Why Yoga for Grief?

Pain in the world right now is palpable. Grief and loss surround us. We feel the effects of loss and confusion as we struggle to navigate daily uncertainty in the harrowing, ongoing thick of a global pandemic. We sense heated waves of anguish emanating from impassioned protests. We feel and recognize urgent demand for changes to unjust systems. We sense the deep generational sufferings at the heart of it all. In the midst of all this collective pain, you may also be experiencing your own personal anguish. Your heartache may be due to the death of someone dear, the loss of that which is so precious. You may be trying to manage loss, grief and trauma uniquely your own. The universe is all but insisting that we become more intimately acquainted with our own pain and with the pain of those crying out around us. 

Finding ways of acknowledging and expressing what’s going on inside is crucial to moving through, processing and integrating grief and trauma. Just as grief is an experience that affects us physically, mentally, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually, yoga sustains and strengthens us in all of those same areas. Yoga in all its forms is about finding our way to our true nature, which is wholeness. 

All of yoga is about honoring where we are in each moment, expanding and contracting as we heed the wisdom of our own containers—the container of body, mind, emotion, energy, wisdom and spirit. Just as grief is not one way or one thing, neither is yoga one thing or one way. There are multiple yogic paths. Yet all paths of yoga lead to the same place, to the space and place where we recognize our essential wholeness. Yoga allows us to see all the various pieces and parts of ourselves as unified and to recognize that we were never really separate in the first place. It helps us to remember (and to re-member) those parts of us that we forgot were One. Yoga helps us to realize and remember that we were never separate and can never be separate, from ourselves, from our loved ones, from all of humanity, from our planet, from Spirit. We are one with something much larger than ourselves. 

My own experiences have shown me how the practices of yoga can serve to bring us from broken, scattered, and shattered spaces back to the place where body, mind, and spirit can be unified. The essential teaching of yoga is in fact that we are always whole. Even when we don’t feel it, yoga says that we are; we are whole in pain and grief as well as in joy and happiness. Grief, loss, heartbreak, and trauma make it very hard to see this truth. 

Grief and trauma impact every aspect of our being; physically, mentally, cognitively, emotionally, spiritually, and philosophically. Yoga and its practices can support us in being with and moving through the effects of pain and grief in each of these same areas. The practices of yoga address self-care, help to integrate experiences of loss, and support feelings of creativity, connection, and relationship. Where grief, loss, heartbreak, and trauma can separate and destroy, yoga unifies and creates.

Join me with Project Yoga Richmond on November 14-15 as we create a safe space where you can be exactly who and where you are, with compassion and non-judgment, to experience the multiple ways that the practices of yoga can help you remember (and re-member) your wholeness. It may feel scary to think about purposefully spending time with grief and heartache, but as we ease into our most tender spaces, with as much compassion as possible and as little judgment as possible, we begin to know we can trust ourselves in those shadowy spaces. We also learn to trust in our ability to emerge again into the light. We learn we can breathe through the hurt, allow it to be and to move. We learn we can depend on our own strength. We see that we can go safely into the dark and back out again—still whole. Again, and again. This is the gift of yoga in grief.