TL;DR: Sydney Starko, RMT, reframes grief as something we experience constantly — not just after major loss, but through every small change our bodies move through in a lifetime. She draws on somatic therapy and Traditional Chinese Medicine to explain why unprocessed grief gets physically held in the body (often the throat, chest, or belly), and how body-based practices like breathwork, massage, or movement can help release it. Her core message: grief isn’t only about endings — it’s also what carries us into what comes next.
Have you met Grief? Let me introduce her to you in a way you may not expect.
While grief doesn’t have a gender, she nevertheless embodies the complexities and mysteries of the Divine Feminine.
Life. Death. Life.
Mother Nature.
The truth of grief is that, to be alive, we must grieve.
We grieve our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our identities, our life stages. We’re born, we grow, we change, we cycle, grow a little more, and eventually we die—our bodies returning to the earth and our souls heading off to wherever we go next.
Throughout our lives, we experience a billion little losses, changes, shifts, and seasons. We may never consciously notice or process many of them.
Our bodies remember.
Emotion processing through the body (somatically) follows a cycle. First, we feel a buildup or change in pressure inside of us: a welling of tears, a held breath, a flush of heat, a sinking stomach. In a perfect world (which doesn’t exist), we would be able to feel those sensations, breathe, and let the experience move through us—sobbing, laughing, shaking, sighing.
Then, eventually, the intensity would soften.
But we don’t live in a perfect world.
For all kinds of biological, psychological, and social reasons, we often interrupt that process. We hold our breath. We swallow the tears. We tighten our muscles. We keep going.
We are very, very good at holding on.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has understood for thousands of years that emotions are experienced through the body, with grief traditionally associated with the lungs. According to TCM, when the natural flow of emotion and energy is blocked, stagnation can affect both our physical and emotional well-being.
After sixteen years of working with bodies, I’ve witnessed this pattern again and again in my clients:
The contraction isn’t necessarily the problem. We just haven’t learned how to release.
Our bodies can continue to carry tension long after the original experience has passed. Sometimes the physical pattern becomes so familiar that we forget there was ever another way to inhabit ourselves.
This is where intentional somatic work can be powerful.
Breathwork and body-based practices—including massage, acupuncture, osteopathy, and grief-specific movement or yoga—offer space to slow down, feel what’s there, and reconnect with what the body has been quietly holding.
I often see grief expressed through the throat, chest, breasts, and belly/womb spaces.
And when someone finally begins to soften their grip and allow some of that emotion to move, there can be a surprising amount of crying, laughing, shaking, sighing—and relief.
Not because we’ve erased the grief, but because we’ve allowed ourselves to move with it.
My hope is to help change our story about grief. She isn’t only here to remind us of endings, losses, and longings. She is also here to remind us of the preciousness of the moments we get to experience.
The holiness of the unknown. The tenderness of change.
Grief helps guide us through releasing what was and into the potential of what will be—which can be scary, disorienting, and intensely felt in the body.
Grief is about life’s transitions.
We’re meant to move through it, feel through it, and meet it again and again.
Just like seasons. Just like moons. Just like death and birth.
Life becomes richer when we allow ourselves to flow with what is changing, rather than gripping so tightly to what once was.
Because grief isn’t only about the ending. It’s also about the beginning.
– Sydney Starko, RMT
hello@sydneystarkormt.com | sydneystarkormt.com
Registered Massage Therapist, Somatic + Womb Health Practitioner, Calgary, AB
Trained through MacEwan University’s 2200-hour program with nearly 20 years of body-based practice, blending Craniosacral Therapy, Visceral Manipulation, Chi Nei Tsang, and scar tissue integration work, for women seeking to feel more at home in their bodies and in flow with their cycles. Co-creator and facilitator of yoga and anatomy courses with Embodied Living.
Guided meditations and Yoga Nidra recordings available on Insight Timer.
Click the link below to a related article about grief, written by Pam Monjar:
The Grief No One Talks About
