The Hidden Grief We Carry Through Healing and Transformation
Updated: Aug 21
Jyllin, founder of the Holistic Liberation Method, weaves Five Element theory, meridian yoga therapy, and EFT to restore emotional balance and embodied resilience, drawing on nearly two decades of teaching experience across four continents.
Grief isn’t only about death. A relationship ends. A career shifts. We grow older. We move countries, outgrow identities, recover from illness, experience hormonal shifts, or unlearn patterns that once kept us safe. Even positive transformation carries a subtle sense of loss.
Yet many people move through these experiences without recognizing them as grief because grief isn’t always loud or visible. It can show up as numbness, loneliness, chronic busyness, emotional exhaustion, or a quiet disconnection from life.
While modern culture tends to frame grief through the lens of the five stages, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) offers a broader, more cyclical perspective. In TCM, grief isn’t a disruption to life but a natural part of its rhythm. It reflects our capacity to let go of what has run its course, so we can create space for what’s next.
Our inhale is only as deep as our exhale. Growth requires as much unlearning as it does learning.
Understanding grief beyond the five stages
Many of us understand grief through the five stages identified by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance have become familiar reference points for navigating loss and mourning, and for good reason. They name something real.
But grief is more fluid and individualized than the model’s popular interpretation suggests. Grief rises and recedes. It softens, then resurfaces. It doesn’t move in one direction, and it doesn’t only follow death. It follows changes in health, age, fertility, career, home, and identity. All carry their own weight of loss because growth requires releasing what once felt necessary and familiar.
In TCM, grief isn’t solely a psychological experience. It’s embodied and connected to our relationship with change and attachment. Rather than asking how quickly grief can be resolved, TCM asks whether grief is moving. When left unprocessed, grief doesn’t simply disappear. It shapes how connected we feel to ourselves, others, and life itself.
Letting go and letting life in
In TCM, grief is associated with the Metal element, which is connected to the lungs, large intestine, and the season of autumn. The Metal element governs our capacity to recognize and refine what still holds value while allowing what has run its course to fall away.
The lungs govern breath and our ability to take life in fully. The large intestine supports elimination and our body’s ability to discern what nourishes us and what’s no longer needed. Together, they mirror an emotional truth many people encounter during grief and transition: we can’t keep filling ourselves if we refuse to let anything go.
Many of us move through life holding onto relationships, habits, or beliefs that once protected or defined us. Over time, however, those same patterns can confine us. The path of self-discovery requires grieving old versions of ourselves, shedding inherited conditioning, and making room for something truer to emerge.
When grief is suppressed, it can cut us off from ourselves and from full participation in life. When it’s allowed to move, it becomes more than an emotional reaction to loss. Like autumn clearing what is complete, grief can open us to deeper meaning, alignment, and renewal.
The grief inside growth
Some of the most profound grief has nothing to do with death and everything to do with becoming.
We grieve the versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown. We mourn old dreams, familiar routines, relationships that no longer fit, and the earlier versions of ourselves that carried impossible burdens. We grieve identities we built to survive seasons we’re no longer living in.
Sometimes healing itself awakens grief. As we soften old protective patterns and reconnect with ourselves, we may begin to feel the accumulated weight of what was lost along the way. The years we spent disconnected. The needs that went unmet. The parts of ourselves we abandoned in order to belong, achieve, or remain safe.
Life transitions carry this same duality. A woman moving through perimenopause may simultaneously grieve and awaken. Someone leaving a career, a relationship, or a home may feel relief intertwined with sadness. This isn’t confusion. It’s the nature of change.
Autumn doesn’t cling to summer. Trees don’t mourn their leaves by refusing to let them fall. There’s wisdom in allowing what’s complete to return to the earth, so that something new can eventually emerge. We cannot become someone new without, in some way, grieving who we once were.
Supporting the body through grief
Grief isn’t only something we think through. It’s something we breathe through, move through, and carry within our body, often long after the mind has decided it’s time to move on.
During difficult transitions, many people instinctively try to override their emotions through productivity, distraction, or the pressure to return to “normal” as quickly as possible. But the body keeps its own timeline. Healing tends to begin not with doing more, but with slowing down enough to feel what’s been held.
In TCM, the lungs are primarily connected to breath, emotion, and our felt relationship with life. Practices that support the breath, such as slower inhales, longer exhales, humming, gentle walks, and time in nature, can help soften the nervous system and create space for emotions to move rather than stagnate beneath the surface.
Mindful movement through the lung and large intestine meridians can offer additional support. Chest opening, shoulder and arm movement, and yin yoga can dissolve tension that accumulates when grief remains suppressed.
The large intestine invites us toward conscious release, not just physically, but emotionally. Letting go of old obligations, simplifying where possible, steadily nourishing yourself, and allowing genuine rest are all ways of moving with the body’s natural rhythms rather than against them. Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) tapping and journaling can support this process as well.
Most importantly, grief asks for compassion over urgency. During periods of loss and transition, sadness and relief can coexist. Gratitude and loneliness may arrive together. Healing doesn’t mean the end of grief. It may simply mean learning to let grief move without losing ourselves in the process.
Grief as part of becoming
Grief isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s evidence that something mattered.
We grieve because we love, because we grow, and because life asks us, again and again, to let go of what can no longer come with us into the next season. Whether we’re grieving a person, a relationship, a version of ourselves, or an entire chapter of life, grief reflects our humanity and our full participation in the cycles of transformation.
TCM reminds us that living fully has never meant staying the same. Renewal requires release, and grief, when we allow it to move through us rather than accumulate, can become something more than loss. It can become the very process by which we find our way back to ourselves with greater authenticity and alignment.
Grief isn’t evidence that we’re broken. It’s part of how we grow.
Read more from Jyllin
Jyllin, Holistic Health Coach & Somatic Educator
Jyllin is a holistic health coach and somatic educator who blends trauma-informed coaching, meridian yoga therapy, and EFT to support emotional resilience and embodied healing. Teaching internationally since 2012, she draws from her background in Five Element philosophy, mindful movement, and nervous system regulation to help others reconnect with their innate wisdom. Through her Holistic Liberation Method, Jyllin offers a grounded, integrative approach that bridges Eastern and Western wisdom to restore flow in both body and mind.
