Heaven is a Feeling
Heaven is a Feeling
A Somatic Reflection on Mood, Memory, and Spiritual Connection
When you live with bipolar disorder, grief doesn’t move in straight lines.
It spirals. Expands. Contracts.
It rises like altitude and drops like undertow, the nervous system responding long before the mind can make sense of anything.
Loss becomes a landscape.
A terrain of thin air and deep water.
A place you travel through with your whole body.
I’ve lost people I love. And every time, grief reshapes the inner world in ways that are both unpredictable and strangely sacred. Bipolar disorder amplifies this: emotions crest higher, sink deeper, and linger in the tissues like memory stored under the ribs.
Some days I feel lifted into clarity—
a wide mountaintop where everything is painfully precious and painfully exposed.
Other days I’m pulled to the bottom of a cold, quiet sea, learning how to breathe again through heaviness,
how to stay in my body when everything inside feels dim.
Clinically, this is emotional lability—the way mood, attachment, and grief collide.
But inside the lived experience,
it feels like following a voice I can no longer touch
yet still hear in my chest.
I used to think of spirituality as something above me—
a heaven, an afterlife, a place you go when the world gets too hard.
But grief changed that.
Bipolar disorder changed that.
The body changed that.
Now, spirituality feels more like sensation:
a shoreline at dawn,
a memory made spacious,
a warmth returning after a long stretch of cold.
It’s the moment the breath finally comes back
after you thought it wouldn’t.
It’s presence.
It’s connection.
It’s the sense that love doesn’t vanish,
even when the person does.
Heaven, I’ve learned, is not a destination—
it’s a feeling.
A moment where your nervous system remembers safety,
connection,
something soft and continuous.
It doesn’t require belief in another world.
It asks only that you stay in this one long enough
to feel something small, warm, and real.
Even what sinks can crystallize into light.
I think about this often—how the lowest point on earth is made of minerals rising, hardening, shining.
How the bottom of grief, the bottom of depression,
can sometimes produce a strange clarity.
Not joy—
but truth.
Not escape—
but presence.
When someone you love dies, the body continues to carry them.
In scent-memory, in breath, in the somatic pull toward what once felt like home.
Sometimes I imagine I’m following them across oceans,
or flying beside them at sunrise,
or standing with them on a wind-swept summit where nothing has been built yet.
These aren’t delusions.
They are attachment.
They are grief.
They are the nervous system trying to orient toward what was once safe.
And healing—slow, imperfect, nonlinear healing—
happens when we stop fighting the movement of grief
and let it guide us.
Up or down.
Back or forward.
Toward breath.
Toward presence.
Toward meaning.
If you’re grieving, if you’re living with bipolar disorder,
if you’re somewhere between the ocean floor and the top of a mountain:
you are not alone.
This world can feel unsteady.
Your body can feel unfamiliar.
Your memories can feel like they’re pulling you in two directions at once.
But there is a place inside you where connection survives.
Where breath returns.
Where love keeps its shape.
Where heaven isn’t elsewhere—
but here,
in the feeling of continuing on.
We breathe together.
We stay.
We keep going.
