Thank you for watching and for the comment, Luna . I'm happy to connect with you. Feeling understood makes the pains that we go through more bearable. I'd love to hear if you explore any of the practices. ~Michelle
Dearest Michelle. I too appreciate your courage in telling your story. I very much appreciate your sharing a reaction that I too felt after a devastating loss five years ago, and which I felt ashamed and inadequate about: I deeply resented my longtime yoga and meditation practice because I thought it ‘should’ somehow have inoculated me against that depth of pain and grief. I joined this online group because I actually could not go into a real-life yoga studio without feeling sobbing rage at yoga’s ‘failure’ to ‘protect’ me. Crazy, I know. I have gradually found my way back to yoga through this site and now I am looking forward to practising with you here. Thank you from the whole of my heart. This means so much to me.
Thank you for your message. Oh, how I relate to what you describe. I couldn't do yoga either! It took a long time to become friends again. "Sobbing rage at yoga's failure to protect me".... yes. I wonder if/how your practice is different than before. Stay in touch as you go through the series -- I'd love to hear how it's going for you.
Thank you for your courage and being so vulnerable with your experience. I remember your blog post about this at the time, this it seems to go deeper into it and shows tremendous strength to share. like you said, still something really charged. The hating yoga and how you resolved coming back to it is shocking to learn and an interesting perspective.
Michelle - I am in awe. Thank you for sharing this. I've worked in the fitness field for almost 20 years and as part of my grief process I turned to what I'd always done and expected healing. Didn't happen. My body said no. And this fed my anger. I had to approach "fitness" with an entirely new perspective, which demanded patience and openness when I had little of that (or so I thought). This has helped shape my perspective that through grief we create new - there may not be a "going back" to many aspects of our pre-grieving life. And that's ok too. Like you said; perhaps not grateful for the experience, but grateful to be "here". Thank you again for your generosity in sharing your story so that we too may understand ourselves more deeply.
It's funny to think of what I shared back then, mostly because I was still "in it" and could only know certain aspects. Every year reveals something different. Yes, I think many people would be surprised to hear about my relationship to yoga changing so much. It goes back to how loss can make us question everything -- is anything that I thought was true actually true? It takes time to know the answer. Thank you for being here and sharing your thoughts.
Oh my gosh, yes. And I think this just adds to the sense of loss -- now I've lost this way of being or a practice that has been a resource for so long. Thank you for sharing about your experience. It helps us all feel less weird and alone.