Let Your Yoga Dance!

Finding my unique way to honor the life, death, and meaning of my daughter, has been instrumental in my healing process. I have learned throughout my life that grief is an ocean; the waves come when they will. I can either ride them, or get washed under it. But if I don’t honor the wave, it’ll smack me harder the next time it appears. When I ride that wave, remembering to breathe, relax, feel, watch, and allow the sensations to be there, eventually the wave will crest.

One special moving meditation is the act of smiling. I made a commitment back then to try to smile and laugh at least once in 24 hours, and remember the teaching of the “Half Smile of the Buddha:” To turn the corners of my mouth up. Turning to the great Rogers and Hammerstein for help with happiness, I whistled and sang their happy tune, hoping the song would cheer me up:

Four months after Sarah Grace’s birth, I was given a CD for Christmas that contained a gorgeous rendition of an old hymn: Breathe on Me, Breath of God. It was exquisite. I listened. I danced. I sang. Over and over. I was enthralled. While dancing, I thought to myself, “This is a prayer! This is a dancing prayer, a Dance Prayer. I need to share this with all my students and trainees.”

An important book I reread during this time was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. He actually managed to find meaning from the hell of his Auschwitz years. Meaning came pretty quickly for both my then-husband and for me. After Sarah Grace was born, we took a walk around the Berkshire hills surrounding Kripalu. From that walk we created our own gift of meaning to our daughter, the Tour for Grace.

After Sarah Grace died, it was essential to surround myself with loving people who could understand that I was bearing the unbearable. My beloved friend Eileen Quinn told me she was sending a letter to the 350 Kripalu residents to tell them what they could and could not say when we met in the hallways. Together we concocted a script for them. We wrote that it was important to acknowledge Sarah Grace. She was my daughter; she had a name.

For me, one of the most important aspects of grieving is to let feelings be there, no matter how tempestuous. I remember thinking when the baby died, “I’ll never stop crying.” But if I simply let myself have my moment(s) of grief, the moment would indeed pass. Grieving is exhausting; not letting myself grieve is more so.

I recently participated in a telesummit in which I was asked to share ways that I have dealt with dark times. I decided to revisit my toughest loss, because it has reshaped the rest of my life. I’m grateful to have had this chance to look back and examine with new insights my deepest life sorrow and joy, all rolled up into one: the birth and death of my only child, Sarah Grace, 19 years ago.