Grief medicine.

On Grief, Beauty, and Impermanence

Chinese medicine says autumn is the time of grief. Leaves fall, decay begins, and we start moving toward the stillness required to fuel the next cycle of life.

In the cosmology of Elements in Chinese medicine, autumn is also associated with the Metal element.

But here’s the thing about grief: it’s sticky. Loss can be sticky. (Loss is sticky.)

We humans are forever trying to bring form back to what’s been lost. We’re so literal: “If I don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”

But grief is otherworldly. To grieve is to stay connected with something that’s no longer tangible. And that feels divine, doesn’t it? To still be connected to what’s already gone.

The lungs are the organ of autumn. They hold grief, and they also hold the reminder that we are here in our bodies. Breath is our proof of life.

But loss makes us shallow our breath.

We pay homage to what we’ve lost by lessening our own life: look at me, my inhales are barely detectable. It’s like nothing’s been lost at all.

But no matter how much we try to resist it, the exhale always comes. Inhale, exhale. Life keeps moving.

This is Metal.

It’s grief and it’s beauty. It’s being alive even when wholeness feels devastating. Because art must move you, and we are art: imperfect and impermanent, stirring up feelings, growth, and connection.

Sex + Meat Suits

Here’s where the paradox of Metal really hits. I was talking with a patient going through IVF recently, and I was talking about how my practice here in Westchester kind of formed around women going through IVF because what is more more spiritual and intimate than creating life? You are literally making a person! But the IVF process is so clinical. So the office grew out of that need for warmth.

Bringing it back to baby making, outside of IVF: the whole making a human as a spiritual endeavor still tracks, and yet how do we do that?

Through sex. Through bodies.

Through pleasure.

The most divine act is inseparable from the most physical act.

That’s Metal energy. Spirit only exists because of the body.

We need our meat suits to cultivate our humanity.

Facials Becoming Grief Medicine

When I first started offering facials, people often came in because they wanted to look more perfect. That is, after all, the language we have around patriarchal beauty standards for women.

But over and over, I say with words or actions, intimations, laughter: if it’s perfect, it’s dead.

Perfection is the pathology of Metal.

Circulation is life. Movement is life. Imperfection is what keeps us here, breathing, changing.

And people would nod, agree… (and still love how their face looked a little more perfect after the treatment.)

Because facials work on two levels. Yes, your skin shifts. Yes, the underlying structure is lifted. But more importantly, facials are deeply relaxing and physically embodying. The face is covered in cranial nerves that run straight back to the brain. All that touch, all that circulation, is like a shortcut to the nervous system. You come out the other side different.

And over time I’ve noticed that the people who came for facials most regularly are the ones in grief.

The loss of a parent. The loss of a marriage. The loss of a job. The loss of your identity in that liminal space before giving birth.

The loss, the loss, the loss.

When faced with loss, we can come home to ourselves through our faces.

Facials became a way to soften those edges. To let grief move. To let beauty come through with it.

That’s why facials have become grief medicine.

Perfection is the Death of Metal

Metal is about refinement and clarity, but its shadow is perfection: the allure of nailing something down to remain the same in perpetuity.

But Metal is impermanent. It’s the falling leaf, the lung’s last exhale, the truth that the body will end. When we freeze ourselves in perfection, we choke Metal energy.

Metal energy thrives in imperfection. The reminder that everything changes. That beauty is visible becauseof loss, not in spite of it.

Grief + Beauty

This is why grief and beauty are always linked.

Youth is beautiful because nothing has been lost yet. Age is beautiful because of everything that has been lost — and all that’s been gained in the process.

Without impermanence, beauty doesn’t exist.

Autumn, the season associated with the metal element, gets misread as an ending. The leaves fall, the branches look bare, and it feels like decay. But in Chinese medicine, that shedding isn’t death: it’s transformation. Trees actually push their energy down into their roots in the fall. What looks like loss above ground is what makes them strong enough to return in the spring.

That’s the paradox of Metal again: what looks like letting go is actually the fuel for what’s next.

Metal is contradiction. It’s breath and spirit. It’s lungs and loss. It’s beauty braided with grief.

Perfection freezes us. Circulation frees us.

That’s what facials do: they bring life back into what felt stuck, forgotten, or gone. They remind us that impermanence is not the end of beauty — it’s the condition that makes beauty possible.