This March, I turn 50.
Fifty years in this body. A body that has carried pregnancies and miscarriages, and parenting three children, one of which had a rough start with serious medical challenges, the loss of my beloved father, a near-fatal hiking accident, a cancer diagnosis, seasons of anxiety, seasons of strength, and the quiet daily work of staying open when it would have been easier to shut down. This is also a body that has sat in hospital and therapy rooms for decades, holding the stories of grieving parents, widows, children, siblings, and helpers. A body that has listened to heartbreak without turning away.
I did not always know how to stay soft. I had to learn.
Grief has been one of my greatest teachers. Somatics has been my greatest tool.
Not only the visible grief, funerals and diagnoses, but the invisible ones too. The loss of health. The loss of safety. The loss of who I thought I would be at certain chapters of my life. The loss of certainty. The loss of the imagined future.
LIGHT Movement was born from that lived understanding. After decades of sitting with grieving families as a therapist and years of teaching yoga, I kept witnessing the same truth. People could tell the story of their loss, but their bodies were still bracing. Their breath stayed shallow. Their shoulders hovered near their ears. Their sleep was fractured. Or they felt numb, disconnected from themselves and from others.
Talking matters. But grief is not only a story.
It is a physiological experience, a story held in the whole body.
It lives in the nervous system. In the racing heart. In the clenched jaw. In the heaviness of exhaustion. In the fog. In the startle response. In the moments of shutdown.
That is why LIGHT began in the fall of 2023, to create spaces where grief could be met in the body. Not pathologized. Not rushed toward “closure.” Not bypassed with platitudes. But gently supported through movement, breath, rhythm, ritual, and connection.
People have joined LIGHT for so many reasons.
Because they lost a child and the silence in their home feels unbearable.
Because they are parenting a child with a life-threatening condition and live in constant anticipatory grief.
Because they lost a spouse and feel disoriented in their own kitchen.
Because they lost a family member or friend to suicide and carry guilt in their chest.
Because they lost someone suddenly to overdose, accident, or violence and never got to say goodbye.
Because they miscarried or experienced infertility and felt their grief minimized or dismissed.
Because their pet, their daily regulator, died and the house no longer feels the same.
Because an affair shattered trust and they are grieving the marriage they thought they had.
Because divorce changed the shape of their family and their sense of identity.
Because chronic illness changed their relationship with their body and the life they once imagined.
Because a cancer diagnosis, theirs or someone they love, altered their sense of safety and peace.
Because trauma, discrimination, or marginalization eroded their basic sense of safety in the world.
Because they are LGBTQ+ and navigating grief in spaces where their identity or relationships are not always affirmed or protected.
Because they are grieving estrangement from a parent, child, or sibling and carry both love and distance.
Because addiction has taken someone they love, slowly or suddenly.
Because they experienced job loss or financial instability and lost security, purpose, or stability.
Because retirement brought unexpected loss of structure, identity, or meaning.
Because they are empty nesters and the quiet feels heavier than they expected.
Because they relocated and lost community, familiarity, and belonging.
Because they left a faith tradition and are grieving spiritual home and certainty.
Because aging is changing their independence and their confidence in their body.
Because they lost a sense of who they were after caregiving, career change, burnout, or chronic stress.
Because their loss was disenfranchised, not publicly acknowledged, not honored, or quietly dismissed.
Because their grief did not fit cultural expectations and they were told to “move on.”
Because they are helping professionals who are exhausted from holding everyone else’s sorrow and have forgotten how to tend to their own.
Every story is different. Every nervous system carries it in its own way.
And when we gather, something ancient happens.
When we move slowly together in grief-informed yoga, something softens. When we hike side by side, breath syncing without effort, something regulates. When we journal after rhythmic bilateral movement, words rise more gently. When we sew pieces of a quilt together, hands working fabric, thread pulling through cloth, something deeply human emerges.
Each square tells a story. Each piece represents a loss, a memory, a name, a season. Alone, the pieces feel small, fragmented, tender. But when we stitch them together side by side, they become something that warms all of us.
That is somatics.
It is not about exercise. It is about integration.
When our bodies move rhythmically, when our breath deepens, when we feel safe enough in community, the nervous system begins to settle. Polyvagal theory gives us language for why this works. The Window of Tolerance helps us understand what is happening. But what truly changes us is the experience of being regulated together.
Grief is love that has nowhere to go. Somatic practice helps that love find new pathways, not by erasing the loss, but by expanding our capacity to carry it.
As I turn 50, I also reflect on the risk it took to build LIGHT. Volunteers have given thousands of hours because we believe this work matters. Not because it is easy. Not because it is profitable. But because every single human will grieve. It is the one human condition none of us are immune from.
And yet, alongside grief, there are glimmers.
Small moments of light that remind us our nervous systems can soften. A shared laugh during a hike. The warmth of tea held in quiet conversation after class. A hand resting gently on a shoulder. The steady rhythm of breath moving in a room together. The hum of voices sewing pieces of a quilt, fabric becoming story, story becoming connection.
Our volunteers are extraordinary. They are people who have known profound loss and still choose to show up for others. They facilitate circles. They teach classes. They light candles. They move chairs. They sit beside someone who cannot yet speak. They also work tirelessly behind the scenes. They support marketing and outreach so people know they are not alone. They help with fundraising so we can keep our offerings accessible. They manage operations, logistics, emails, registration lists, and all the invisible details that allow this work to exist. They give their professional skills and their human hearts.
They hold space not because they are untouched by grief, but because they are shaped by it.
We are all stories of grief. And we are all stories of LIGHT.
LIGHT is not the absence of sorrow. It is what happens when sorrow is witnessed. It is what happens when nervous systems regulate together. It is what happens when we allow both the ache and the glimmers to coexist.
At 50, what moves me most is this community. People who understand that healing is not about erasing loss. It is about expanding capacity. It is about finding moments of safety again. It is about noticing the glimmers, even in the midst of heartbreak, and letting them gently widen the window of peace.
This is why we keep going.
Because grief is universal.
Because connection is biological.
Because even in our darkest seasons, light finds its way in.
In the natural world, elephants return to the bones of their dead, gently touching them with their trunks. Crows gather and call out when one of their own has died. We are wired for this kind of collective witnessing.
LIGHT feels like that to me.
Fifty does not feel polished. It feels woven. Woven from love and loss. From risk and resilience. From community and courage. From all the pieces of fabric that could have stayed separate but instead were stitched into something strong.
If LIGHT has touched your life through a class, a retreat, a training, a solstice ritual, or a quiet moment of shared breath, I invite you deeper.
• Take a class or ask us to provide a workshop.
• Volunteer.
• Donate. Maybe consider $50 in honor of my 50th. Donations would all go to programming to ensure financial access to our classes, retreats, and trainings.
• Consider a training in somatics or becoming a grief and trauma-informed yoga teacher with us.
Help us continue building spaces where no one grieves alone.
This birthday feels less like aging and more like integration.
The girl I was.
The woman I became.
The losses that shaped me.
The community that surrounds me now.
Thank you for being part of this journey. If curious, you can read more about it in How the LIGHT Movement Began.
With gratitude, peace, and love,
Amy