By Dr. Bev Walpole – Clinical Psychologist based in Guelph & Founder of Haven Wellness by Design

Today was one of those mornings where the heaviness arrived before I even opened my eyes. The kind of day where the cold feels sharper, the quiet feels louder, and the absence of my kids — mothering from afar — echoes in places I don’t always want to look. As a clinical psychologist in Guelph, I talk often with women about moments like this, but living it in my own body always brings a different intimacy.

Grief, I’m realizing, doesn’t ask for permission. It arrives like weather: sudden, insistent, honest.

For years, like so many women moving through anxiety, burnout, ADHD tendencies, or the invisible load of motherhood, I pushed past feelings like this. I muscled through. I performed strength instead of feeling what was true.

But not today.

Today, I practiced what I teach.

I turned toward the ache instead of outrunning it — not because it’s comfortable, but because it’s the only way through.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy teaches us that emotions lose their destructive power when we stop wrestling them. Tara Brach calls this Radical Acceptance: the suffering comes not from the emotion itself, but from the belief that we shouldn’t be feeling it.

So today, I softened.

I cried.
I let the ache belong.
I let the moment be exactly what it was.

And what happened next surprised me.

I watched a film about the poet Andrea Gibson, and in it they shared a reframing that landed in my bones:
Every overwhelming feeling — grief, fear, heartbreak — is love. Literally.

What hurts is what we love.
What breaks us open is what reminds us we are alive.
It made my tears feel purposeful, not punishing.

Research backs this too:
When we allow emotion without judgment, the nervous system doesn’t rupture.
It reorganizes.
It settles.
It heals.

Even Pema Chödrön echoes this: stay with what is. Let the heart remain open. Different frameworks, same wisdom: whether we’re navigating grief, OCD spirals, or the anxious buzz that so many women carry.

After sitting with the grief most of the day, I could feel something shifting in my body: that unmistakable pull toward movement, release, heat.

So I went to hot yoga.
Late, naturally.
Ambivalence is truly a full-body sport.

And in the chaos of rushing in, I forgot a sports bra.
Which meant I raw-dogged the entire class — me, my emotions, and gravity doing her best to humble me.

Weirdly, it felt like the perfect ending.
Messy.
Honest.
Human.

Healing rarely arrives tidy. It arrives as movement, tears, breath, sweat, laughter, surrender.

The same way healing often unfolds in the work I do with women’s mental health, design psychology, and the ways our environments shape our nervous systems.

Not because it was easy.
But because I didn’t run.

Because I remembered that grief isn’t a sign something is wrong, it’s evidence that we’re alive, connected, capable of enormous love.

If you’re moving through something big right now—anxiety, grief, life transitions, motherhood from afar—I hope this lands gently:

You don’t have to rush your feelings.
You don’t have to hide them.
You don’t have to fix them.

Just turn toward yourself: slowly, compassionately, bravely.
There is so much healing in simply staying.

Sending warmth today,
xo Bev