The Yoga of Grief
Finding Calm Through Ancient Wisdom
About The Yoga of Grief
While grief is a universal human experience, most people are not prepared when it inevitably enters their lives. It affects the mind, body, and general capacity for daily life, leaving us disoriented and overwhelmed.
Informed by historical and philosophical perspectives on yoga, this volume offers a holistic framework for calming the mind and finding steadiness in the depths of grief. The author applies lessons from her career as a licensed therapist and yoga instructor, integrating reflections on her own lived experience of grief with her research on how the eight limbs of yoga can be tools for engaging the emotion with intentionality and awareness.
Each chapter introduces accessible practices that emphasize reflection, regulation, and reconnection. Intended for individuals experiencing grief as well as those supporting others through periods of loss, the book reframes grief as a site of transformation rather than closure, offering thoughtful integration of yoga philosophy and contemporary approaches to healing.
The Yoga Of Grief: An Excerpt
January 10, 2007
It's the date of the most defining moment of my life; one forever etched in my memory. Early that morning, my flip phone's alarm cut through the quiet. When I dragged myself out of bed to open the phone, I saw that I had fifteen missed calls and a voicemail, all from my friend in Reno, Nevada. Beau, my then on-again-off-again boyfriend and best friend in the world, lived in Reno too. A deep knowing, and a feeling of fear and dread settled into my stomach.
I knew. I knew exactly why my friend was calling me.
I knew that Beau was dead.
My heart was pounding, my hands were trembling, and I called her back.
"Beau overdosed last night," she said. "He's no longer with us."
My heart dropped, my throat clenched, and my whole world stopped.
Yet somehow, the rest of the world kept going.
What do you do when you've just been told that the person you love most in the whole world is dead? I certainly didn't know the answer to that question. I was just twenty-six years old, and grief had just become a huge and defining part of the rest of my life.
Eventually you learn that grief doesn't necessarily get any lighter, but instead that you get stronger, that you learn how to carry its weight. For me, the thing that taught me how to do that was yoga - not just the physical poses, but the full eight-limbed practice of yoga as it was originally designed. Yoga taught me how to do the unthinkable - how to relax with the terrible reality of the worst thing that had happened to me. That lesson changed everything about my grief, my life, and about who I became.
Yoga and grief? They're like two old friends who've unexpectedly met at a crossroads. Grief is that friend that feels like the epitome of chaos, the friend who shows up uninvited and refuses to keep to any kind of schedule. But yoga is that friend who's all about looking within, about finding that connection to your true self and softening life's chaos, confusion, and discomfort.
When we bring these two old friends together, we can find calm in the chaos. We can access an incredible power to transform, to heal, and to find our way through the toughest times of the human experience - not by getting rid of or moving on from our grief, but by learning how to live with it.
This is the story of how to get there.
Outside of The Yoga of Grief, Laura has created extensive resources regarding grief. You can discover them here or listen to her podcast, Grief on Purpose.