The holiday season is often portrayed as joyful and full—but for many, it brings mixed emotions, exhaustion, and quiet grief. This reflective article offers a compassionate perspective on navigating Christmas when it feels heavy, inviting readers to honour their real experience, tend to their nervous system, and move through winter with gentleness rather than pressure.

As we face numerous crises on a global level, we must consider grief not as a problem to be solved but as an invitation to transformation. This perspective requires us to rethink our engagement with loss, seeing it not as an endpoint but as a pivotal moment for political and creative expression.

The body acts as a sensory sponge, constantly picking up cues from our environment to determine whether we are safe to relax and connect, or if we are in danger and need to act. Learning the language of the body and how to communicate with it can disrupt unhelpful patterns, move out stuck emotions disguised as pain or tension, and create new patterns that are more flexible, spacious, and healthy.

It felt like a cosmic joke that I had to endure such shocking, deep grief right before stepping into a space serving others through their grief. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel his passing was a gift of mourning and learning for me, one I needed to walk through and share with others as I connected neurological findings I had recently learned to my personal practice of grieving.