Whether it is dealing with apprehension about your own mortality or struggling with the loss of a loved one, yoga can help you understand and cope with death. Though grief is a natural human emotion, it is often debilitating. The wisdom behind yoga is powerful in healing both physically and emotionally and can help you deal with your pain and become whole again.
Awareness
Tim Miller, an Ashtanga yoga student for more than 20 years and certified teacher at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in India, says that yoga helps you get in touch with your true self. When fluctuations of consciousness cease, and you are able to tap into your soul and find your "essence," this is called drastuh or "seer." All aspects of yoga are designed to help you discover this inner light.
Through yoga, you can begin to understand that there is an awareness within you that is both unconditional and eternal. Miller explains that this is crucial in preparing for death because it helps us to distinguish between the "seer" and the "seen." All things that are of temporary existence are part of the "seen." These include your body, mind and emotions. Yoga helps keep your sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) in good condition so that you are able to distinguish better between the "seer" and the "seen." Once you can make that distinction, it is easier to discover the "seer" or drastuh in you, and you can understand your spirit as a seperate entity from your body.
Attachment
Attachment is a major source of grief. According to YogaJournal.com, Vairagya is a principle of yoga that focuses on nonattachment. Clinging on to something goes against one of yoga's primary truths, which is that "everything changes and everything will eventually end." If you never allow yourself to become attached to the physical things in the world, you will never experience grief. Yoga teaches us to love the spirit within the body rather than the body itself. The spirit is eternal.
Practices
Antonio Sausys, a yoga therapist with extensive training in a variety of yoga lineages, created sadhanas (practices) for clients suffering through grief. The program consists of several parts. There is a short asana routine in which clients do a series of pranayama exercises. Pranayama exercises concentrate on breathing, which is the bridge between the conscious and unconscious. Since grief is part of the unconscious, pranayama helps you tap into that. Another part of the program involves six cleansing techniques that target the endocrine system. Deep relaxation and a closing sankalpa (resolution) meditation ends the session. Most of these kinds of programs also focus on modulating the breath, easing the pain and curbing obsessive thinking.
Expert Insight
Lyn Prashant, grief counselor, massage therapist and Sivananda-certified yoga teacher says the key is to go into the pain, not run from it. Yoga helps you do this by focusing on the immediate physical and emotional experience. Don't "get over it," but "work through it." The process that she calls "degriefing" encourages her clients to use somatic therapies. She says our society views death as a failure instead of as a natural part of life. Through yoga, you can view death as something that happens every day, just as birth does.
Conclusions
Although society tells you that you are your body, yoga helps you understand that the body is merely a shell. You are your essence, the seer, the spirit. The body grows, ages and dies. Yoga is designed to keep the body healthy and strong so that it lasts, but its philosophy emphasizes that it is just the outer covering. Miller says through yoga, you begin to realize, "We are not the form we animate, but the force of animation itself." Once you understand that, death becomes significantly easier to deal with.
