Yoga for Grief Relief is a somatic psychotherapeutic process using specific Yoga techniques as somatic tools to address the physical, mental and spiritual symptoms of grief towards self re-identification following an important loss. For two and a half years, I lived in a state of denial, completely disconnected from my feelings. When I was finally able to be with my pain, I discovered, to my ast
onishment, that my body had created an additional calcium deposit between one of my ribs and the breastbone—what the body will sometimes do in response to a fracture. In essence, what my mind had been hiding, my body showed with pristine clarity: I had a broken heart. As life continued after the loss of my mother, I began training with Lyn Prashant, an outstanding grief counselor and therapist and creator of the Degriefing process, a comprehensive mind-body approach to grief therapy. She helped me learn that grief is one of our least-tapped sources of self-knowledge. Sometime after starting to work together, Lyn asked me to develop a yoga prac- tice to address the body-centered effects of grief, which can range from feelings of lethargy to dull aches, tightness in the chest cavity, shortness of breath, and sleeplessness. I was well equipped through my training as a somatic psychothera- pist and yoga teacher. But it was my own personal experience of grief that led me to build a sadhana, or spiritual discipline, that eventually became a holistic practice I call Yoga for Grief Relief.
