The Ocean Refuses No River
- Taylor Deacon King
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
“The ocean refuses no river” echoed through the room as my peers and I sang this at our psychotherapy graduation.
It imprinted itself on my heart and shaped the way I feel about grief.
Perhaps grief – in all of its heart-breaking, heart-opening glory – is coming home to life.
To open ourselves up to the river, and let it flow.
The question is: will we let ourselves be carried?
(As a brief interlude, this song deeply connected me to the words you are about to read. If you’d like to make this experience even more immersive, I invite you to listen to it as you continue)
Grief is a natural process of re-adjusting to life after loss.
Not just readjusting the heart’s longing, but our whole nervous system’s expectation, anticipation, and memory.
Grief is therefore an acceptance of Life as it is, even if that ‘as it is’ is more painful than we wish to bear. Grief is, in many ways, the doorway to Life itself. “To live well is to grieve well”, my teacher Lee says.
I'm coming to see that some of the most valuable work we need to do as humans is grief work.
Not only when we lose someone or a relationship.
But also, the love we didn’t get; the needs that were unmet; the boundary that was violated and the version of ourselves we lost in that moment; the costs of the environment we lived in or the skill we didn’t learn; the worldview that shattered in an act of terror and horror; the opportunity we missed; the potential we never fulfilled.
All of the times life asks of us to recognise something that was lost. That wasn’t there. That was different from what we expected or needed, we need to re-adjust and reorganise our internal system.
I see it all the time, in myself and the people I’ve worked with, how natural it is to fear, avoid and suppress this natural re-adjustment process.
“It happened so long ago, I should be over it by now”
“If I feel that it might consume me”
“I don’t have time to breakdown”
“If I can just be perfect enough, attentive enough, good enough, then maybe I won’t have to feel the original pain”
“I’m scared what will happen if I let it in”
How is it that this natural process can be so scary?
….Because it brings us into contact with the fullness of Life.
There’s something powerfully terrifying about being cracked open – to the unknown, to surrender, to feeling, to the depth of our care and love and all we’ve lost.
Grief holds our most intimate yearnings. Our deepest loves. Our unmet needs. Tender, young parts of us. ‘Life’ as it ‘Is’.
Our coping strategies, our avoidance – our resistance – are like an intricately built dam, exhaustingly pushing the river’s water upstream, tirelessly, and painfully keeping it at bay.
However, this resistance is also the threshold guardian to acceptance. The part of us that simultaneously whispers, “Not yet” and “How much do you want it?”.
“How deeply do you want to love; how fully do you want to live?”.
All of our hearts hold a treasure chest of loss. The beautiful violence of life. The threshold between what was and what will be.
Even years or decades later, we may still need to recognise and move through this readjustment process.
As a therapist, I would never force someone toward their grief.
In fact, I acknowledge the intelligence of the strategies that have protected us from what once felt – or does feel – too overwhelming, too much. I find myself there, again and again.
Grief has many faces for a reason, right?
Denial, anger, bargaining, numbness, relief, even joy.
Less spoken about are the many faces of coping strategies we adopt to resist the river - the perfectionism, self-sacrificing, caretaking, overachieving, avoidance, and distraction. Each one valid in its attempt to cope. Each one a way of trying to metabolise what we cannot yet fully hold. What we cannot yet fully grieve.
When I sense grief, I acknowledge that it’s there – waiting for us to slowly circle towards it when we’re ready.
Our protection, our resistance, our strategies to cope don’t mean the grief isn’t there. It’s waiting with arms wide open, like the ocean’s eternal embrace, even when it feels like arms ready to drown us.
I’m noticing how much of my own personal therapeutic work is grief work, even when we call it ‘somatics’, EMDR, talk therapy, or parts work.
Recognising, feeling, expressing the parts of me that didn’t get to. That didn’t feel safe to. That were in opposition to my protective strategies. That got frozen in time because I felt I needed to cope, get through, be okay.
Our culture often asks this of us. To be okay. Cope enough. Breakdown politely.
We’re given a narrow script for grief. A few days, perhaps weeks, off work if someone passes, a moment of empathy when a relationship ends, both with an unspoken pressure to “move on” and “stay strong”.
Anything outside that – grieving a childhood you never had, a parent who was there but not really there, a part of yourself you’ve banished in shame and self-hate, the loss of a future you anticipated – gets labelled as stuck, as too much, as too dark and spidery and taboo. We even do it to ourselves.
Sometimes we need to work through the hardened walls of stories built around grief to get there.
Sometimes the sensation of grief pours out – through our eyes and throat – fierce and unstoppable, like raging rapids.
Sometimes we don’t even realise we’re grieving until someone gently points it out.
Recently, I was speaking with a dear friend of mine:
“I just feel like I need to grieve this, once and for all. Why am I so bad with this?”
And his response touched me:
“Grief isn’t a one-time cry and then you’re over it. It is a process, and it looks to me as if you’re doing it, right now”.
Being reminded of this – that grief, this natural reorganisation process, was already happening – can shift something.
Many of us are waiting for permission to grieve “properly”, or to grieve and be done, or avoid grieving at all, when really, we’ve been doing it all along… just not in a way we’ve been taught to recognise or welcome in.
Grief as a process, not bound by time or human-made deadlines.
Bringing awareness and consciousness to this process can make it feel more intimate, and maybe even, more bearable, like a gift we’re giving ourselves.
Permission. Presence.
So, grief is something I’m opening consciously to more and more in myself, and inviting in with the people around me.
Just recently, the river called for me. I was listening to the song I shared earlier, and instead of building the dam higher, I wanted to allow the river to take me into it’s flow. This poem is what surfaced.
This is what it felt like to let the river flow:
they say drowning is peaceful
but when my heart first swells with the tide of loss
my lungs constrict and gasp in desperation
as the shore-break, unforgiving,
pulls me under.
just a natural cycle, they say,
the waves,
and from below, I see how
if i just find the stillness
the sun pierces the water’s surface
and god’s rays penetrate my willing eyes
but this stillness is elusive
and my body screams for air
too afraid to exhale
as if this might be the last
so I tumble and thrash
I tumble and thrash
I tumble and thrash
still in the whitewash
grasping for a hand that never catches mine
instinct wills me to fight
but my heart yearns for the white flag of surrender
and when i do,
just like the sun is destined to rise and fall,
my body is carried to the shore
and countless grains of sand
so naturally caress my panting body
I plead for them to take me,
consume me,
with the hunger of quicksand,
but they merely hold mein their knowing silence.
Silence
silence summons warm, salty tears
like river streams
until they too kiss the ocean’s surface.
nestled in the heartbeat of this union,
drumming since time first begun,
the melody reminds me
that the ocean refuses no river,
and maybe, just maybe,
this river of grief
is the river of life itself
Grief is an invitation.
The river is already flowing. It always has been.
The question is: will we let ourselves be carried?
Take care,
Taylor
Check out the reel Taylor posted on instagram where she chats about this a little more:
About the Writer - Taylor King
As a holistic therapist, I am passionate about supporting you to reconnect with and become who you truly are.
This means living a life that feels truly authentic, fulfilling, and aligned with your values - rather than feeling ruled by patterns, relationships, emotions and experiences that keep you feeling stuck or disempowered.
To support you in this, I draw from a variety of evidence-based and trauma-informed modalities, including talk therapy, parts-of-self work, narrative therapy, somatic healing, and mindfulness-based practices.
Whether you’re wanting to understand and shift repeating patterns, tend to experiences that still feel tender or unresolved, strengthen your relationships, or cultivate more self-compassion, emotional balance, and flow - our sessions can support you in doing this deeper work.
I work with people navigating:
Developmental trauma
Anxiety & self-esteem struggles
Perfectionist & high-achieving tendencies
Patterns that keep you feeling stuck or disempowered
Relationship difficulties, with self or others
Grief, change & transitions
Difficulty with boundaries
Addiction
Visit my website to learn more about me, or book a session with me via the Community Clinic.
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