The Healing Power of Grief Yoga
5 Minute Read
Photo by Ginny Rose Stewart on Unsplash
Healing with Grief Yoga
Full disclosure here. I’m not one who practices yoga easily. I make attempts every now and then to try it out again, and most times, I decide that it’s just not for me. That said, I am such a believer in the power of yoga and I watch friends, family and colleagues benefit immensely from this practice.
So, I decided to take a workshop given by the renowned Paul Denniston, creator/founder of Grief Yoga.
I wanted to experience for myself the power of this particular yoga practice to help heal grief. I also knew that I would want to then recommend it to the clients in my grief counseling practice.
And, what I found was that Paul Denniston has the greatest grief yoga practice ever.
Paul Denniston, founder of Grief Yoga
Here is the theory of Grief Yoga, as Paul Denniston explains it so profoundly:
In order to live, we must all experience loss. Life includes suffering and grief is our response to it. Losing someone or something we cared about brings grief into our mind and spirit. And that sadness and anger gets stuck in our body. As challenging as it is to deal with such suffering, the grief is actually incredible self-knowledge that can be used as fuel to open ourselves up to more love.
Grief Yoga combines many forms of yoga to help release grief to connect us to the gift of life.
If we are alive, we experience loss. When we are suffering, feeling grief is our response. Losing someone or something we cared about brings about grief in our mind and spirit. When it isn’t expressed, sadness and anger can get stuck in our body because the body remembers.
As challenging as it is to deal with such suffering, grief can bring us self-knowledge, the fuel we can use to open ourselves up to more love.
What Is Grief Yoga?
Grief Yoga uses yoga, movement, breath and sound to release pain and suffering and to reconnect back to love. It combines many forms of yoga, movement, and breath techniques to help students process grief and use it as fuel for transformative healing.
This practice is centered on emotional liberation. Students become aware of the present moment and where they hold struggle or pain in the body and mind. This compassionate space helps express and release struggles through movement, breath, and sound in exercises and flowing meditations.
The intention is to open the heart and connect to the soul with dance prayers or laughter exercises that connect us to joy. Students can surrender in order to let go of pain and reconnect to love and the gift of life.
Branches of Grief Yoga
There are six branches of grief yoga as follows:
Hatha Yoga: This focuses on physical postures to help students stretch, extend and relax. It helps create balance and grace as the spine straightens and the heart opens.
The practice eases back pain, improves breathing disorders, and heart conditions. It increases body awareness of where stress gets stuck and how to relieve muscle strain.
Vinyasa Yoga: This is a sequence of postures that stretch and flow, using synchronized breath. The movement is smooth and flows together like a dance.
Focus on the breath is key, as the student moves from one pose to the next on an inhale or an exhale.
Kundalini Yoga: This is an uplifting blend of spiritual and physical practices that help build physical vitality and increase consciousness. This transformative practice uses kriyas, breathwork, meditations, and chanting mantras to awaken and connect to intuition. Kriyas are a specific set of exercises that generate energy to deliver a greater sense of awareness as you awaken to your higher self.
This powerful practice helps to strengthen your nervous system, balance your glandular system, purify the body, calm the mind, and connect you to the fullness of who you are.
Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash
Let Your Yoga Dance: This is a sacred, tribal flowing experience that blends yoga, movement and chakra fusion. You use breath and movement in the seven energy centers of the spine to create liberation, empowerment, and joy.
This magical yoga dance helps people surrender and shake off sorrow, moving through sadness or anxiety. Dancing has immense healing powers to inspire and energize us to embrace self-expression and celebrate life and love.
Laughter Yoga: This uses laughter exercises as a form of movement that mirrors daily life and offers incredible health benefits. Laughter can be a medicine to help deepen the breath and allow the flow of emotions to move through.
The practice follows a mind-body approach to laughter that doesn’t focus on jokes or humor, but rather on exercises to strengthen the immune system, bring more oxygen into the body and brain, and help connect to a childlike playfulness.
Laughter Yoga helps students connect to the present which can free them of regrets from the past and anxieties about the future so they can enjoy a simple state of being.
Restorative Yoga: This is also known as yin yoga, which is a series of nurturing postures that allow a gentle approach to stretch, calm the body and quiet the mind.
This restorative practice can be deeply healing when dealing with trauma since your body eases into a pose and remains there for a period. These postures are practiced by using bolsters, blankets, and blocks so students can experience the benefits of a pose without having to exert effort, creating a gentle approach to healing.
Try yoga for your grief
Many of his Grief Yoga classes can be taken online. And yoga instructors can enhance their practice by taking his teacher training programs. I strongly suggest a visit to Paul’s website www.griefyoga.com and obtain a copy of his book too.
This just could be the way in which your grief starts to heal!
To add grief counseling to your healing, schedule a complimentary 30-min consultation to see if I can help you work through your grief.
