Deep Feeling: Processing Grief and Creating Emotional Solace
Healing Through Water
Where Earth steadies and Air makes sense, Water moves. It softens us… into the gravity of what we carry and the grief we had to outrun. Releases us from the ache we buried under striving and the shame we cut off when it threatened to drown us.
Water is the element of emotional presence and alchemical integration. In the Sacred Elements framework, it it invites us into the the hallowed work of metabolizing sensation and sorrow. To feel. To tend to our emotional needs with compassion and care. Water teaches us fluidity, not fusion. It restores the boundary between empathy and enmeshment. In Water, we build capacity to stay with ourselves and our own experience.
Unlike Air, which explores trauma through the lens of narrative and story, Water drops us below cognition into sensation, memory, and deep feeling. Into the unconscious places where trauma still shapes our rhythms, reactions, and relationships.
This is where our grief lives.
This is where our longing lives.
This is where our felt sense lives.
Water heals in waves of embodied integration—not through will, but through surrender. Water is not easy medicine. But it is honest. And it is holy.
Water and the Fawn Response
Water molds to its container, taking the shape of what holds it. But that same liquidity, left unexamined, can become emotional fusion—where we can no longer tell where we end and the other begins. In Polyvagal Theory, the fawn response isn’t its own nervous system state, but describes an embodied experience of sympathetic activation (urgency, anxiety) and/or dorsal collapse (numbness, shutdown), filtered through a desperate attempt to preserve connection. It’s what happens when the social engagement system gets recruited under threat.
“If I become what you need, maybe I’ll be safe.”
Fawn can surge with sympathetic urgency—over-giving, over-attuning, self-sacrificing, flattering. performing emotional labor to manage someone else’s regulation. Or, it can sink into dorsal collapse—going quiet, compliant, docile, checking out while seeming cooperative, vanishing into the background.
But fawn isn’t just behavior. It’s grief. The grief of a self we weren’t allowed to be.
Water invites us to mourn that loss. To feel fully, without being flooded. To stop flowing outward and begin flowing inward. To sense when we’re bending out of shape to be acceptable, agreeable, lovable. Not to judge these instincts, but to honor them. To see them as sacred strategies from a time when we didn’t have another choice.
Water guides us gently back to the truth of our own hearts. It helps us feel ourselves again… our own needs, emotions, longings. And when we can feel our own emotional body without dissolving into someone else’s, we begin to heal.
Like a river breaking through stone,
we begin to flow back home.
The Waters Within: A Parts Work Reflection
Water is not just the emotion itself—it is the carrier of emotion. The internal ecosystem where feeling, memory, and meaning pool together beneath the surface. Water parts are often misunderstood. Mistaken for weakness. Pathologized as instability. But sensitivity is not the wound—it’s the wisdom.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), our Water parts are often Exiles. Carriers of pain, shame, grief, and memory. These are the parts that weren’t allowed to feel what they felt when the wound first landed. Parts that were told they were too sensitive. Too dramatic. Too needy. Too much. So they buried it. Deep.
But Water can show up in Managers and Firefighters, too. The diplomat. The chameleon. The hyper-empath who feels everyone’s feelings but their own. The part that says a reflexive “yes” when a “no” churns silently in the belly, slipping into passivity, yielding before there's pressure, abandoning self to avoid rupture. Dissolving. This is survival. A soft, saturated shutdown that says: “if I become what you need, maybe I’ll be safe.” These parts work tirelessly to keep the Exiles from breaking open.
We often think of these Water parts as obstacles to healing. But what if they are the healing? What if their form of protectiveness is not a problem, but a prayer?
Water work isn’t about flooding the system with feeling. It’s about allowing feeling to move in waves. Not riptides. Healing through water isn’t all release and catharsis. It’s attunement. Attunement is how we learn to stay soft without spilling everywhere.
This is the work: To feel without drowning. To soften without dissolving. To be moved, but not undone.
Water’s Wisdom: Signs, Symbols, and the Soul
Water is the deepest deep. The archetypes of Water are guardians of the threshold. Mystic. Healer. Grief-Tender. Dreaming in tides, remembering through sensation, healing through presence. These are the ones who carry the uncried tears of the lineage. Who find wholeness not in clarity, but in communion with what hurts. These archetypes hold our hands when we slip beneath the surface and lose our bearings. When we cry for what we never got and rage for what we cannot change. They guide us through the liminal spaces of healing between rupture and repair. Between the pain of the past and the promise of something new.
Water correlates with the archetypal realm of the unconscious, especially the personal and collective emotional body. It lives in the realm of the anima—fluid, relational, intuitive, maternal, mysterious. It flows through dreams, images, and the murky waters of affect. If Air gives us symbolic mind, Water offers psychic depth… the wellspring of felt experience that lies beneath the words we speak. It is eros rather than logos. Relatedness rather than reason. The soul’s longing to return to itself.
Astrologically, the Water signs—Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces—offer three distinct portals into emotional and spiritual life. Cancer protects the softest parts of us, teaching us how to nurture and be nurtured. Scorpio dives to the underworld, guiding us through death, shadow, and transformation. Pisces dissolves the boundaries of the self, attuning us to the sacred, the invisible, the collective field of feeling. Each water sign brings sensitivity, intuition, and healing… and each carries its own shadow: over-identification, avoidance, escapism, entanglement.
When balanced within us, these archetypes are a reminder that feelings are to be felt. And, that connection is it’s own kind of cure.
Water invites us to ask: What wants to be felt? What am I still carrying that was never mine? What would it mean to be with myself in the midst of pain—not despite it?
When we are healing, we need places to fall apart. To feel safe in our own tenderness. To cry, to remember, to mourn what we couldn’t grieve at the time. We need to be reminded that our tears are holy and know their own way home.
We don’t heal by holding it all together. We heal by letting it flow. By letting ourselves be seen, felt, and known—even (especially) in our mess.
In Water, we become intimate with our grief and allow it to change us. We become fluent in emotional nuance. Curious about contradiction. Capable of holding complexity without needing to control it. We stop rushing ourselves toward clarity or closure and learn to dwell inside the question. Inside the pause. Inside the tenderness of not knowing yet.
Water asks us to trust the tides of our truth and let it emerge in waves.
Water as Preservation and Promise
Water teaches that emotional expression is not dangerous.
In a society that pathologizes sensitivity, numbs emotion, and suppresses vulnerability, Water offers an ancient counter-medicine: we are meant to feel. Emotion is not a liability to be managed—it’s a movement to be honored. Energy in motion. A sacred tide. A message from within.
But not all emotional flow is freedom. Sometimes what looks like openness is really enmeshment. Sometimes we don’t just feel with others—we feel as them. And, we forget where we end and they begin. This is the difference between emotional fluidity and emotional fusion: Fluidity means feeling what’s here, allowing it to move, trusting that it won’t drown us. Fusion means absorbing what isn’t ours, losing ourselves in the flood, mistaking self-sacrifice for love.
Water can show us the way to stay soft and sovereign. How to hold space for others without leaking out of ourselves. To honor the truth of our emotions without needing them to define us—or dissolve us completely.
When we feel safe enough to feel again, we begin to recover the parts of ourselves that went dormant in survival. Our tenderness and intuition. The very pulse of our aliveness.
If Earth is where we root, and Air is where we understand, Water is where we remember.
We trust and allow.
We feel it all, and let it move through.
We flow on the current and let ourselves be held.
Rituals and Practices for Softening with Water
Water is about emotion, movement, and memory. These practices are invitations to feel without drowning—ways to be with what aches without abandoning yourself. May you meet your tenderness with reverence here.
Revisit an old photograph. Let the memory rise. Ask what that version of you needed. Offer it now.
Place a hand on your heart or belly. Whisper, “I’m here. I won’t leave you.” Repeat until something shifts.
Listen to a song that evokes feeling. Let it move through you. Sing along. Sway. Sob. Let yourself be changed.
Create a small grief altar. Include objects, images, or poems that honor what’s been lost. Let it be a place of return.
Soak in water. Bath, shower, hot spring, rainstorm. Let the element itself hold you. Let it cleanse what words cannot.
Cry on purpose. Give yourself permission to grieve, even if you don’t know the “why.” Let it rise… even if it doesn’t spill.
Practice pendulation. Notice a feeling arise. Then pause and ground. Return to the emotion when ready. Flow in and out like a tide.
Tend water. Set a small bowl of water in your space. Check in with it. Refresh when cloudy. Offer it a blessing or a tear. Let it hold what you can’t yet name.
Journal Prompts for Water
What do my tears say that words cannot?
What emotions feel unsafe to express in front of others? Why?
How might I honor the waters within me as sacred, not shameful?
What grief have I never given myself time or permission to grieve?
What parts of me still believe I am “too much”? Where did they learn that?
What memories still bring tears—or numbness? What do they need from me now?
What feelings am I holding back? What am I afraid might happen if I let them through?
When have I felt abandoned or unseen in my pain? What did I most need in those moments?
Water Frees as it Flows
After we’ve spoken the truth (Air), we must allow it to touch and move us. Healing deepens with Water. It’s how we soften what once had to stay hard. How we feel what was never safe to feel. So, let yourself weep when you need to weep.
You do not have to hold it all together. You can let it spill.
You do not have to make it make sense. You can let it be sacred.
Your tears are a testament. Your heart is not too much. You belong here, too.
There are stories in your body that words will never touch… but the body remembers. And when it weeps, it tells the truth.
This is the work of Water. Simply to honor what was once silenced with attuned presence. Maybe the healing isn’t in knowing why it hurt so much. Maybe it’s in letting it matter.
