When Grief Burns: Reflections from Puerto Vallarta
The Destructive Side of Grief
A Week Later
It has been a week since the cartel descended from the mountains behind Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. They were stealthy, organized, and efficient. I joked with friends that it was as if they clocked in at 8:00 a.m. and clocked out at 6:00 p.m., because those were the hours the mayhem unfolded—and nothing more happened overnight.
If you are living in a hole and have no idea what happened here in Puerto Vallarta and in other areas of Mexico, first I want to say, “Good for you!” If I didn’t live here, I likely wouldn’t have known either. I try not to pay attention to the news, but nowadays that is a tall order.
The official report is that President Claudia Sheinbaum organized the raid and eventual execution of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes (aka El Mencho) early Sunday morning, February 22, 2026. This led to a systematic and well-organized retaliation from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, of which he was the leader.
(Footnote: I am not saying I agree with this, but this is the official statement here in Mexico.)
Smoke on the Horizon
I woke up to smoke, car bombs, and gunshots in the distance. Around 9:00 a.m., after a friend called and told me not to go outside, I went to the rooftop of my building and saw dozens of small fires surrounding us.
She said, “Are you home? Please don’t leave. The cartel is here. It isn’t safe.”
It was a quick call, but it was enough information to send me upstairs to see this scene unfold:
My first thought, after the initial shock wore off, was: “This is grief. They lost their leader, and they are grieving.”
Many would call that an insane amalgamation of this situation, but I would suggest that when you get to know grief, you recognize it when you see it.
The Nature of Grief
Grief is destructive by nature. It is the deconstruction of what was.
Grief is accompanied by a flood of emotions that cause huge waves of action, inaction, and sometimes surprising creative inspiration. A dear friend once reminded me of something I told her: “Grief is love with nowhere to go.”
The cartel dedicated their lives to “El Mencho” and were willing to give theirs to his cartel if need be. This is far beyond what most people can fathom. Would you die for your boss? Likely not. But several of them did—along with members of the Mexican military—last Sunday morning.
Before I go further, I will say this: no civilian lives were lost. No tourists were kidnapped, despite some media portrayals. Property was destroyed. It was a show of force.
Try to remember the last time you experienced grief. What was your first reaction? Denial? Control? Anger?
Usually, shock comes first. Then there is a burst of action—either organized or haphazard—followed by a period of depression or sadness, with many other emotions in between. There is no true map for grief, but as waves of emotion flood the system, energy rises and falls accordingly.
Anger can become red-hot and highly activating. Shock can be erratic and unpredictable. In some, shock is debilitating. In others—particularly those who have acted in traumatic situations out of survival—it can produce hyper-focus.
Each emotional state carries its own energetic fingerprint, but there are always high-energy moments and low-energy moments.
Systematic Destruction
The fall of a cartel leader is expected just as much as the dominant lion of a pride will eventually age out of his commanding role. The cartel was clearly left with orders when this happened:
bomb cars and buses to create blockages to the major traffic arteries of our territories to keep the military out.
Bomb the OXXO’s and other choice businesses but do not hurt anyone.
Show our power, even in the absence of our leader.
My commentary on this is not a political statement, I am sharing what I observed here, in the middle of it. I am not placing blame or alleviating it, I am just sharing an observation on the systematic fall out of lives lost. Whether it be a Cartel member or military, they are all trained soldiers and they exist in a hierarchy. They lost their leader, some of their friends and comrades and they reacted.
Nervous System Training In Action
I have interviewed many people in the US Military over the years, on and off camera. They have to disengage the debilitation of shock and keep moving. They train for this. They run drills for this and they often give their nervous system over in service to their missions. I interviewed a retired Navy Seal named Joel Lambert, years ago and one thing I found shocking was that he was considered 100% disabled by the military. His training debilitated his system to the point that he was declared fully disabled. He shared that he walked the perimeter of his property each night with a rifle. He said,” isn’t that normal?” I shared, “no, sometimes I forgot to lock my doors.” We laughed but when you are trained to act while death, destruction and mayhem surrounds you, your system is different.
Part one of our interview is here:
Emotional Rehearsal and Control
For those who, like my former self, believed they were non-reactive and aware of their emotional control, there is a path between grief’s destruction and your action.
In college, while earning my degree in Humanistic Psychology, I remember feeling struck by lightning by a single idea:
“What if we are simply rehearsing emotions from the past rather than actually feeling them?”
I was also pursuing a dance degree, and I regularly put myself into emotional states on stage and in rehearsal. It occurred to me then that I was, in fact, influencing my emotional states.
Years later, after a PTSD diagnosis and several losses, I felt less in control. I found myself aligning more with Joel’s hyper-vigilant perspective.
At the end of the day, grief exists on a continuum. PTSD exists on a continuum. In my view, they are closely related evolutionary adaptations.
If we do not learn to process and alchemize emotion, we may find ourselves perpetually “on patrol” in our own lives. After the loss of a leader, loved one, relationship, career, or home, old wounds can compound current grief.
Our work is to dismantle the blocks we have erected—not to double down on the blockage of our own emotional systems.
Part Two: Alchemizing the Divide
This is the end of Part One of this commentary.
In Part Two, I explore how to reconcile the divide that loss creates in the mind and body through hermetic practices. I share a specific practice to help mitigate the challenge of unresolved grief using active imagination and transmutation.
If you would like to read that practice, join us by subscribing for free.
What a beautifully written essay.
This stayed with me. Waking into smoke and sirens, then standing on the roof watching small fires ring the horizon, feels almost unreal, like the nervous system trying to decide which reality it inhabits. You let the moment breathe instead of sensationalizing it, and that restraint makes it land harder.
What struck me most is your framing of retaliation as grief moving through a system trained for violence. Not excusing. Not sanitizing. Simply recognizing that when a hierarchy loses its center, the shock wave travels through bodies, loyalties, and conditioned responses. Grief as energy searching for form. Grief as love with nowhere to go. That lens invites witnessing rather than the reflex to flatten everything into good and evil.
Your reflections on nervous system training and hypervigilance deepen the piece. Trauma conditioning does not remain on the battlefield. It lives in the body. It shapes perception and narrows the field of safety. Placed alongside your own experience, it builds a bridge between individual grief and collective response that feels both sobering and clarifying.
I also felt the power of your restraint. You describe what you saw without forcing interpretation, trusting the reader and creating space for contemplation rather than reaction. In a moment when fear narratives spread faster than facts, that grounded witnessing becomes a form of coherence.
There is a quiet courage in choosing observation over outrage and reflection over certainty. The piece holds fear, complexity, and compassion in the same frame without collapsing into any one of them. It lingers in the body the way real events do, echoing long after the noise fades.