Coaching practices for Awe and the Small Self After a Loss

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • For a little while right after something takes my breath away, the stuff I’d been stressing about genuinely feels smaller and farther off
  • In the moments something vast cracks me open, I feel this soft pull toward everyone and everything
  • When something makes me feel tiny against how huge the world is, my reflex is to flinch and grab back control, like feeling small is a threat to fend off
  • Everyone keeps telling me to move on and get over the loss, but the grief is huge and it won’t go
  • I feel small and stuck inside my own head, looping on my own problems, and I want something vast enough

Practices that may help

  1. Awe and the Small Self
    Dacher Keltner’s research shows that awe — the response to something vast that exceeds our current frame — reliably produces the "small self": a felt diminishment of individual concerns that is experienced as expansive rather than deflating. This shift reduces self-focused rumination, increases prosocial behavior, and expands the sense of available time. The core effects are well replicated; the neural and downstream health claims are more preliminary.
  2. Write from a small-self perspective after awe
    After an awe experience, write briefly from the perspective of someone whose personal concerns feel appropriately small.
    Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical
  3. Use awe to reconnect with something larger than yourself
    When awe makes the self feel small, follow the natural impulse toward belonging — toward community, nature, or humanity at large.
    Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical
  4. Courting the small self
    Seek experiences that make you feel small in a good way — and notice the relief in it.
    Awe Walks, and the Science of Wonder
  5. Treating grief as a form of gratitude
    When something ends and you feel grief, recognise that the grief is proportional to the love — and let it be both.
    Mono no Aware: The Pathos of Things
  6. Seek out awe as a broadening and self-transcending emotion
    Awe expands perceived time, reduces self-focused thought, and increases prosocial behavior — and it can be deliberately accessed.
    Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
  7. Deliberately invoke the small-self shift
    Seek an encounter with something genuinely vast to let your personal concerns be re-proportioned.
    Awe and the Small Self
  8. Reframing loss as transformation
    When something ends or is lost, practise asking what it is becoming rather than only mourning what it was.
    Zhuangzi and the Practice of Perspective Shift
  9. Look honestly for what has grown or changed for the better
    Without minimising the loss, notice any growth, change, or perspective that has emerged from it.
    Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical
  10. Havening to soften acute grief activation
    Use gentle touch and brief distraction to lower the physiological intensity of grief surges.
    Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch

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