Growing Around Grief - Creating Space to Feel Our Emotions Inspired by Lois Tonkin
At our recent retreat at Esalen, I shared a simple illustration that seemed to land deeply for many in our circle. It speaks to something we all meet at some point: how to live with grief and other big emotions, without being swallowed by them or waiting for them to disappear. I wanted to share it here for anyone who might need it.
The Jar and the Ball
In her 1996 article “Growing Around Grief,” Dr. Lois Tonkin offered an illustration that helps us understand how we can make space to be with our feelings, and even feel them, while still allowing ourselves to experience, expand, and grow in our lives.
Dr. Tonkin tells the story of a mother who came to one of her workshops. Her child had died years before, and she described her journey of living with grief through three drawings.
The first drawing showed a mason jar filled almost entirely by a single ball. The jar represents you, and the ball represents an overwhelming emotion, such as grief. Here the grief ball fills the whole jar, leaving little room for anything else. This was how it felt when she first lost her child. Her grief shaped how she felt, how she engaged with others, how she moved through each day, and how she experienced the world.
In the second drawing, she showed how she thought she was supposed to get over her grief one day. She drew three jars, all the same size, each holding a grief ball of a different size. The first ball was huge, filling the jar. The second was a little smaller. The third was smaller still. She believed her grief should keep shrinking until, maybe, it disappeared.
That isn’t how it went at all.
Her third drawing showed her actual experience. The balls never shrank. The grief was still there, always the same size. What changed were the jars. The first jar matched her earlier drawing, but the second and third jars grew progressively larger. She had expanded. She grew with and around her grief.
Little by little, as she became more able to allow herself to feel her grief, her fear of those sensations and emotions began to soften. Staying present with her hardest feelings widened her experience beyond grief, into a greater capacity to experience more of life.
Expanding Our Capacity to Feel
These drawings can help us understand how we create space to be with, and even feel, our big, hard, challenging feelings. Our emotions aren’t something to get over, like a passing flu. They are an integral part of who we are. We are not trying to inoculate ourselves from our emotions, or graduate from having them. We are expanding our capacity to experience and stay present with a wider range of human emotions.
Our emotions will come and go in their intensity. Our feelings will continue to rise and fall. They will get stirred up, swirl around, and sometimes even take over our container with their storm.
We can expect to feel engulfed by our emotions again. And we can practice remembering that we can always return to creating space, allowing them to flow.
A Gentle Practice
The next time a strong feeling arrives, try pausing for just a moment. Feel your feet on the ground. Notice your breath arriving. Allow the feeling to be here, and sense the space around it. You don’t need to make it smaller. You are simply allowing yourself to grow a little larger around it.
For more practices on meeting big emotions with presence and care, join my free Begin Again series: five days of 5-minute meditations to help you return to yourself, again and again. You can also explore these practices more deeply in The Power of the Pause.