Felt Sense Part Two: Narrative as Armor, & The Grief at the Center

The story does not appear out of nowhere. It rises from systems in the brain designed to protect us. The prefrontal cortex seeks order and solutions. The default mode network runs scenarios, repeats patterns, and keeps us prepared. Neuroception scans beneath it all, seven times per second, asking: safe or not safe.

These systems in us are displays of evolutionary intelligence at work. They evolved to keep us alive. Now it is our turn to evolve our relationship with them.

When we do not meet these parts with awareness, we become old scripts, rehearsed and rigid, layered with cultural and familial instructions.

Hide this.

Control that.

Stay “good.”

Over time, the story overrides the raw sensation, teaching the body how to armor itself, and eventually training the mind that this armor is our identity.

Essentially, we become so repressed that anytime anyone has an emotion, we think something is wrong and suggest they take a medication to make the emotion go away.

When we talk about repression, we have to look at the ways we internally repress ourselves; the external examples of oppression are externalized expressions of what each of us is repressing. What accumulates inside must eventually radiate outward.

And here sits grief.

Grief for the self, silenced and minimized, bending to someone else’s rules of what is acceptable, what can be felt, what counts as real.

Grief for the ancestors, for the caretakers who could not give what was needed, for the patterns passed down through families, schools, cultures.

Grief for all the ways life asks for more and we think we can’t meet it, just because we are afraid we don’t deserve to be here, and for the ways fear and scarcity shape choices, even when abundance is present.

Grief rises in the chest, pools in the belly, heats the face. The story rushes in to smooth it over, but grief is not a problem to solve. It is a tether, a thread back to what is alive.

We get it from all sides: biology bracing, culture reinforcing, conditioning stacking layer upon layer. Armor on top of armor, energy folded back on itself, it's no wonder life can feel claustrophobic and stagnant at times.

The cost of not noticing our sensations is that we carry the double weight of repression and disconnection, unaware that it is optional, unaware that grief can be felt and witnessed without being acted on or judged.

Grief, when met, teaches us.

It opens a space to soften around what is happening right now, to feel the weight of history and our own choices. It does not demand solutions or action, it demands recognition, presence, and a willingness to stay with what is.

In staying with it and our felt sensations, we can see where the story has taken over, where the armor has hardened, and where life might finally be met again in a more honest and expressed way.

Grief is both the weight and the compass, showing us what is real, what matters, and what we have been avoiding.