Practice Is What We Have When Life Gets Real: On Yoga and Grief
Recently, my father passed away following complications after open heart surgery. He had gone in to have his aortic valve replaced. After surgery, due to other underlying health conditions, he was never able to come off sedation. Over the course of several days, it became clear that his body was not going to recover in the way we had hoped. As a family, we made the most loving and difficult decision we could, to withhold further medical interventions. He passed quickly and peacefully, with us by his side.
Nothing about this experience is something I could have ever fully prepared for. And yet, in the midst of it, I found myself returning again and again to my yoga practice.
The present moment
One of the most immediate ways yoga supported me was by bringing me into the present moment. In times of grief, the mind naturally wants to travel backward into memory, or forward into fear, anticipation, or imagining all that our deceased loved one will miss. But neither place offered much relief. The past felt heavy with the weight of memories and regrets. And a future without my dad felt uncertain and sad.
The present, though, held a kind of spaciousness. Watching my dad’s health decline and his life slowly slip away held such a heavy and contracted feeling. Those last few days in the hospital often left me feeling like I couldn’t breathe. Yet there was something ethereal about returning to now, even for a few seconds at a time. This is often how I feel during my meditation practice, like my body and mind have expanded into a peaceful, perfect space. Not needing to fix anything. Not needing to solve any problems. Just sitting in the peace of the present moment.
Clarity
Yoga also helped me see more clearly when decisions needed to be made.
In situations like this, there is no perfect roadmap. Only information, intuition, love, and time-sensitive choices. Years of practice taught me how to pause inside the intensity, to notice when fear was speaking, when clarity was present, and when I was grounded enough to respond rather than react.
That steadiness didn’t make the decisions any easier. But it did make them clearer. And clarity, in moments like these, is its own kind of compassion.
Making space for grief
Grief is not something to “move through” quickly. It is something to allow.
My yoga practice has taught me how to sit with discomfort without immediately trying to change it. Through meditation and stillness, I have learned how to stay with emotion as it rises and falls, without abandoning myself or beating myself up in the process.
Through āsana and movement, I have also learned that emotions are not just mental, they live in the body. They move. They shift. Sometimes they need breath, sometimes they need stillness, sometimes they need to be expressed through movement. Practice gave me a place where all of that was welcome. Through prānāyāma, meditation, and āsana, I have the tools to work with my emotions and let them move in me.
Practice is preparation for life
My dad was one of the biggest basketball fans I have ever known. He loved the game deeply.
I know that in a big game, what a player relies on isn’t just instinct and talent, it’s what they’ve built through repetition. The preparation, the conditioning, the countless hours of practice that become something they can trust when things get intense.
In basketball, you don’t walk into the fourth quarter and just hope you can make the winning shot. You trust your conditioning. You trust the hours of drills, what you’ve learned through all of the shots you’ve missed in the past, the free throws you practiced over and over again when no one was watching, the muscle memory that carries you when pressure is high and you can’t think straight.
Yoga has felt like that for me. Every time we step onto the mat, we are doing that same kind of preparation. We are training the breath to stay steady when intensity rises, training attention to return when it drifts, training the nervous system to remember safety and presence even in discomfort and fear.
We don’t get to choose when life becomes the fourth quarter. But we do get to choose how we’ve practiced for it.
Every time we step on the mat, we are practicing for something bigger than the class itself. We are training our attention. We are building resilience. We are learning how to stay present under pressure, how to breathe when things feel uncertain, how to return to center when we are pulled off balance.
We don’t always know when we will need those skills. We just know that life will ask for them.
And when it does, we don’t start from zero.
We return to what we have practiced.
Final Thoughts
I don’t share this to make my grief seem resolved or neatly tied up. It definitely isn’t. But I do share it because I have come to trust, deeply, that practice matters. Steady, consistent, committed practice matters.
My dad understood this in his own way through his work as a carpenter. Over a lifetime of hard work, he refined his skills through repetition, attention, and care. He didn’t rush solutions or overcomplicate problems, he trusted what he had learned through years of experience with his hands, his tools, and the materials in front of him. He helped me with so many projects in my old house, a house built in the 1800s that always seems to present its own set of surprises and challenges. No matter what we uncovered behind the walls or under the floors, he met each situation with steadiness. When challenges arose on a job, or in my old house, he didn’t panic or freeze. He drew from a deep well of past practice and found a way through, steadily and skillfully, one decision at a time.
That way of working is what I recognize in yoga. Every time we step onto the mat, we are building that same kind of embodied intelligence. Over time, repetition becomes a resource. Our practice becomes something we can rely on when life becomes uncertain.
On the mat, we practice for life so that when the pressure is on in the fourth quarter, we can step into it with the skills we’ve built and finish the game with steadiness, knowing we have everything we need to meet the moment.