onthemat
Yoga and Grief
It Can Get You Through The Worst of Times by Yael Flusberg
G
etting up the mojo to find your mat can be daunting on many days, but it is mission impossible in the midst of grieving the death of a loved one. There is no way to know how long grief will stay or when it will return. Just as often, grief shows up without warning. Grief is often unresolved because we aren’t able to attend to it fully in the aftermath of death. We immerse ourselves in the practicalities, or throw ourselves into whatever it takes to survive the loss. We neither feel safe nor give ourselves sufficient space and time to grieve. I was 13 when my father died suddenly. Two years later, my mother committed suicide. My inner fighter won out over the mourner in me. This wasn’t bad; fighting saved me from the many roads I could have taken—foster care or dropping out or deeper pits of depressions. I could barely fess up to, let alone manage, the range of emotions I experienced—rage, exhaustion, disbelief, pessimism and perhaps the hardest—relief. By my mid-20s, it wasn’t grief exactly that brought me to my mat. Grief was obscured under more pressing concerns— cycles of insomnia, weekly migraines, and bouts of back pain so intense I couldn’t lift my legs high enough to pull pants over them until an hour after getting out of bed. The effects of yoga weren’t immediate. Like a slow-release vitamin, a consistent yoga practice eased my physical symptoms. In retrospect, I see that yoga also curbed my psycho-spiritual load of impulsive, obsessive and self-sabotaging behavior. That in turn led me to learn who I was, beyond the loss I had experienced and indeed, helped me, after years of practice, to be grateful for grief’s teaching. As a yoga therapist, I’m trained to look at the multidimensional nature of people I work with. That means that there isn’t a
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Washington, D.C.
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