28 One-Liners On Grief

Posted on by Mo Minahan

For almost a year now I’ve been quietly posting almost daily under my project name of The Grief Practice over on Instagram. I alternate posting words with photos, and tonight I wrapped up many of them into this little list. Because I don’t know about you, but sometimes it’s nice to have all the words in one place.

Often I expand on the concept in the body of the post, but I’ve kept this list sweet and short.

  1. Don’t toss your broken pieces aside. You’ll need them to complete the puzzle of your heart.
  2. Sometimes we don’t every say Goodbye to them, to us, to who we used to be.
    We just say hello to each new breath, each new moment, each new day.
  3. We are not give what we can handle.
    We handle what we are given.
  4. You’ll get there faster by going slower.
  5. You don’t need to know it or name it to heal it.
  6. Let Grief speak. Just like Love it has something to say.
  7. We don’t work against sadness.
    We work with sadness.
  8. There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with your grief. You are having a tremendous human experience.
  9. When we can’t look forward, we can look up.
  10. Healing is not linear or logical.
  11. The only grief anyone can be an expert on is their own.
  12. Honor the collapse.
  13. Follow your grief’s lead. It knows the way back home.
  14. Grief is not contagious.
  15. The way through is in.
  16. Grief expands before it shrinks.
  17. The old rules don’t apply now.
  18. We can’t talk ourselves out of how we feel.
  19. The body processes slower than the mind.
  20. Grief isn’t just about grief.
  21. Exile nothing.
  22. The darkness teaches us many things, one of which is to celebrate the light.
    The other is how to see in the dark.
  23. Before we can move on, we have to move in.
  24. Too much Shhh. Not enough Sacred.
  25. Our bodies are the first home for our grief, starting with the feeling of our hearts breaking.
  26. Our stories of how things ended are also stories of how we begin.
  27. Sometimes our outer facade can’t keep up with our inner pain.
  28. Happy endings are for fairy tales.
    Real life is about Courageous beginnings.

Update! It’s been 5 years since this post and I’ve been writing this whole time! For more thoughtful one-liners on grief and being human, head over to my IG page @thegriefpractice xox-Monique