The Year of Tower Moments: Finding Wholeness Through Grief, Loss, and Letting Go

The Year of Tower Moments: Finding Wholeness Through Grief, Loss, and Letting Go

There are years that feel like steady ground, and then there are years when everything we thought was unshakable begins to crumble. This was my year of The Tower; and she didn't just bring with her one moment, she brought with multiple. 

I lost my sweet Oliver, my boss and the most pawfect companion for my client sessions, I lost my favorite Uncle, who I spent my first moments in Arizona with, lost my beautiful Aspyn and another family cat. I lost multiple relationships I thought I’d keep building, and we haven't even mentioned the amount of illnesses (emotional purging) i've experienced this year. I also lost this very business. The EmBodhi Shakti that I had poured myself into, at least in the form I had known it. Unsurprisingly, with it all came the waves of deep grief and tears that I thought would never end, financial strain, the sting of shame, the haunting thoughts from the parts of me that wondered if life was too heavy to keep carrying.

The Tower doesn’t ask permission to fall. It doesn’t wait for us to be ready. It topples, and we are left in the rubble, learning to breathe through dust and ash. But what I discovered is this: the Tower is never the end. It’s an initiation.

Now let's talk about grief as a teacher...

We are taught to fear grief, to rush through it, to “move on.” But grief is not an enemy. Grief is a teacher, a guide who invites us to feel where life has touched us most deeply. This year, grief has sat at my table every day and continues to do so. At first, it felt unbearable. I wanted to fix it, escape it, override it, shove it into my closet of skeletons and yet, the more I resisted, the louder it became.

Through parts therapy and hypnosis, I learned to meet the voices inside me; the part that didn’t want to live, the part that feared shame, the part that panicked at financial insecurity. Instead of exiling them, I listened and what I discovered was that they were not here to destroy me, but to protect me in their own misunderstood way.

That is the paradox of grief: in the darkness, it shows us where love lives. We only grieve deeply what mattered deeply.

Then comes the beauty I began to see through the pain...

Somewhere in the midst of all the loss, destruction and collapse, I found something I wasn’t expecting: beauty. *insert shocked a.f. face* 

Not the soft, Instagram-filtered beauty. Not the kind that pretends suffering isn’t real. But raw beauty; the kind that cracks your chest open until you finally see yourself clearly. I have never felt more whole, more free, more understanding of myself than I do now. Because I stopped fighting the pain and instead I let it breathe. I let it speak. And in surrendering to what was, I found myself. I began to write again, to paint again, to bake again. I began to be one with nature and all the beauty she offers. And wow, is there a strange, exquisite beauty in realizing that life does not require our control to unfold perfectly. That relationships don’t need forcing. That clients arrive when we are embodied, not when we perform. That the business that burned down made space for one that feels like home.

This is the alchemy of pain: when we let it transform us, it reveals a depth of life that no bypassing could ever touch.

I eventually found freedom in letting go...

One of the greatest lessons I carried from this year is the liberation that comes with release.

We live in a culture obsessed with grasping; onto identities, outcomes, timelines, and stories that keep us in cycles of suffering. We cling because we are afraid of the unknown, but the body knows when it is tired of gripping. The nervous system longs for exhale, for spaciousness, for surrender.

When I stopped forcing relationships, I discovered relationships that could breathe on their own.
When I stopped pushing for clients, I found resonance with the ones who were truly meant to be here.
When I stopped demanding that my business look like “success,” it revealed a deeper wisdom: it wanted to be reborn. 

This is what I want every woman who reads these words to know:
Letting go is not weakness.
Letting go is power.
Letting go is nervous-system healing in its most embodied form.

Now, it's your turn to answer the call..

I don’t share this just as a story of my year, but as an invitation into your own.

• Where are you holding onto what is already asking to fall away?

• What beauty might be hidden inside your grief if you let yourself look?

• Which parts of you are longing to be heard, even if they terrify you?

You don’t have to have the answers yet. Sometimes the only step is to sit with the question. To breathe, to allow and to trust that the body will reveal when it is safe enough to release.

The Tower's gifts...

If this was the year of Tower moments, it was also the year of initiation.

Because as everything fell, I found myself. Not the version of me that performs or the version of me that hustles for worthiness, but the woman who can sit in the ashes and still see the beauty of the sky. Grief didn’t take me out; it gave me back to myself.

And so I ask you: what if your grief isn’t the end, but the doorway to your most embodied, surrendered, radiant self?

The Tower will fall whether we want it to or not, but maybe the falling is not destruction. Maybe it is the sacred clearing, so that we can finally come home.

With love and deep gratitude,

Brittany