moments in life were celebrated and honoured in community. In many Caribbean and African nations, and across South Asian and South-East Asian countries, birth and death are embraced by collective care and ritual. Death is seen as being a “part of life” (in contrast, to the very Western perspective that views death as encroaching on life).

In the Western world, after an initial outpouring of support and a few hours at a funeral, we callously leave so many bereaved to navigate the loneliness of loss alone. We leave bereaved individuals to resolve their own grief. While support groups and grief resources exist (see links at the end of this article), individual reactions to loss are often medicalized and individuals are left to navigate their lives, homes and finances alone, following the death of a loved one. There is little focus on the role of community and culture to assist the bereaved in transcending grief and loss. What happens in the weeks and months following the death of a loved one, in the Western world?

In contrast, the Caribbean nations of Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica and Haiti all practice their own variation of a nine-night celebration following the death of a loved one. Family members of the deceased, collectively, hold a wake at the home, and pray from the day after the pronouncement of death to the ninth day. Rooted in West African belief that on the ninth night after death, the soul of the deceased leaves for its final resting place, the family and community spend nine days together, praying, cooking, eating, celebrating, and supporting the bereaved. Rural Haitian practice believes that relationships with the dead last forever and a living Haitian inherit the spirits their ancestors worshipped and these spirits visit them in their dreams and provide them with guidance.

Central to death rituals in the Caribbean are practices to help the souls of the dead transition to a new realm while creating pathways for spiritual connection with the deceased. Collective rituals that are experiential, proactive, and creative, support an ongoing relationship with the deceased, allow for the public display of grieving, and facilitate healing through deep sorrow. Collective grieving also serves to heal intergenerational traumas, separation, and disconnection created by colonial oppression.

AN EMBODIED, TRAUMA-RESPONSIVE AND CULTURALLY-INTENTIONALLY APPROACH TO EXPLORING GRIEF IN RACIALIZED COMMUNITIES IN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT UNDERSTANDS THAT:

Experiences of death-specific grief are layered on top of decades and generations of racial and oppression-based trauma.
Death-specific grief is itself a trauma, and is processed in the body (in the physical body, the brain and the nervous system) in much the same way as traumatic experiences of oppression, accidents, and violence.
Language processing regions of the brain, including Broca’s area (a region of the brain concerned with the production of speech, located in the cortex of the dominant frontal lobe), shut down in response to severe trauma, making Western therapeutic approaches of cognitive ‘talk-therapy’ extremely limited in effectiveness as singularly used practices.
Rituals and collective care practices, such as drumming, dancing, singing, humming, tapping, swaying, wailing, and chanting encourage CO-REGULATION of our bodies and our nervous systems and are essential and important practices to healing both the trauma of grief.
It is detrimental to the healing process of racialized bereaved individuals to be denied access to practices of ritual and community care (Unable to get time off work to return to one’s country of origin to participate in 9-30 day healing rituals with family, lack of culturally-responsive bereavement care)

**An embodied, trauma-responsive and culturally intentional approach to grief, therefore *is not*:**

Learning "cultural hacks"
Acquiring "cultural competence"
Cognitively focused
Individually-centered

In the Western world, where death is often viewed as “encroaching on life”, the process of grieving is “treated” and pathologized, and grief support is often cognitively-focused, rooted in talk-support groups and talk-therapy. Through the process of pathologizing grief, cognitive behavioural therapies that prioritize intellectual, mind-based healing, when not delivered with awareness, are in direct opposition to a collective care philosophy that prioritizes interconnection and interrelation among ALL bodies and ALL beings and can be a harmful way to perpetuate suppression of culturally-intentional healing.

GRIEF AS TRAUMA:

Grief, in its powerful capacity to rewire our brains, is interpreted in our bodies like trauma.

Brain scans of the bereaved show that grief activates parts of the limbic system – the ‘emotional brain’ - a primal part of the brain controlling emotions and behaviours that ensure our survival.

The amygdala: governs the intensity of emotions + threat perception.
The cingulate cortex: interplay between emotions and memory.
The thalamus: conveys sensory signals to the cerebral cortex, the brain’s information-processing centre.

From an evolutionary standpoint, we are strongly hardwired to respond to something that is a threat. We oftentimes don’t think of a loss of a loved one as a threat in that way, but, from the perspective of the brain, that’s the way it is literally perceived.

That perception of threat means that our survival response – ‘fight or flight’ – kicks in, and stress hormones flood the body. Heightened levels of the stress hormone cortisol are found in the bereaved. High levels of cortisol help us endure the trauma of grief in the initial acute phases of grieving, and can become detrimental if not moved through the body in healing.

In the weeks after a loss, during acute grief, the brain suppresses the control centres of higher functions, such as decision-making and planning. This happens during the same time that “the system” expects bereaved individuals to single-handedly be calling banks, financial institutions and funeral homes to reorganize their lives and the financial affairs of their loved one. These systems not only appear to be inhumane, they actually are perpetuating a broken healing process by encouraging/enforcing rational decision-making at a time when the decision-making centres of the brain are dissociated. The prefrontal cortex – the centre of reasoning and decision-making – shuts down, also reinforcing the notion that talk-centered healing strategies may not offer optimal healing during acute grief.

*In racialized individuals, the trauma of grief can be layered on top of the pervasive and persistent experience of oppression-based trauma.*

CULTURAL EMBODIMENT PRACTICES:

PRACTICES OF CO-REGULATION FOR HEALING THROUGH GRIEF:

DRUMMING, CHANTING, DANCING, HUMMING, TAPPING, RHYTHMIC MOVEMENT, SHAKING, VIBRATING, HIP SWAYING, YOGA + MEDITATION ARE innately healing on both a physiological and spiritual level and that connection to these practices has immense potential for healing the harms of both grief and systemic violence. Rhythmic drumming, tapping, dancing and swaying are found to have a direct effect on the parasympathetic nervous system by slowing breathing, activating the vagus nerve, and eliciting a sense of safety in bodies who are continually oppressed.

RHYTHM:

Patterned, repetitive, rhythmic somatosensory activity, such as dancing, drumming and swaying, can elicit a sensation of safety in bodies who rarely have the luxury of “resting” in a society designed to annihilate them.

DRUMMING:

Lower frequency vibrations resonate through the body, particularly in the lower stomach and diaphragm region. Lower frequency rhythms, played on the bass note of the drum resonate with the body’s own physiology, and positively impact heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure. Rhythmic interventions at 60-beats per minute (simulating a resting heart rate) is found to regulate and induce systemic pacing, reduce repetitive anxiety behaviours and enable focus and calm, in children with habitual states of fear after grief.

BARRIERS TO CARE FOR RACIALIZED COMMUNITIES:

The number one barrier to care in embodied grief healing is practitioners, healers and support workers who have not done the work to regulate their own bodies to be able to “hold the charge” and the energy of grief and trauma and racialized bodies. Resmaa Menakem speaks in-depth about the harm and violence caused by (white-bodied) practitioners who have not engaged in (thousands) of hours of self-practice to be able to hold the charge of the impacts of white supremacy on Black and Brown bodies.
Of equal importance, the numerous systemic barriers that exist that block access to culturally-relevant and safe care for racialized peoples: Lack of access to time off work to celebrate “nine-night” grief celebrations in one’s country of origin or to local funeral homes who will accomodate culturally-specific rituals - leaving the bereaved to heal without access to community care.
Establishing safety and stabilization for clients with complicated grief who experience systemic daily oppression may be extremely difficult or almost impossible in a colonial society that continues to cause harm.
Death-specific grieving may be prolonged by oppression and racial violence.

EMBODIED GRIEF RESOURCES:

OCEANA SAWYER, DEATH DOULA: https://www.oceanaendoflifedoula.com/about-oceana

SHIFTING DEATHCARE: https://www.goingwithgracecourses.com/courses/shifting-deathcare

RACHEL CARGLE, CONVERSATIONS ON GRIEF: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatunlearn

RACHEL RICKETTS, GRIEF COACH: https://www.rachelricketts.com/grief-resources

WRITING YOUR GRIEF COURSE: https://refugeingrief.com/writing-your-grief/

For grief support in Waterloo Region, please visit, Bereaved Families of Ontario: https://www.bfomidwest.org/grief-resources/

REFERENCES:

Faulknor, S. (2020). Drumming - A Somatic Approach. https://www.rhythm2recovery.com/. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/drumming-somatic-approach-simon-faulkner/

Forde, M. (2018). Governing Death in Trinidad and Tobago

Friedman, R. L. (2000). The healing power of the drum. White Cliffs Media.

Harner, S. D. (1995). Immune and affect response to shamanic drumming (Ph.D.). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global: Health & Medicine, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global: Social Sciences.

Huggins, C. L., & Hinkson, G. M. (2019). Contemporary Burial Practices in Three Caribbean Islands Among Christians of African Descent. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying; Omega (Westport), 80(2), 266-279

Hume, Y. (2018). Death and the Construction of Social Space: Land, Kinship, and Identity in the Jamaican Mortuary Cycle.

Marshall, R., & Sutherland, P. (2008). The Social Relations of Bereavement in the Caribbean. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 57(1), 21.