Grieving through Yin Yoga

Yin Yoga is a passive yoga practice that emphasizes flexibility in joints and connective tissues.  Rather than working muscles, joints and connective are stretched.  This is achieved by holding poses for 3 - 10 minutes in a passive way.  I have found this to be a very powerful but excruciatingly emotional exercise.

Yin Yoga is way for me to actively connect and wrestle and dance with my physical body and emotional being at the same time.  I have always had extremely tight muscles and joints, but the emotional pain of grief has debilitated my life at times and prevented me from doing even most basic activities.  My body is hurting and most all of the poses in Yin Yoga hurt without me having to put forth any effort.  Matter of fact, the pain does not even allow me to to enter into the basic parts of most of the intended pose.  

I set Finn as my intention for yesterday’s practice. My intention was just to breath and bring my focus to him.  This turned out to be a an ideal intention as it was not difficult to lose focus on something as big in my life as him.  Plus his life and death is the root of a lot of my physical pain.

Something spectacular happened during this class. Each pose brought on new stories about Finn.  So many stories and memories from his short 4 month life came to me during these 90 minutes.  I felt joy, sadness, happiness, fear, laughter, tears,  and so much more.  During more intense moments I only had feelings or emotions.  Some of the poses were so painful that I could barely hang on,  In these times, I would just spell out his name over and over.  This session turned out to be a wonderful and powerful journey through his life.  

I left class deep in the Shadows of Grief.  I was completely physically and emotionally wasted.

That night, I had the blessing (remember up is down and down is up while slogging through grief), of twice waking up crying in my sleep with dreams about Finn.  Since most of my crying is in my sleep, I find these times to be sacred.   The next week turned into a very productive one free from the Shadows of Grief.

So, I have found something very powerful here.  Using physical release to work through emotional drama.   Yin Yoga  is an ideal way to work through physical pain to bring of emotional scars and is a new tool for me in learning to live through grief.