
Losing someone you love is one of the most difficult challenges you can face, but yoga's healing power and wisdom can help you heal.
How yoga helps with the grief process :
- The body is an outer manifestation of the mind.
- Grief resides especially in the eyes, throat, chest & spine.
- The poses require a concentrated mental "body-mind" effort.
- This connectedness allows the poses to "unstick" the areas affected most by sadness.
- As yoga poses stretch and tone the body our mood opens to healing thoughts and a new energy. We are flooded with our own natural chemicals. This leads to an improved mindset and sense of well being.
Easing Your Suffering
Life is suffering, the Buddha says, and even if you're not given to abstractions it's easy to see that life can be hard. The added strain of a major loss can make your world unremittingly bleak.Faced with grief, most people seek solace by drawing close to family and friends, seeing a therapist or a member of the clergy, or perhaps joining a support group. All these things bring comfort, but there are times when Eastern spiritual practices like yoga can bring healing when nothing else can.
When you're grieving, the simple fact of whatever loss you must endure is hard enough to face. Yet many of us do things that increase our suffering. We flee the moment, either by attempting to deny a reality that seems insufferably cruel or by imagining a worst-case scenario that might well never occur. We react to actual loss with fear of further loss. We convince ourselves we cannot survive the present crisis (emotionally or even physically), or that the loss is so unfathomable that we don't want to. We cling desperately to the one thing we can never have in the present moment: what is not.
It's in precisely these situations that the wisdom of the yoga tradition can be enormously helpful. Asana, breathwork, meditation—and, especially, theperspective on loss and death taught by the ancient yogis and sages of the East—can not only mitigate pain and expedite the grief process but also transform your experience of life after loss.
Learning Compassion
"We don't get to live and not lose," says Ken Druck, a grief coun selor in San Diego. "If we care about anything, we're going to experience loss." An outgoing, impassioned man, Druck knows loss intimately. His elder daughter, Jenna, was killed nine years ago at age 21 in a bus accident in India while in a semester-abroad program. Druck channeled his grief into creating the nonprofit Jenna Druck Foundation (www.jennadruck.org), which offers free support services to bereaved families. Yoga is central to the foundation's work.Two years after Jenna's death, Druck was still so emotionally wounded he was shutting down. "There were nights when I curled up into a ball on the floor, racked with pain," he says. "My shoulders were pulled in, protecting my heart and gut. And my thinking was obsessive—I was having flashbacks to the phone call telling me Jenna had been killed."
Not long after that, a friend suggested he try yoga, so Druck signed up to study with Diane Roberts, the owner of Foundation Yoga, in north San Diego County. Within the first 10 minutes of class, tears were streaming down his face. "I just let grief have its way with me," he says softly. "There was nothing to do but let it happen. I relaxed enough to breathe, and realized I'd contracted around my wound." Since then, Druck has come to value the way yoga allows grief to be expressed; today, the foundation offers yoga classes to grieving families. "Through yoga, people can learn to modulate the breath, the pain, and the obsessive thinking," he says.
Pictured above is the Black Swan, the donation based studio that I have been going to in Austin.
Visit yogajournal.com for more information about yoga and grief.
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