Grief in Chinese Medicine: How Loss Lives in the Body & Heart
One year ago I lost my soul dog, Rufus.
Anyone who has loved an animal knows they are never just a pet. They become family, routine, comfort, and home. When Rufus crossed the rainbow bridge I wasn’t prepared for how deeply grief would move through me—not just emotionally, but physically.
As a doctor of Chinese medicine, I have spent years sharing with patients that emotions aren’t simply “in our heads.” They live in our bodies and shape our physiology, influence our cells, tissues and organs—and ask to be experienced rather than suppressed. In fact, suppressed emotions can (and often) generate a disharmony that invites physical disease manifestations.
Over the past year, I came to understand that truth in an entirely new way.
How Chinese Medicine Understands Grief
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), every emotion is connected to an organ system. Grief belongs to the Lungs.
The Lungs govern respiration, immunity, the skin, and our relationship with both receiving and letting go. Every inhale invites life in; every exhale is an act of release.
When grief is overwhelming, we often see it reflected in the body:
Tightness in the chest
Frequent sighing or shallow breathing
Lowered immunity and repeated illness
Coughs and colds
Fatigue
Loss of appetite
Changes in sleep
A sense that it’s difficult to “let go”
These aren’t simply emotional symptoms—they’re deeply physiological. Chinese medicine reminds us that emotions are embodied experiences which should be seen and honored.
My Body Carried My Grief
After losing Rufus, my body spoke before my mind could fully understand what had happened. I was definitely in a psychedelic shock for weeks. I woke from restless sleep crying after dreaming of him. My appetite disappeared. My immune system faltered more than it had in years. I experienced recurring colds and coughs—my lungs were weakened by my grief. Textbook.
As practitioners, we often explain to patients that grief affects the Lungs—I knew this. I have seen this in countless patients going through a grief journey—sudden cough, bronchial colds, chest tightness and deep weariness. Living through it myself gave those words an entirely different meaning. The somatic experience of grief was visceral. It wasn’t something I could think my way through. My body had to feel it, process it, and slowly integrate it. The repeated illnesses were like a barometer of my grief experience, a total physical manifestation.
Even though I was laid up on the couch and a bit miserable, the physical experience validated my grief and confirmed what I’d been taught twenty years ago in school!
The Medicine That Kept Me Upright
Throughout this past year, I kept returning to the thread that has guided me for so much of my adult life: Chinese medicine.
It reminded me that healing isn’t about pushing through, nor can its pace be controlled. Any healing is nonlinear and grief certainly is too. I surrendered to the flow, feeling grief’s own energy move through my body, sometimes quite forcefully and other times like a gentle nudge. I became attuned and learned to listen to it and meet it. But this didn’t happen in isolation.
I embraced community more deeply than ever before. I allowed friends to show up for me. I accepted and sought support from healers and my somatic therapist—who gently held my hand through the hardest moments. I rested without guilt. I received a lot of acupuncture (the perks of being married to an acupuncturist). I nourished myself with warm foods when my appetite was low, and also enjoyed ice cream when my heart needed soothing.
Chinese medicine gave me permission to honor grief instead of rushing to move beyond it. This was a journey of tending myself in a way I had never before.
The Unexpected Gifts of Grief
Grief is a strange teacher. It arrives uninvited, tears through the life you knew, and leaves you standing in the wreckage wondering what's left. And yet, somehow, it also gives.
It gives proof of how deeply you loved—because grief this size doesn't happen for things that didn't matter. It sharpens your sense of what's fleeting and what's worth holding onto, often stripping away the noise of daily life until only the essentials remain: connection, honesty, presence. People who have grieved often speak of a new tenderness toward others in pain, a recognition that passes between people who've been through the fire.
Grief can also return you to yourself. In the quiet after loss, old certainties fall away, and sometimes what grows back is more honest—a life built less on habit and more on intention. It can crack open a kind of gratitude that wasn't accessible before, not despite the pain but because of it: an acute awareness that time and people are not guaranteed, and so neither should be taken lightly.
None of this makes grief good, or makes the ache worth it in some tidy equation. The gifts don't erase the cost. But they can coexist with the pain—quiet companions that, in time, help carry what feels impossible to carry alone.
As the months passed, I began noticing a shift (sometimes with a bit of persuasion) and began to see beauty everywhere. Amidst the pain there were butterflies dancing in my garden. Cloud formations took on new shapes and colors. Wildflowers just being their vibrant self on the side of the highway.
And more rainbows than I can remember seeing in my entire life. (Thanks, Rufus.)
My heart still ached. But somehow, alongside the ache, there was a profound sense of fullness. Grief had not only broken my heart open—it had expanded it.
The Heart’s Role in Healing
While grief is rooted in the Lung system, Chinese medicine teaches that our ability to experience joy, connection, love, and meaning belongs to the Heart. The Heart houses the Shen—our spirit, our consciousness, and our capacity to be fully alive. Perhaps this is one of grief’s greatest paradoxes. When we allow ourselves to feel heartbreak fully, we also become more capable of experiencing beauty fully.
The same physical heart that aches can become more available to wonder, gratitude, connection, compassion. Grief isn’t erased, it can’t be. But it teaches us how to hold both sorrow and joy at the same time, which is reflected in the foundation of Chinese medicine principles: balance.
TCM has always understood what many of us eventually discover through lived experience: the human heart is expansive enough to contain both.
One Year Later
One year later, I still miss Rufus every single day—I always will. Why my socks are still on the floor and not balled up in his mouth as he runs through the house confounds me. How every fire engine that speeds by with its siren blazing isn’t met with his howl, bewilders my heart.
But through this, I can also feel what this grief has given me. It has softened me and opened up my tender insides. It has made me a more compassionate practitioner. It has deepened my trust in the body’s wisdom and reinforced what I have always believed: healing doesn’t happen through avoidance. It happens through presence.
My hope is that if you’re grieving—whether the loss of a beloved animal, a person, a relationship, or even a version of yourself—you know this:
Your body is not failing you. It is carrying your love. And when we support the body with rest, nourishing food, healing therapies like somatic or acupuncture, herbs, community, and compassionate presence, something remarkable begins to happen.The grief doesn’t disappear. But over time, it transforms into tenderness and wisdom. Into a heart that has learned it can break—and still remain beautifully, courageously open.
Here’s to my greatest teacher,
Rufus ❤️
