FIRE meets WATER: Grief
Using my 5 Elements System for 5 stages of mourning
If you’re subscribed to either of my two other publications, then you may be aware that I recently lost my mom. I actually drafted today’s post a little over a year ago when she had her second stroke that debilitated her far more than the first.1
I’m glad I drafted it back then. I would be in no condition to write this out for you right now.
Apparently, I also left myself a preemptive little roadmap of the tools I have available through my Elements System. I mean, I originally created the thing for myself. It just so happened that a bunch of other people found value in it as well.2
We’ve been working through the Fire Element for a little bit now — Realm of Passion & Emotion. All too fitting, if you ask me. Each element has a predominant pair of emotions.
For Elemental Water, one of those emotions is Grief. One of its modalities is Story. One of its bodily realms is Tears, and one of its energetic pathways is Flow.
Honestly, I am not certain that I’m fully up to doing justice to this post right now, so please bear with me. I drafted it on grief-brain; I’m editing it in even deeper mourning. Someday in the future, I will come back and clean it all up.
But in case it helps anybody else, especially since Fire is currently wearing Her destructive face, causing so much pain and loss in another part of the country, let’s dive a little deeper into how Water meets Fire.
We could use some Water right now. In many places.
USING THE SYSTEM IN GRIEF
A love note of reminders to my mourning self, and to anybody else who might benefit from the way I grieve.
This post is not meant to be read start-to-finish in one sitting. I mean, you certainly can if you’re inspired to. But it really is meant to be bookmarked and referenced as you need it. In whatever order you need it. The order in which I work through these elements is what works for me.
Please always make it your own.
EARTH - Body, Grounding, Keeping the Foundation Stable
Do all body-based self-care that a human meatsuit and my personalized model require.
If necessary, go down to the most basic functionality like food, hydration, sleep, rest, movement, etc. and blow off things like primping, getting out of jammies, even friggin’ showering when it’s too much. If I don’t have to do all that in order to keep a job or tend to other living organisms who are dependent upon me? Blah. Don’t bother.
OR pamper myself, get dolled up, take luxury baths, take myself on yummy dates because it feels good.
Say screw it to “should.” Blow off doing laundry and cleaning house.
OR clean house obsessively when it soothes me. Fold washed clothes and put them away like cleaning off and organizing the shattered, scattered shards of my heart. Declutter surfaces like decluttering thoughts.
Give no fucks about swinging to extremes with these things. Do whatever is best for my body (whether I need to be calmed or energized, or both) on any given moment, because if the organism itself is collapsing, glitching, tapped out, over-extended, frazzled…well, the body is the foundation, so anything I try to do on top of that will eventually collapse.
Leave the Christmas decorations up even though we’re approaching the end of January. Who flippin’ cares? Besides, my mom made a boatload of those decorations, she gave me most of the rest, decorating was one of our favorite things to do together (until her stroke). And it was the very last thing I finished, minutes before my dad called to rush us down to the hospital where we learned she hadn’t even made it there. So my twinkle lights and ornaments are still up, comforting me even though it is well past “the season” for them. This IS the season for them, and it might be for a long time, no matter what anybody else is doing.
Plus this protects my knee. I just had surgery, so there’s no way I’m going up and down those stairs while carrying the boxes.
When I have major neurological issues like I had last year—and that have come screaming back as my brain struggles to rewire itself to my new motherless reality3 — it takes a toll on all other issues. My old tooth infection starts acting up. My spine starts degenerating again. My torn meniscus starts getting micro-tears just from standing in the kitchen while cooking. So I have to make sure I take my max does of the glucosamine-MSM-chondroitin that my sports med. doc prescribed to heal both the disks and my knee. This means I also need to take stool softeners so I can actually…um…poop? Very important for optimal functionality of the organism. I wear my knee braces for all physical activity. I stop full-out dancing and only do PT. It sucks, but hey. That’s what we have to do around here.
Grief-brain is a real thing. I have the dropsies, run into things, forget things, can’t focus even worse than usual. There are times when I can feel that my body is just DONE, and my brain isn’t willing to do anything more, so whenever possible, I don’t force it to. Sometimes I have to. But I reduce my concept of “have to” to only the most crucial NOW tasks, letting grief-brain hijack the bodily resources it needs to reprocess my world as quickly and efficiently as it can.
My daily afternoon brain reboot demanded by multiple Traumatic Brain Injuries4 isn’t enough these days. This means that on the days when I’m foggy, wiped out, disoriented, exhausted, I have to power-purr 2-4 times a day, just to maintain base functioning and to stave off seizures, migraines, and more. This means I become a really un-fun person. It means I have to cancel most of my life except the most crucial and immediate problem solving. Oh, well. Nothing new there in TBI Land, and feeling guilty or ashamed about that will do me absolutely no good. It’ll only prolong the grief and cause damage in the process.
Protecting and nurturing my body is paramount, because if it starts failing, not only will I be no help to anybody else. It means I will start collapsing, usually when somebody needs me most. Like having to ask for even more help during an already sparse and taxed time when my new primary caregiver—my dad—is mourning just as deeply as I am, and learning how to live alone for the first time in his life.
Not fun. So everything becomes a means to prevent this collapse by taking proper care in advance, and doing constant body checks, then heeding what I notice when at all possible. 5
Grief is really hard on the body. It kicks the crap out of you, so it must be treated like exactly what it is: a serious injury.
Oh yeah, and I do a lot of breathing exercises. Which leads us to…
AIR - Spirit, Breath, Music & Inspiration
Air in this System is the home of the Muse and Music, so one of the first things I instinctually do is make a playlist that sums up what I’m feeling and what I need to express. (I’ve embedded it below.)
Sometimes, if I need a pick-me-up, distraction, or to temporarily forget so I can focus on something that needs to get done, I instead listen to music that makes me feel how I would RATHER feel, rather than how I currently feel.6
I make art about it. For me, that means I dance, write, sing, make collages, pull out the coloring books and color mandalas. I take photos and nature videos. I redecorate my home with altars. I make comfort food.
Don’t consider yourself an artist but want to be? Think you don’t have a creative bone in your body? Used to be creative but now you’re all stopped up and nothing is flowing right? This is my favorite course for busting through creative blocks.
These don’t have to be major projects. Amidst grief and shitstorms, they often can’t be. Dumb little stuff is totally fine.
I dance in the kitchen while I’m cooking the meal that will give me a week’s worth of mindless, instant leftovers.
I sing while I’m on the way to
pick up my mom for PT orgo get my knee put back in place by my sports med. doc.I trade out a big, involved art project for choosing clothes in a specific color combo that my soul needs today, and I paint it on my body because that’s the only painting I have time or energy for.
I take photos and videos of the groovy fish in the doctor’s office because they make me happy.
I savor my orange, and the juice that runs down my chin because it tastes good.
I do breathing exercises out on the patio, or in front of the patio doors as I watch the wind in the trees, because it’ll calm my frazzled spirit and bring me back into my body so that I can hope to elevate my existence up from the most basic survival.
If not…I go back to Elemental Earth. Rinse-repeat.
Earth meets Air: I lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling in the twinkle lights, exchanging carbon-dioxide for oxygen. Period.
In this System, Air is the element of deep listening. What’s reeeeally going on inside me? What do I reeeeally need? What do I reeeeally want to express? Air is predominantly about taking the time to ask these questions and being 100% honest about the answers. What I decide to do about those answers is a different matter.
If I actually have the time and energy to fully immerse myself in the Dance of Air7, this is all about the initial inspiration, and then letting my body move any way it wishes to in this moment. Just for me. Only for me, as an act of self-care and self-love.
Which is the only way I can do anybody else any good for any length of time.8
FIRE — Heart, Emotion, Desire
Breathing exercises, deep listening, and feeling into how I am inspired to move (or sing or paint or draw or cook or clean or whatever) often unleashes whichever emotion that I’m needing to express in any given moment.
Sometimes the emotion shifts as I work with it.
Sometimes it only gets deeper.
Sometimes it’s too deep and overwhelming for what’s going on in this moment, so I need to shift away from it.
I’m not a therapist, so I’m not going to speak about what anybody else “should” do for their heart any more than I’m going to give specific advice about how anybody “should” care for their own personal meatsuit. But the heart needs to be tended just as much as the body. (Really, it’s my heart’s impact upon the body that is wreaking the havoc with grief.)
For me, I journal whatever comes into my mind, or I use prompts, addressing the things that I am afraid of, angry about, don’t wanna deal with, grateful for, excited about, hoping for, dream about, or in this specific case, grieving.
Grief is such a complex emotion that it traditionally has five official stages, plus all the nuances and combinations therein, as well as its repetitive cycles. Or its erratic ping ponging and the stalking-pouncing-mauling it does just when you think you’re in the clear with a certain aspect of it.
Le-siiiiiiigh…
The most important thing in the healing journey of my heart has been to keep myself from short-changing any of the emotions that arise, especially the ones that I Hashtag-Don’t-Wanna. I try not to numb them out too-too much. Numbing is the shock-mechanism of self-preservation, but I try not to dwell in that place in order to avoid feeling what is unpleasant to feel.
“Life Is Pain.” ~The Dread Pirate Roberts, from The Princess Bride.
Better out than in. The body really does keep the score, and I have no interest in letting my bottled-up, stifled, stuffed emotions become toxic to my meatsuit until it finally turns on me. There is enough in this world that does that to us just by breathing, eating, and walking around in it. I don’t need to do it to myself. 9
I also try not to force myself into any particular emotions when I’m not ready for them. Or to force myself to get through them before I’m ready to be done with them. Or to limit myself by chastising, “You already went through the Anger Stage. And now you’re back there WTF?!” No. If it cycles back, it cycles back. For however long and however many times it cycles back.
My timeline of grief is my timeline. Your timeline is your timeline. Their timeline is their timeline.
Period.
WATER - Mind, Meditation, Story & Tears
In the midst of fresh grief, I often find myself bereft of the bandwidth to accomplish the Water Element’s reining in, directionally channeled, meditational, and focused mental aspects required to navigate what has just happened.
Those are tools I use later, but I’m a Fire Sign with a neurodivergent, hypersensitive nervous system and inborn executive function issues. As such, it’s my understanding that joy to me feels like a lot of people’s ecstasy. I mean, c’mon. Have you ever seen me get excited about something?!
Anger to me feels like a volcano needing to blow. So the initial pummeling of sorrow to me feels like being slammed into the ground by a tidal wave. It’s like a dam breaking, followed by the deluge.
So grief to the level of losing my mother? Losing my dream job? Losing myself to the ravages of a drunk driver? Now add frontal lobe damage to that.
Needless to say, emotional regulation is one of my greatest demons, and one of the biggest reasons I created this Elements System beyond how I use it in dance.
In the initial pummeling, the best thing I can do for myself is to simply let it hit. Being a martial artist (Elemental Metal) and a lifelong Phoenix (Elemental Fire), I have learned that I can get hit so hard it puts on the ground, yet still get back up. Somehow.
If I relax and surrender to what’s coming at me, if I utilize the Flow aspect of the Water Element, the devastating impact of the blow doesn’t do quite as much damage. I can let it pass through me.
I mean, sure, if I can slip and get out of the way, great. But there is no getting out of the way of this. There is only going through it — and letting it go through me. Just like a car wreck you know you can’t avoid, the more the body has time to tense up, the greater the injuries.
Same-same here.
Once the first waves of grief have hit me and passed through, it starts to move more like a river.
When it’s swelling too much but life demands that I must be functional, I have to manage and steer it with the riverbanks of my Earth practices, because the mental focus and fluid flow of my Water Element has been ruptured and overwhelmed.
Then in the quiet and solitude, or in places where I’m safe to just be as I am, however I am in any given moment — when it comes time to give sorrow its head and simply mourn…
I try to relax, surrender, and let it hit again. I practice standing with my feet ground, I exhale, and move the way I do when I’m standing on the beach facing the ocean. When the tide comes in, I let it crash over my feet and knees. I let that energy flow up my spine and rock my head back as I inhale. I take in What Is, in this moment. As the tide goes out, I exhale and let the energy rock my back forward. The water washes the sand and the footprints of my passage away. I envision it washing clean my grief, too. Or anger, grief, shame, whatever I want to release. Over and over I do this to the waves of music.
If I can literally get my body onto a beach, better yet. I have done an enormous amount of grief-work while standing at the edge of an ocean.
I do similar types of cleansing rituals in my shower. If I really need a cleans, I fill a water bottle with lemon-water and spritz it over myself before standing in my mini-waterfall.
Or I take meditative baths.
Or I walk in the rain and let it pour over me.
I always know when I’m getting to a place of healing anything painful, because I am able to cry. For me tears are like a blessed pressure relief valve when the emotion is too big and it’s overwhelming my body. Having a good cry cleans out my pipes. It cleanses gunk that has been stuck. It quenches a too-ravaging fire.
When I’m deep in grieving, I don’t often create choreographies. I don’t have the mental faculties for that. Everything is breaking the dams, overflowing the banks, and sweeping thorough the causeways too much. So I’m really only telling the tales of how I feel through the movements that I’m inspired to dance in the moment. It’s the story of how the music is pulling on my raw heartstrings.
These dances often aren’t pretty. But they have their own unique beauty. They are rarely for the eyes of anyone else. They’re for the healing in my heart.
At most, they create building blocks that later become dances I will share. So my dances of sorrow are often way more flood and ocean and breaking through the dam. They are thunderstorms or gloomy fog in a bog, rather than deft navigation of the river or gorgeous sparkling fountains to ogle and admire.
The other aspect of the Water Element that I utilize a lot of is Story. I’ve created millions of words of fiction out of my sorrows and losses.
Setting my own tales into words is also a cathartic process.
Having them read and appreciated by other people adds a whole other layer of healing — provided they’re the right people. Appreciated is the operative word here. I have to have done a whole lot of work in my Earth self-esteem foundations, my Air connection to Higher Self, and in the protective mechanisms of Metal in order to risk the vulnerability of exposing my stories to trolls, sniggerers, flamers, and jerks. Or just…the eternal chorus of chirping crickets who do not care.
*I* care about my stories. Maybe someday I’ll find where the pools and ponds of My Kind dwell.
As a writer, as a storyteller in my bones and my blood, I am also constantly jotting notes about my emotions. Some of this is external memory that takes the place of a fully functioning brain in the wake of TBI.
Otherwise, in the times of my deepest emotional turmoil, new characters spring to life and old characters gain fathoms more depth. So I let all that imagery flood my pages in a deluge.
Later, when the raw grief has run its course and the tears and snot have dried up, I’ll have the mental faculties to actually do something with it all.
At that point, I will need meditation. Choreography. Plot outlines. Intentional envisioning. Vision boards. World-building graphs. Maps. I’ll need all those riverbanks built from my Earth Tools, and all that practice letting emotion and creative impulse course through me so I can navigate—not the flood-zone anymore — but the creative flow-zone.
This is how I reclaim my already damaged brain from the overwhelm of grief-brain.
METAL: Persona, Protection & Connection
Metal in this System is the space between me and you. Between me and them. It’s how I present myself to the world, how I protect myself from it, and how I connect with it. So when I’m grieving…
I really am an isolator. A cave-dweller.
Okay, let’s be honest, I’m not an Earth Mama type. I’m a friggin’ fortress.
Down comes the portcullis. BLAM! The gates get slammed shut. The archers come up to the ramparts with their arrows nocked and the cauldrons of oil get boiled. The 10-lock mechanism whirs and clicks until everything is sealed up tight for anybody except those few with the key and the passcode.
Deep within the dungeon I let myself cry ugly.
Deep in the heart of the inmost garden surrounded by the trixxy maze of towering hedgerows, massive crenelated walls, and all the moats and pitfalls that surround them, I let myself collapse.
Deep under the covers in the dark, I am safe to stare with hollow eyes, to twitch and drool, and to fall into the depths of sleep, knowing that the moat monsters and other ravening beasties I cultivated and trained through decades of martial arts and mental health practices are out there guarding me.
When the deluge overwhelms too much, my fortress and I disappear like Atlantis into the depths.
This gives me the space to muster up the energy and resources to still accomplish what needs to be done. I take my submersibles up to the surface for quick forays, and then dive back down.
I send my nearest and dearest submersibles to visit me because I need them more than ever. We communicate intensely through our own morse-code-like channels. But otherwise? I am usually just…
GONE.
And that has to be okay.
When I’m ready, one of the most valuable things I can do for myself is to find people and communities with whom I do not need to censor my emotions and the thoughts that puke out my mouth during this time.
I do always try to be conscientious and sensitive about the expression of emotions that are unpleasant for others to witness. But grief-brain makes anybody emotionally compromised. It limits access to the regulating mechanisms of the frontal lobe. I already have enough trouble with that from TBI, so all my Dain Bramage symptoms come screaming to the forefront. Hence one of the biggest reasons for my isolating. Then again, some people can’t stand my overexubernt joy, so they are not My People.
The more I can let my emotional system run cleanly — emotional impetus in, burn through it like fuel, exhaust out — the more efficiently I can work through the devastating impact of a loss, and the less likely it is to turn into things like PTSD, cancer, anxiety disorders, etc. So much of that is just stored trauma in the body. Dis-ease. Old emotional ruts running on outdated coping mechanisms from a time when the emotion was too big for the system to handle.
This is why the people and situations with whom I surround myself — and especially the people and situations with whom I limit contact or outright avoid — are crucial. That goes triple while I’m grieving.
When the loss is too big for me to handle with my personal tools and some support from My Pack (which includes humans, animals, nature), I seek out professional help. Grief counseling. Trauma therapy. Support groups run by a mental health practitioner. Experienced spiritual healers.
Eventually, when I’ve taken care of myself enough and am fit for general (limited) human consumption, I start sending out sonar pings to the world again. The pings provide access codes and maps to my location for select communication.
This is one of them.
So now you know what I do when I’m in mourning. Now you know one of the biggest reasons why my System turned into something far huger and life-encompassing than merely a metaphor for learning the creative and expressive aspects of dance. Because…
The playlist I made when I found out my mom had a stroke and I tripped & splatted headlong into grief and anticipatory mourning:
© 2025 Hartebeast
Up Next:
Back to Elemental Fire:
Explore the whole System:
The story of my mother’s second stroke, and how hard it hit me, which prompted me to draft today’s post and create the playlist: ANTICIPATORY GRIEF - The post I drafted a year before my mother’s death. This tale is over on my memoir publication:
I originally made my Elements System for myself. Then other people found that it helped them, too.
Sidenote: “Yeah, must be nice to have that luxury, sweet-cheeks. I have a job and kids, unlike your couch-sitting, bonbon-eating, home-staying, childless self, so I don’t ever get to stop!”
Then my roadmap is not for you.
Because, yeah. It’s really NICE not being capable of working my jobs anymore, two of which were my dream jobs, and a bunch of others allowed me to pay my own basic living expenses without being a burden on my loved ones and society. Love it!
I do have a full-time overtime job: it’s called cognitive rehab and physical therapy. And I do have a kid: a permanent brain injury is like taking care of an overtired 4 year old in an overcrowded restaurant at 11 o’clock at night. That kid will NEVER fully grow up and leave home. I also don’t EVER get to take a vacation or even leave it in another room to so much as go pee. So yeah. It’s really NICE.
I do not disparage anybody else’s situation and call other people down, so I’ll ask that nobody else disability-shames me, by assuming that I’m over here eating bonbons all day just because I don’t have to get to go out and work. Everybody’s situation has pros and cons, luxuries and detriments.
But if we live long enough, we’ll all experience loss and grief in one way or another. I prefer to focus on the ways in which we are kindred, not the polarized ways we’re awful, horrible, evil, lazy, spoiled different.
If my way is inaccessible to you, or simply not your way, that’s totally fine. Go seek out somebody else giving the roadmaps through their grief in a situation more similar to yours. They’re certainly out there. It just means my way isn’t your way.
Mine is the grief map for a disabled, neurodivergent, childless, pet-less, one-person-home, artist/athlete on Medicaid, living in a small town with very few local friends, an amazing long-distance support network, and one local family member.
If even ONE of my bullet points creates an “ah-hah” for you or makes you feel less alone at a really crappy time, I am thrilled. I’m also thrilled if you figure out by Bullet 2 that my way is not your way and move along, citizen, to find what will work for you.
That’s all that matters to me. That you find what you need in your time of mourning.
The myriad ways I use music for inspiration and healing:
Each of the 5 Elements’ dance styles
One of the best books I have ever read in my life: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma
Don't want to read the book? Here's the basic premise of what trauma does to the body and why talking about it, even in therapy, so often doesn't solve the problems: Short Version. Or Long Version by the author himself
 | A guest post by
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Thank you so much for restacking this!