Our grief comes and goes with enormous fluctuations. You might be feeling pretty good, and then that song, that scent, that remembering of what was…and your entire being dissolves into pain and loss.

A Buddhist saying that I rely on a lot: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Yoga for Living With Loss offers guidance in where, how, and why we feel the way we do and designed to give you a sense of where you are and how to navigate the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of grief. The core of this approach is an understanding of the seven chakras, the energy centers that influence our physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

Yoga for Living with Loss was born from this understanding.

In 2015, my life shifted dramatically in the span of a few short months. My husband underwent his second serious open-heart surgery. While he entered a long and difficult recovery, I was simultaneously facing devastating personal losses.

In June, my best friend and soul sister of more than forty years, Kaiya, died from glioblastoma after only sixteen months with the disease. She was 72 years old.

Four months later, my beloved sister Susie — my idol, my guide, and one of the most connected human beings I have ever known — passed away after a four-year journey with lung cancer. She had just turned 70.

I was shattered.

These were not abstract losses. These were my “go-to” people. The ones who held my history, my laughter, my grief, my becoming. Their absence altered the rhythm of my life.

I had already experienced the deaths of my parents, Seymour and Dorothy, who both lived into their eighties. Their passings were deeply painful, but there was also the blessing of long lives fully lived. The deaths of Kaiya and Susie felt profoundly different. Too soon. Too unfinished.

And yet, somewhere beneath the devastation, yoga quietly held me.

I first discovered yoga in 2003 almost by accident — or perhaps by serendipity. When my father died in 2004, I sensed that my practice was helping me survive the first great loss in my immediate family. By the time my mother died in 2009, yoga had become an anchor. Through movement and breath, I began to understand impermanence in a way that intellectual knowledge alone could never teach.

But it was the grief of 2015 that transformed yoga from a practice I loved into a lifeline.

During that time, I attended a grief-writing group at my local hospice. By then, I had completed my yoga teacher training, and yoga had become deeply woven into my life. Sitting among fellow grievers each week, I noticed something beyond our words. I saw rounded shoulders, collapsed chests, tense jaws, shallow breathing, exhaustion, and heartbreak physically embodied in every person in the room.

At the end of one session, I invited the group to gently move their bodies — simply to loosen some of the grief that had become trapped within us.

Something shifted.

Our compassionate facilitator, Ellen Frankel, encouraged me to continue exploring this work. Soon after, the hospice director asked me to offer a class called Yoga for Healing Grief.

But that title never felt quite right to me.

Grief is not a disease to be cured.

We do not “heal” from grief in the sense of returning to who we were before loss. Instead, we learn to live alongside it. We adapt. We soften. We carry love differently.

So I renamed the class:

Yoga for Living with Loss.

Years later, this work has expanded far beyond anything I imagined. Again and again, I have witnessed how movement, breath, meditation, and compassionate awareness can create subtle — and sometimes profound — shifts within grieving bodies and hearts.

Not because yoga removes grief.

But because it gives us a way to inhabit it without becoming completely consumed by it.

Grief changes us. Yoga helps us remain present enough to meet that change with tenderness, awareness, and breath.

And sometimes, that is enough for one moment at a time.

In March of 2015, my husband had his second (of more to come) serious open heart surgery. In June, my best friend and soul sister of over 40 years, Kaiya at 72, succumbed to the glioblastoma that invaded her brain and in 16 months she was gone. Then four short months later in October, my big sister, Susie had just turned 70, my idol, my most connected human being passed on from her four plus year journey with lung cancer. I was more than grief stricken….I was completely devastated.

My ‘go to’ most precious relationships were gone. My husband was deep in a long and rough recovery and my most treasured soul and biological sisters were gone. I knew the grief of losing each of my parents. They both died at 86, five years apart. Their passings were heart-breaking but yet they were in the right order. While the universe presents the ebb and flow, the loss of my sister, Susie, and my friend, Kaiya, seemed far too early in what was hoped to be their long lives.

It was by chance, serendipity, or perfectly planned that I had begun my study and practice of Yoga in 2003. My beloved father, Seymour, passed in early 2004 and I had an inkling how Yoga was helping me cope with the first loss of my nuclear family. When my mother, Dorothy, passed on in 2009, my Yoga was a source of grounding that helped me to shed my tears with a greater understanding of impermanence and the flow of birth and death.

Then the events of 2015 firmly rooted me in navigating my emotional losses through the spiritual and physical practice of Yoga. I was attending a Grief Writing class at my local Hospice. By this time Yoga had become supremely important to me and I had recently completed my Yoga Teacher Training. I saw the rounded shoulders, the tense jaws, and the broken hearts of my fellow participants. At the end of one session, I encouraged the class to move a bit and loosen the congestion in our bodies that our bereavement had encapsulated us. Our fantastic guide, Ellen Frankle, encouraged me to do more in this area and….. the seedling for Yoga for Living with Loss was planted. The director of Hospice asked me to lead “Yoga for Healing Grief,” but I renamed it Yoga for Living with Loss, because we don’t ‘heal’ from grief, it’s not a disease. We learn to ‘live with it,’ because it is now part of who we are.

It is now years later, and my study, practice, and teaching of Yoga for Living with Loss has expanded beyond any expectations. I, along with the those in my classes, have found that moving our bodies in our grief has allowed for subtle as well as major shifts. We have inhabited this space of grief where we live moment to moment and adjust to this new, unwelcome, and unplanned for world.

More at www.yogaforlivingwithloss.com

This is the intention of Yoga for Living with Loss: Navigating Our Losses Without Getting Lost. Rooted in ancient wisdom and grounded in compassionate practice, this book offers a path forward. Through gentle postures, mindful breathwork, and practices of self-inquiry, yoga becomes more than exercise for the body; it becomes medicine for the soul. It reminds us that healing is not linear and that we can hold both sorrow and hope within us at the same time.

What I love about this work is its accessibility. You do not need to be flexible, strong, or experienced in yoga to begin. You need only the willingness and courage to pause, breathe, and be present with yourself. The practices here invite you to soften into your grief, to discover stability within the body, and to open pathways for release and renewal.

It feels physical.
Heavy in the chest. Tight in the throat.
A kind of quiet exhaustion that rest alone doesn’t touch.

On those days, we don’t need a full practice.
We need something small. Kind. Doable.

Try this:

A 5-Minute Grounding Practice

1. Sit or lie down comfortably

2. Place one hand on your heart, one on your belly

3. Inhale slowly through your nose for a count of 4

4. Exhale gently through your mouth for a count of 6

Stay here for a few rounds.

Then, add a small movement:
– On your inhale, gently lift your shoulders
– On your exhale, let them drop

You might also soften your jaw
or let your tongue rest away from the roof of your mouth.

Nothing forced. Nothing dramatic.

Just a quiet signal to your body:
You are safe enough, right now.

If this is all you do today, it’s enough.

Loss doesn’t always arrive in obvious ways.
It can be the loss of a person, a role, a relationship, a sense of who we thought we were.
It can come quietly, or all at once.

And often, there isn’t a clear place to bring it.

This space was created to be that place.

Yoga for Living With Loss is not about fixing grief or moving past it.
It’s about learning how to live alongside it—with more steadiness, more compassion, and more connection to your body.

Here, you’ll find:

• Gentle, accessible yoga practices

• Simple breathwork for moments that feel overwhelming

• Reflections for the in-between spaces of life

• Support for your nervous system, in real time

You don’t need to be flexible.
You don’t need to be “good at yoga.”
You don’t need to be in any particular stage of grief.

You just need to arrive as you are.

Each week (or as often as feels supportive), I’ll share something you can return to—a practice, a perspective, or a pause.

A small place to land.

I’m so glad you’re here.

— Sheena