Blog posts

Manage your anger in grief – find peace within.

Do you find yourself sometimes angry in grief? Or grumpy? And sometimes, like a sudden rain shower, it disappears and you wonder what got you so angry?

We all experience anger at some point in our lives, and while it’s a natural emotion, it can be challenging to manage, especially in grief and loss. Anger can affect our relationships, work, and overall wellbeing.

Incorporating yoga into your daily routine – even while in bereavement or loss – can help you manage your anger and find inner peace.

Let’s take a look at a few ways tools and wisdom from yoga can help us with our anger in grief.

(more…) “Manage your anger in grief – find peace within.”

How to find courage in grief – tips to help you cope.

To say that grief can cripple you – especially in the initial stages of loss – is surely an understatement for many of us. Losing a loved one is one of the most challenging experiences we can face.

Still, it’s essential to remember that grief is a normal and natural process that everyone experiences differently. Finding courage in grief is possible, and there are ways to cope and process your grief.

Here are some tips to help you stoke your inner fire when experiencing grief:

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Come practise with me!

I am so excited to begin offering you virtual yoga practice, and I’d love for you to hear the stories behind each of the current offerings I have. Some of them are paid and some of them are totally FREE (yes, that’s right), but all of them are valuable.

And yes, just because some of them are free doesn’t mean that less planning, designing and consideration were put into them. Some of them are free (and may remain so forever) because I feel people need to know the practice offered.

Some come join me as I take you through the main offerings:

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Managing ageing parents and grief.

Grief can be caused by many things, and one of the first things I grieved for (aside from lost and deceased pets) was the loss of my mother’s health when she had her first stroke in 2005.

Eighteen years later, and the onset of dementia in 2009, and with the loss of my father recently, there has been a lot of change. Over the years, my father also developed cancer and had many causes to be in hospital. Once, both my father and mother were in hospital at the same time (different wings though, about a 15 minute walk from one ward to the next!).

What supported me?

Yoga wisdom, breath practice, essential oils, reiki practice, yoga mat practice, my pets and a supportive partner and community. I probably have missed some (many?) people / things that gave me support but definitely these are what comes to mind.

Saying that, I still care for my mother often when the helper has her day off. We are still both grieving (so is my brother) and it takes some effort to look after yourself and those around you in grief.

Here are a few things that help me.

(more…) “Managing ageing parents and grief.”

The importance of water in your grief.

Water has such a cleansing healing quality but it’s not unsurprising we tend to overlook water as a source of healing and respite in our grief. In grief, especially immediate bereavement, we experience so many emotions, amidst all the tasks we need to handle. We sometimes forget to eat, we can’t sleep, would it be shocking if we neglected hydration?

In grief, whether bereavement or other experiences of loss, we tend to be stressed, and that alone will cause stress to the body. In turn, the stress in our body will cause stress to us emotionally, and it becomes a viscous cycle.

Approximately 72 percent of our body is comprised of water (the more muscle you have, the more water you have), Water acts as the vehicle that brings nutrition and removes waste from our bodies.

Aside from that, water has a cleansing and healing effect on us. Read more to find out you need water in grief.

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How yoga helps to bring grounding when we grieve.

Grounding is a vital tool that yoga and other Eastern wisdom teaches that helps us manage our emotions and reactions to our current circumstances. In a sense, grounding helps to give us distance from what grips us, but in grief, perhaps ‘distance’ isn’t the best word to use.

No one in bereavement wants to distance from our dearly departed. No one who has lost something they loved wants to consider putting distance between them and what they have lost.

We grieve because we love, and sometimes we think if we stop grieving, we stop loving.

This isn’t true.

So perhaps a better word to use is ‘equanimous’. Dictionary.com defines ‘equanimous’ to be “having emotional stability and composure, particularly in times of high stress”.

So perhaps in our grief, we may wish to experience this, being emotionally stable and composed as we experience our grief – perhaps even watch our grief.

Here are a few things we can practise for equanimity in our grief:

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The effect of grief and loss on our chakras.

Grief and loss can have a profound impact on our chakras – the energy wheels in our subtle body that helps churn energy to help us function optimally.

Usually, a contraction of energy, or an uncontrolled expansion of energy, in any one chakra may affect other chakras as well.

Learn more about the chakras in general in the posts below:

  1. The chakras and how they affect us.
  2. Earth and water – the first and second chakras.
  3. Fire and air – the third and fourth chakras.
  4. Ether, light and thought – the throat, third-eye and crown chakras.

Grief and loss affects the various sheaths or koshas of our body. The chakras – being in the pranamaya kosha – would of course also be affected by the experience of bereavement or loss.

Watch the videos below to learn how grief and loss affect each of the seven main chakras in our subtle body.

(more…) “The effect of grief and loss on our chakras.”

How the breath helps when you grieve.

When we are in bereavement or suffering a loss, we tend to be either stressed or anxious most of the time. This emotional state that takes place in the in the manomaya kosha – the sheath just within the pranamaya kosha (click here to learn more).

The cause-and-effect of this will be a more distressed form of breathing – perhaps shallower, perhaps less full – and this will cause stress on the annamaya kosha, our physical sheath. Thereafter, it’s a vicious cycle.

Distress on one of the sheaths has repercussions on all of them. While it is totally okay to sit and experience our grief (in fact, we should), after awhile, we experience fatigue and exhausted, wondering when it will all end.

The energy / breath sheath is instrumental in distributing prana (the life force of the universe) through our body. We receive the most amount of prana from our breath. And the good news is – we can control our breath!

Our breath is one of the few bodily functions that we can either allow to function without our interference (and then it would probably reflect our emotional state), or we can consciously control. And through our conscious breathing, we can then invite more prana into our own being.

(more…) “How the breath helps when you grieve.”

What grief and loss does to our body.

Our body goes through a lot of stress and tension when we experience grief and loss. Our necks and shoulders may grow tight from anxiety, our digestive system may take a hit from having no appetite or excessive comfort eating, our hip-flexors and low back may experience pain and tension from sitting too much…

However, I am not just talking about our physical body. In yoga wisdom, we have five bodies – one physical, and four subtle – and they are called the ‘koshas’.

The koshas were revealed in the Upanishads, revealing five concentric sheaths, housed within the next, that cover our consciousness. The koshas layer from the dense physical sheath to the subtlest inner layer of bliss.

They are:

  1. Annamaya Kosha – the food sheath / physical body
  2. Pranamaya Kosha – the energy / breath sheath (or body)
  3. Manomaya Kosha – the mind sheath (or body)
  4. Vijnanamaya Kosha – the wisdom / intuition sheath (or body)
  5. Anandamaya Kosha – the bliss sheath (or body)

Keep in mind that ‘maya’ means ‘illusion’ / ‘delusion’ in Sanskrit. These sheaths or bodies are not even really real (which is true, if you think of the millions of atoms and molecules vibrating at different speeds that make up the total of us).

So let’s take a look at these sheaths, and how they affect us while we grieve.

(more…) “What grief and loss does to our body.”