JOYA: 0:00

You are listening to. We Woke Up Like this and I am your host, rev Joya. This is a show dedicated to embodied spiritual awakening, and we love to talk about the messy magic of living a soul-led life. A true spiritual awakening is not all unicorns and rainbows, and on this show we are not afraid to talk about it. Your awakened frequency is the frequency that will change the world. Enjoy the show, laura. Thank you so much for being on the show today, and we're going to dive into a really deep conversation that most people don't want to talk about, and I love that. You reached out to me and mentioned the yoga of grief. So, with that, what is the yoga of grief? And tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came to form this idea around grief and death.

LAURA: 1:02

So I've been practicing yoga for over 20 years. I used to teach yoga. I don't do that anymore, but I've completed a whole bunch of different modalities of training within yoga as well. A couple of years after I started practicing yoga, I had the first of two really significant deaths. That would happen in my twenties. So my dad died when I was 21. And then my then boyfriend died when I was 26. And those two in particular more my boyfriend's death were really just shattered my world and changed the trajectory of my life.

LAURA: 1:42

And after his death, my yoga practice, my physical yoga practice, became the. I felt it at the time and now in hindsight, when I look back on it, I can see that this is totally accurate. But it became like kind of my anchor through my grief. It was the one place where I could connect with my body. I would go to like really hard, hard, active classes, but they would have, you know, kind of the slower part at the end and I would just cry in the forward folds and the hip openers and so that, as a physical practice, was the only thing for a long time that I felt like I could really like hold on to as I was navigating those very early days of grief. And then, after about a year-ish after his death, I did another yoga teacher training, which this one was a bit different than your average yoga teacher training in that it was almost a year long. It really focused on the philosophy of a yoga practice, much more than the physical part of a yoga practice, and that study was the most transformative thing for me in learning how to navigate my grief for the rest of my life. So I completed that. That shifted a lot of things in my perspective on grief and just life in general.

LAURA: 3:05

And then, a few years after that, I went to grad school. I became a therapist, wanting to work with grief Again, all of this motivated by my experiences with grief. And as the years have gone on, my evolution, I guess, of that work has just continued to shift and evolve. And now, while I'm still working as a therapist, I'm I'm working on this book titled the yoga of grief. And it's because a lot of us know yoga as the physical practice but we don't know yoga as the other elements of it, right? So it's defining that, first, explaining what all that even is, and then defining how that relates to grief, and weaving in story my personal story. I'm interviewing other people to blend their stories into it, so to kind of have it be like a handbook of sorts for grief, of just presenting a tool, just one of many tools, but a tool that we can use to navigate our grief.

JOYA: 4:02

What is the yoga? What did you find when you went exploring the philosophy of yoga? So, for people who don't know what yoga means, yeah, what does yoga mean?

LAURA: 4:28

historical yogic texts, specifically the Yoga Sutras, yoga is defined as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. So yoga is a practice that helps us to still our mind, to quiet down our mind, so that just maybe, just that could be just one answer. You know, when you're grieving and even when you're just living our regular lives, our minds do tend to be very busy, very scattered, very much attached, like we grab onto all of these. Well, what if I did this? What if this was different? Just all of these things that we can attach to and grab onto. And yoga as a practice again, both physical and non, but as a practice of learning how to slow that down and bring awareness to what our patterns are, where our mind goes, the stories that our mind creates, and once we have a greater understanding of just what our habits are in that, then we can explore how that relates to, how that relates to our grief.

JOYA: 5:20

That is so important and I have found that, you know, even though I have a really strong mindfulness practice, after my son transitioned my mind, I just noticed how it was. It changed my mind, it changed my thinking and my mind became very like it would not stop. And the mindfulness aspect of it. I realized that it was like, oh, this is making me very aware of what I'm thinking about, which I found to be so helpful so that I could immediately stop those thoughts that were you should have done this, this should have happened, like all of those should have, would have, could haves that I quickly discovered that that is a grief hole, that if I fall down it, it's going to suck me into a really dark, helpless place, because it really is a helpless place when there's nothing, there's nothing that can be done to change what is. And so that moved me quickly into acceptance.

JOYA: 6:16

But in that acceptance phase, I found my mind still looping, attacking me like it was just this really vicious place that that began to come up in my mind. And when you reached out, attacking me like it was just this really vicious place that that began to come up in my mind and when you reached out to me. I thought it was so interesting because I had just remembered at that point and I don't remember how far along I was already and I mean I'm not very far along in this journey at all but remembering to do my sound yoga, the chanting, the meditating, remembering to do my sound yoga, the chanting, the meditating, those vibrational practices that again, like you said, put you in your body and still the mind. So I really love that definition of yoga, of a practice of stilling the mind, and how do you find that that helps? And how does coming into the body help us to still our mind? What's the somatic practices behind that?

LAURA: 7:04

Yeah, yeah well, so it can be helpful or at least in my experience it was helpful in recognizing the practice of stilling your mind. First you have to become aware of what your mind's doing, where your mind likes to go. We all have broad umbrella themes of kind of like the stories we tell ourselves or the way that our minds make sense of things, and so once we can get an understanding of what that is for ourselves, typically those themes still apply to our grief and we can just start to see this as a pattern, not necessarily as a truth, but just as a pattern of what our brains do and then we can, of what our brains do and then we can. You know, one of the core practices I think that I walked away from all of this yoga study with was the practice of relaxing with what is, or sitting in something really terrible, really uncomfortable, but learning how to sit with it instead of run from it. So those were some of the themes I think that I took out of the practice.

LAURA: 8:12

But physically, we hold the emotions in our body in that our bodies respond to physically to how we're feeling, and if we're feeling something that's hard or stressful or uncomfortable, oftentimes our bodies will tighten and clench around that. So as a physical practice the yoga or any other physical practice it just helps us to move that energy and physically release the tension, because it's you know, grief is going to be hard no matter what, but it's, it can be easier to manage if our body's not fighting against it, if our body's not clenching and holding and resisting it, and if we're able to just soften into it, even if it's just by a little.

JOYA: 9:01

But softening into it makes it a little bit more manageable yeah, I like how you say a little bit more manageable.

JOYA: 9:09

Manageable yeah, I like how you say, a little bit more manageable, yeah, and then, of course, there's time, the factor of time, and our and our own self care and our own self love and honoring.

JOYA: 9:22

I love that turning toward and really honoring how I was feeling, and I and I know for me that when I, when I noticed what was going on in my mind and I and I went to work to quiet my mind by going into my body, by turning toward, and, and that, that, I think, was what kicked up all the angst in my mind, because I have a long history of running from things, and so just in this past year, I had stopped drinking, I stopped using any kind of mind altering substances, I stopped overeating, so I had stopped doing all of my go to things that numbed me and distracted me. And so then, when this came along, everything in my mind was like you need to numb, you need to check out, and when I wasn't, I found my mind attacking me and so going into my body and softening. It's exactly that it was softening, softening, turning toward, knowing I can handle what is.

JOYA: 10:08

And when I did that, I found that there was a rhythm almost to grief where I could feel it arising in my body like a wave, and if I gave myself permission to just turn toward that feeling and let it out, obviously through tears, through crying, that it would pass and then I would find like a breath would come again and I could go back into being in the present and doing the dishes and doing the laundry and being present with those things in life that still needed to be done. That I feel like that, that clenching and that avoiding, that wishing for things to be different than they actually are, is such a pain that does. It causes the body to just to harden. And what? What have you found in working with grief? Have you found the different ways? What am I trying to say here? Like the different ways that people handle it, or is there a way to soften it and turn toward it?

LAURA: 11:06

there are. There are a lot of different ways. One of the things that really resonated with me as a yoga practice and that sometimes I softening around the edges of a pose, a challenging pose. So if you're holding I mean it could be any pose, but if you're holding warrior two, for example, and you're there for a long time, your shoulders start to get tired. You know you don't. Your mind starts to say, okay, when is this going to be over? You know and you can find the little places where you can soften around that and this is a practice. But once you learn how to do that, that applies everywhere. You can do that. You can do that in any situation and learn how to soften around the edges of anything that life might bring to you, including grief.

JOYA: 12:06

So in my experience that I'm, you know, in handling this unexpected loss of my son, who was only 18, that I'm finding now that, because of my deep spiritual practices and my deep spiritual knowing from my own experiences that I've had having a near-death experience and those kinds of things, that I'm literally cultivating a different kind of relationship with him, I can feel him vibrationally and energetically. So I'm curious if you also have that experience and have spoken with people who have that experience of when we learn how to calm our mind and bring our frequency into a coherent state, that there's a different vibrational frequency that comes through, where we can feel and have experiences with the people that we love who are no longer in their physical bodies.

LAURA: 12:57

Yeah, this is one of my favorite current topics. I love this, yes, but I, yes, I have felt that since I mean it's been 18 and 20 something years since my deaths happened, and I have felt that since then it has evolved with time and changed with time, but I've felt that connection with them. So that's been something I've just been kind of observing and been curious about as all these years have passed. You know how that has shifted. But I've, as I've been working on this book, I've been interviewing people to put their stories into it, and that's a question that I've been asking people and it's been actually surprising to me.

LAURA: 13:39

I think so far, every single person has said yes. I felt that in some way, which I didn't necessarily expect. That, because I think, well, it's not something we talk about that much and I expected, if I just asked you know random people more often than not it would be no, but most people so far have. They've it's been different in how they've felt it, but they've felt it and I found that to be really interesting and really cool.

JOYA: 14:06

It is. And it's like if everything is vibrational, then when we leave this body, which is also a vibrational construct, right that when we, when our consciousness, our soul leaves this body, that it hasn't disappeared, it's still, it's on. It's on a different son that I think was. I mean, it was just amazing, and it was very early, like the first week, that I was crying in front of my altar. It was the only place I could find peace was in front of my altar, and so I was just crying in front of my altar and all of a sudden I have this vision like, like I was up out of my body and I could see these points of light shooting up around the world, of light shooting up around the world. And then I felt this feeling go through my body. That felt like.

JOYA: 14:54

I later identified it as the feeling of like, the when you're being honored by people and you feel a sense of like, reverence about that or deep appreciation about being honored.

JOYA: 15:03

And then I heard my son's voice just go wow, mom, I didn't know you had such a community. And I realized that all those points of light were people who were praying and holding in consciousness, like all my spiritual family out there who were holding in consciousness him and our family, and then that that feeling that bubbled up inside of my body was his feeling. It wasn't my feeling, it was his feeling of feeling like, because I had never experienced that feeling before. From that point of view, and so I'm curious I've been kind of researching and diving in and looking into this topic of these feeling and felt states that can, that we can pick up on vibrationally from our loved ones who have passed, and I'm curious if you've experienced that or have talked to other people who have also experienced that. That's number one, and number two is what role does being embodied play in our ability to actually be able to do that?

LAURA: 15:59

and hold that? Yeah, good, good, that's a good question. Yes, for me personally, I have felt that I remember. One particular memory that just always sticks out to me is, I don't know, it was maybe six months or so, within six months after his death, and I was driving and I just I was driving and things were normal and then, all of a sudden, I just felt like he was in my passenger seat. I just felt like a shift in the energy and I just felt that and I was like, I looked over, like hey, and it was. I mean, it sounds it's so hard to put into words these types of things, but it was something within that energy in the car shifted and I felt it and I was aware of it.

LAURA: 16:41

And I've talked with people who I've worked with who've had Similar but different experiences and stories in how they've felt that connection with their person. But I don't think this is something we can feel unless we have some degree of embodiment and some degree of mindfulness, because if we're just going through our day you know checking my phone all day and you know running from one thing to the next we're not paying attention. Our mind is always on the next thing, so we're not present in this moment, and that's where this happens, that's where these connections happen, and so I think a mindfulness practice or embodiment practice or something that teaches us how to be present, that's the doorway in through which we can feel these things and have these connections, maintain these connections with those people.

JOYA: 17:42

Yeah, and it's beautiful and it's lightened up my load of grief so much. And that's not to say that I don't miss him physically of course I do, and he's physically not here anymore, but he is vibrationally here, and I feel him all the time.

JOYA: 17:57

So I and I am so grateful for that, for for having done all of the work somatically to be present, to be in my body, and this has become also such a passion of mine now, of you know, keeping our frequency coherent and especially when we are in grief or we know grief is coming, or even if we don't, it's such a normal part of life. Let's talk about how death is a normal part of the human experience and on the wet in the West, it's something that no one wants to talk about, no one wants to deal with, but yet it's. It's as much of a part of life as birth. It's the opposite, it's the opposite right Of birth. And so let's talk about, let's talk about normalizing death and I love that you're on a mission to do that and normalizing grief.

LAURA: 18:43

Yeah, yeah, I mean when I was. I mean this was almost 20 years ago when I had my experiences and I was in my twenties. I was very young and things were different, as you know. As far as social media, as far as how much we talk about things, everything was different at that time, but I couldn't find anything in terms of support and what felt like good support. And even you know, being young and being new in my grief, I recognize that I know we're all going to die, and so I. There was some. I felt a disconnect at that time because I'm like this seems so absurd. You know that none of this exists when this is going to affect all of us. So, yeah, ever since then, it's just been something that I've haven't I don't shy away from talking about, and something that I've made a part of my life's work to to talk about it and to make that more of a normal conversation.

JOYA: 19:40

How do you know if your grieving is healthy?

LAURA: 19:43

Oh, it's a, I don't know, that's a. I think that's a hard question that comes up frequently, a hard question that comes up frequently. I hesitate to say that any representation of or any form of grief is unhealthy, because I think in any way in which it might show up, as long as it's maybe with a precursor, as long as that grief is actually being looked at or felt that it might be considered healthy given the context of whatever the situation is, I think it can. I don't even know if I would call it grief, though if we get into avoidance, if we're avoiding the grief, can we call that grief. I don't know, but that's where maybe it can get into unhealthy, depending on what you're doing to avoid it, and long-term avoidance of it can be unhealthy because then we never face it, yeah, and what you sweep under the rug, you eventually start tripping over right.

JOYA: 20:41

It's like it doesn't go away. It's still there and it will need to be looked at at some point and dealt with and emotionally healed or released. I would say you can't heal from grief. It's really something you learn to live with.

JOYA: 20:54

Yeah, what would you say to people who feel like they're stuck in grief if someone has passed away? You know, because I've had people ask me this question and I'm like this is I'm not a grief expert, I'm only going through my own experience and I realize and recognize that how I'm handling it is unusual for most people. But I get asked that question is how do you get unstuck?

LAURA: 21:16

Well, first I would be curious about, when they say stuck, what that means. People often have an unrealistic expectation of what grief is or what grief should look like. So some people that I've worked with have thought they're stuck after six months, and six months is like a blip in time, you know, that's barely anything in the grief road or on the grief road.

LAURA: 21:40

Whatever the definition of stuck is for an individual may or may not be totally accurate to what one could reasonably expect with grief, but then, you know, also looking at what their expectation or our understanding of what grief is, because we also think that we're going to get over grief one day, the world tells us that, and so we have this idea that, oh, oh, no, I'm still sad, I must be, I must be stuck or I must be doing something wrong. And so sometimes the work is in redefining what grief actually is and more figuring out ways to integrate that grief into life, into your life, as opposed to trying to be done with it and put it away and never, you know, expect that it will never be there again. So it's hard. You know, stuck is a vague word and everybody has kind of a different definition of it, but I often you know broad, broadly I often find that if somebody is experiencing that it can come from a misunderstanding or a mis-expectation of what things should look like or where they should be right now.

JOYA: 22:50

Yeah, the self-judgment piece that comes in and like when you look at life before that day and then life after that day, and then there's a part that of yourself that acknowledges life is never going to be the same.

JOYA: 23:01

So what does life look like going forward then? And I find for me that's a question that just gets answered in the moment that I'm in. It's like whatever I'm doing now is what I'm doing now and there's no. I try not to project too far into the future and setting these high expectations of what it should be. What is the purpose of your book? What kind of themes in grief are you covering in your book that you're writing?

LAURA: 23:30

Well, I think that more, as opposed to covering themes of grief, the exploration of the book, or maybe intention of the book, is really about explaining a yoga practice in a much more broad sense than just the physical practice, so explaining what that looks like and what sort of practices can be involved with that, both on the mat and off the mat practices, and then weaving that into grief, so explaining, okay, how does this concept, how this applies to grief and how we can practice that. So it's more, I guess, the conversation, more about broadening our understanding of yoga than necessarily any particular aspect of grief, but just weaving in those personal stories, as I said, and other people's stories into it as a way of highlighting and, I guess, illustrating how these practices can apply.

JOYA: 24:27

And I love that because as many, for as many people who are in grief is a way to handle that grief right that there's no one right way and like you said earlier, what we do on the mat transfers and carries over into our life. That when we soften and turn toward in the discomfort in our physical body when we're doing a physical practice, that we can then recognize that discomfort in the body that comes up in different places and be able to turn toward and soften that. And that is such a key.

LAURA: 24:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really just a practice for life. I mean, I'm talking about it through the lens of grief, but, but this applies to life too.

JOYA: 25:06

Yeah, because life is life is life. I've always looked at the definition of yoga as union with the divine, because I practice not yoga which is sound, yoga which is vibrationally attuning with the frequency of the divine and coming into that space. For me, in this healing journey of, of, of redefining who I am as a mother who has lost a child, you know that this is a big. It's a big thing in life. It's a big thing that's. That's knocked me off of my course, of where I was going, for sure, and but coming into those practices where I can find that stillness and be able to come into that place of stillness is something that I'm so, so grateful for.

LAURA: 25:54

To have that practice to come into, yeah, yeah, and in my experience at least, it's only through that stillness, creating a place, uh, and a space where that stillness can exist, that the connection with the divine, whatever that means, can can happen. So yeah, in different words you could say this yoga is the connection with the divine. But there's a certain you can't just, you know, say I'm going to connect with the divine. There's a way you have to kind of get there.

JOYA: 26:23

I can't just snap my fingers because I have to go through the process of stilling my mind, stilling my body, just being with what is noticing, what's arising, all of those kinds of things. Laura, when are you expecting your book to be out? Number one and number two are you still looking for authors or people who want to submit to your book?

LAURA: 26:44

Yes, so, um, the book is probably at least a year out, because I'm still finishing these, these interviews, and then it will be submitted to the publisher and then it'll be. It can take up to a year in their hands, so so it's still a little ways out. I am still looking. I have, I think, the most of the live interviews scheduled, but I do have written interview forms that I am still looking for people to contribute to that. So, yes, if anybody is interested in just giving some written answers, that's something that's still available.

JOYA: 27:21

Wonderful and where can people submit to that and to submit that for your book and find you to fill out the information?

LAURA: 27:28

Let's see. I think the best way to contact me would be either through my website or through Instagram. So my website is griefonpurposecom and then Instagram is griefonpurpose.

JOYA: 27:43

Okay, and of course, I'll have the links down below for anybody who wants to contribute to this very important conversation. And and I love that it gives messages of hope and healing that life does like we do go on with our lives, living with grief. This becomes something that we live with and I'm learning that I don't have to suffer in my grief and it's not something that I have to carry with me so much as it's now a part of who.

LAURA: 28:09

I am.

JOYA: 28:10

Yeah, that feels softer yeah.

LAURA: 28:13

Yeah, I like that perspective a lot. That resonates with me too.

JOYA: 28:18

Yeah, yeah Well, laura, thank you so much for the beautiful work that you're doing in the world and bringing forth this topic of conversation and giving people stories and tools and ways of processing and processing their grief coming into their bodies and finding those ways to cultivate and develop those relationships now that we can have with people who've transitioned out of the physical body and into their light body, their vibrational body, whatever we want to call it. I just think that's just probably the most beautiful work, such sacred work, that you're doing so, thank you.

LAURA: 28:52

Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you for having me and talking about this topic.

JOYA: 28:56

Absolutely, absolutely. It's so important, it's such an important topic and, yeah, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you for listening to. We Woke Up Like this. Your likes, comments, subscribes and reviews are deeply appreciated. If you're interested in being on the show, please send an email to podcast at vibologycom. And until next time, remember your authentic frequency is the frequency that will change the world.