One of the things Weller speaks about with particular clarity is how the absence of love can slowly shape our inner world. When the care, affirmation, and mirroring we needed are missing, we often turn the explanation inward. Instead of recognizing the absence as a loss, we begin to assume that the problem must be us.
This is the terrain where shame grows.
Shame has a way of crystallizing around those early absences. It can harden into a sense of self-doubt, into the belief that we are too much or not enough, into the quiet conviction that we must constantly earn our worth. Over time, that shame can take deeper root, shaping how we move through the world and how we relate to ourselves.
Weller writes that this kind of grief, when left unacknowledged, can lead to what he calls a kind of premature death—not necessarily a literal one, but the gradual narrowing of a life. A life where parts of ourselves go underground. A life where vitality is constrained by self-protection and self-judgment.
For many people, myself included, that’s exactly what it feels like.
Not dramatic collapse, but a slow erosion of aliveness. A quiet disconnection from joy, curiosity, tenderness, and self-trust. A life shaped by trying to avoid rejection or criticism rather than moving freely toward what nourishes us.
When I think about the Second Gate of Grief, this is often the first place my mind goes: the grief of what shame has done to our sense of ourselves.
But there is another place where this absence of love often lands with particular force.
Our bodies.
For many of us, our bodies are one of the places that have not known love.
In a culture steeped in fatphobia, appearance policing, and constant comparison, we are taught early that our bodies must be controlled, corrected, and judged. Instead of learning to inhabit them with curiosity and care, we are taught to monitor them, measure them, and evaluate them.
Over time, this can lead to a profound disconnection.
We stop listening.
We override hunger and rest.
We ignore signals of pain or exhaustion.
We treat the body as something that must be managed rather than something that deserves relationship.
In the language of Body Trust®, this is a rupture in relationship with the body itself.
And when I think about Weller’s Second Gate, I increasingly recognize that this too is a grief worth naming. The grief of the tenderness we never offered our own bodies. The grief of the years spent believing they were problems to solve rather than homes to inhabit.
Many people I work with carry this grief quietly. They speak about the decades spent fighting their bodies, restricting them, judging them, or wishing them different. Beneath those experiences is often a deep sorrow—not just for what the body endured, but for the relationship that was never allowed to grow.
The body was never meant to be an enemy.
It was meant to be a companion in living.
Grieving this rupture can be painful. But it can also be profoundly healing. Because grief has a way of reopening the places where love might return.
To grieve the ways we abandoned our bodies is also to begin imagining another way of being with them.
One that includes tenderness.
One that includes listening.
One that includes trust.
If the Second Gate of Grief invites us to mourn what never came, perhaps it also invites us to begin speaking gently to those places within us.
To the parts of us that lived without love for a long time.
To the parts of us that learned shame instead of belonging.
To the body that carried us through all of it.
I sometimes call what follows a meditation, and sometimes I call it a prayer.
I don’t mean prayer in the sense of asking something outside ourselves to fix what hurts. What I mean is something older and quieter than that — a way of speaking toward the soul, the body, and the life that moves through us. A way of pausing long enough to acknowledge what has been true, and to offer something different where love was once missing.
Meditation and prayer, at least in this sense, are simply forms of attention. They are ways of turning toward the parts of ourselves that have been ignored, shamed, or pushed aside, and allowing them to be seen.
As I’ve been sitting with this gate of grief, I’ve also found myself returning again and again to a passage from Dana Sturtevant and Hilary Kinavey’s book Reclaiming Body Trust — a piece called “I Am a Person Reclaiming Body Trust.”
Something about that language moves me deeply. Not I have perfected this. Not I finally love my body all the time. But I am a person reclaiming body trust.
It names this work as a return, a relationship that can be rebuilt slowly, imperfectly, and over time.
To reclaim body trust is not only an act of healing — it is also an act of grief. It asks us to acknowledge the tenderness our bodies did not receive, and the ways we were taught to turn against ourselves in order to belong.
So in that spirit — inspired by their words, and by the sorrow this gate invites us to feel — I want to end with something like a small prayer.
For the parts of me that did not know love,
may sorrow be allowed.
For the body I judged, ignored, or tried to control,
may there be patience.
For the years shaped by shame and self-doubt,
may there be gentleness.
For the ways I learned to betray my own hungers,
my needs, my rhythms, my aliveness,
may there be forgiveness.
For the body that carried me anyway —
through every attempt to abandon it,
through every season of disconnection —
may there be gratitude.
And for whatever in me is ready, even now,
to begin returning home,
may there be space.
Grief does not only mark what was lost.
Sometimes it marks the moment when we begin, slowly and imperfectly, to offer love where it was once missing.