Regret Is Grief: Why You Can't Let Go, and How to Finally Release It

TLDR: Regret is not a character flaw or a thinking problem. It is grief that was never allowed to move. The word regret originally meant to express mourning out loud, and when that mourning stays unexpressed, it turns inward and becomes the ache of wishing the past were different. You release it not by thinking your way out, but by letting the grief finish moving through your body, most often through sound and tears. This is the heart of the work I call grieving awake.

If you have been holding something for a long time — a loss, a choice, a version of your life that never happened — this is for you.

What is the difference between grief and regret?

Grief is the sadness for what is no more. Regret is the grief of wishing it had been otherwise. They feel similar, but they are two different energies. Grief can be clean yet bone-deep, to the marrow, and still pure. Regret carries something extra: the wish that reality had gone another way.

When you are aligned with what is true, your grief can be pure sadness for what is gone, without the second weight of regret riding on top of it. The tears still come. But they move, and then they rest.

Is regret a form of grief?

Yes. Regret is what grief becomes when it is held instead of expressed. I call it the second grief.

Here is the trap: the first grief — the sadness itself — is enough. It is real, it is holy, and it wants to move. But when we clamp down on it, when we go up into our heads to manage it instead of letting it out, it doesn't disappear. It turns inward and reshapes itself into regret which leads to rumination; the endless replay of if only,I should have,why didn't I.

And regret is a black hole. It pulls you in and you begin grieving the impossible. You are no longer grieving what happened. You are grieving a reality that never existed, a life you are wishing into being backward. That is grief for an unreality, and it has no bottom.

The way out is not to argue with the regret. It is to go back to the original grief that was never allowed to be expressed.

What is the original meaning of the word "regret"?

When regret first entered English in the 14th century, it didn’t mean private remorse. It meant to express mourning outwardly; to grieve out loud over someone who had died. Only later did the meaning move inward, into the private, psychological sorrow of wishing a past action could be undone.

Sit with that for a moment. Regret was never meant to be swallowed. At its root, it was the expression through the wail, the sound, the outward energy of grief. We are the ones who took it inward and turned it into a wound.

So when regret rises in you, the oldest meaning of the word is also the instruction: let it out. Express it. It is poison held in. It is medicine let out.

What does Mary Magdalene teach about grief?

In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, she teaches that we are not to grieve as though we doubt. When the other disciples were weeping and afraid after the crucifixion, Mary rose, embraced them, and said: Do not weep and grieve, nor let your hearts remain in doubt.

This is one of the most tender teachings on grief I know. She does not tell them to stop feeling. She tells them not to let the grief curdle into doubt, not to let sorrow become the fear that they have been abandoned, that the ground has fallen away.

We can grieve deeply and still trust. We can let the sadness be total and still know, underneath it, that we are held. The soul continues. Nothing on the physical plane is only what it appears to be. That is grieving without doubt, and it is the difference between grief that heals and regret that consumes.

What do taba, bisha, and shlama mean in Aramaic?

In the language Yeshua and Mary Magdalene actually spoke, these three words hold the whole medicine:

Taba — often translated as "The Good" means your true, natural, harmonious oneness with the Divine. It is the life-force that makes the flower bloom and the redwood grow as tall as it can. It expresses itself through you as the urge to express yourself.

Bisha — usually translated as "sin" actually means unripeness: mixing your pure nature with the illusion of separation. Not evil. Unripe. Not yet whole.

Shlama — as peace that means wholeness, completeness, unbrokenness. It is the restoration of every part of you into harmony. The old greeting shlama alakum means peace be with you, wholeness be with you, may you be restored to your natural state.

Grief work is how the unripe becomes ripe. How separation dissolves back into wholeness. How you are restored.

How do you release grief that is stored in the body?

You release stored grief by letting it move through the body the way it wants to, through movement, through sound, then through tears — rather than talking about it. Grief does not have words. It is energy of stored unexpressed feelings. That is why talking about it can leave it stuck: you are using the mind to move something that does not live in the mind.

This is why I work with sound. Grief lives in the body, and the body's language is not words — it is tone, breath, the hum, the sigh, the sound that has no shape. When you let that sound out, the grief rides it.

A simple way to begin: go somewhere private where you cannot be heard — your car is perfect. I used to scream in my car like a caged animal often. Let a sound come. Any sound. It will feel awkward and raw, because it is often the first time you have expressed yourself from a place you are not controlling. Let it rise like a volcano. It builds, it gushes, and then there is a completeness. The rage or the roar softens into tears. And you breathe. You breathe in peace. You breathe in calm.

It works up through the body, through the voice, to the tears. That is the sequence. That is the release.

Do grief tears really have a different chemistry?

Yes — research suggests that emotional tears are chemically different from the tears that simply keep your eyes wet. Studies going back to the work of biochemist Dr. William Frey have found that tears shed from emotion appear to carry stress-related hormones and compounds — including a natural pain-relieving substance — that the body seems to release as you cry.

I find this remarkable. It means your body is not falling apart when you weep. It is doing something intelligent. It is clearing the very chemistry of stress out through your eyes and calming your own nervous system in the process. This amazing contraption the soul lives in was built to grieve. The crying is not the breakdown. The crying is the medicine.

Is hyper-rationalization a trauma response?

Yes — living up in your head, over-analyzing and intellectualizing your feelings, can be a trauma response. For the highly sensitive, going into the mind is often how we survived. If the body held too much, we left it. We became the thinker, the observer, the one who could explain everything and feel almost none of it.

I lived this for years. I used to call myself a skeptical mystic — intuitive since I was a child, and also so up in my head that I was disconnected from my own body. I didn't feel it. I didn't speak its language. And when I finally learned that the hyper-rationalizing itself was a trauma response, I grieved. Because I realized I had been grieving a self I never got to be — one I didn't even fully know.

If this is you, hear this clearly: your sensitivity was never too much. It is the instrument. The head is where we went to hide. The body is the sanctuary we get to come home to.

How do I start grieving if I've held it in for years?

Start small, start private, and start with sound — not with understanding. You do not need to know the whole story of your grief before you let it move. You only need to let the first sound out.

Sit comfortably. Take a breath, and on the exhale, let your shoulders drop. Drop your awareness out of your busy mind and down into the center of your chest, where the spiritual heart lives. And then let a sound come — a hum, a sigh, a tone. Don't perform it. Don't shape it. Let the body do what the body knows.

When the next stressful or intrusive thought arrives, you can meet it with a question: Do you come from wholeness, or from separation? If it comes from fear and separation, you don't have to argue with it. You simply say: You have no substance here. And you return, gently, to the light in the center of your heart.

This is not a technique to master. It is a return. Awakening is not an arrival — it is a return to the aliveness that was always yours.

The heart of it

Grief is not the problem. It’s a powerful emotion and part of the human experience. The holding is the problem.

Regret is only grief that got held too long and turned inward. And the way home is the oldest one there is: bring forth what is within you. Let it be expressed. Let the sound out, let the tears come, and let your body do the sacred, intelligent thing it has always known how to do.

You were built this way on purpose.

If you would like to be witnessed and held while you move through your own grief, you can book a one-on-one session with me.

Frequently asked questions

Is regret the same as guilt? Not quite. Guilt says I did something wrong. Regret says I wish it had been different. Both can show up in grief, and both ease when the underlying sadness is finally allowed to move through the body.

Can you grieve something that isn't a death? Yes. You can grieve a choice, a relationship, a version of your life that never happened, or a self you never got to be. Grief is the body's response to any real loss — not only the loss of a person.

Why do people make sounds — moaning, wailing, humming — when they grieve? Because grief predates language and lives in the body, and the body's native tongue is sound. Vocalizing lets the stuck energy move in a way that talking often cannot.

Is crying actually good for you? Research suggests emotional tears help release stress-related hormones and can calm the nervous system, which is part of why people often feel lighter and more settled after a genuine cry.

What does "grieving awake" mean? It means moving through grief consciously and expressively — letting it complete in the body — rather than numbing it, rationalizing it, or letting it harden into regret.