Inwardly I believed we are immortal. Death happened to other people. Until one day it happened to my people. The reality settled upon me, when after 3 months I understood finally that I could no longer reach out for hug or have a conversation with my person, who was 18mths my junior, it broke my core. I scratch at the bottom of the bucket labelled “reasons” and found none. There is no justification, no karmic law or no cause, no religious or philosophical reason why death took her. It should have been me, but why would it have had to be either of us? Could death not give both of us both a free pass for just a bit longer? Worse still, where has she gone? Her energy forever lost from the surface of this planet, what did it transform into once she left her body? There was no contact from the other side, she is simply gone.
I squashed up all these questions together with my grief, my anger, my bewilderment, I pushed the compressed package of overbearing feelings and thoughts deep down, deep into my hips. My heart sore with loss grew callused. My body, heavy with the weight of despair folded down on itself. My chest tight, my breath short. Heavy shoulder curled around my heart protectively. My hips cradled the package of unresolved feelings clenched by the power of anxiety to hold up the load.
Grief is a creature that lives in my stomach, it feeds off my nourishment and shuts down my nervous system, it robs me of excitement and joy and makes me heavy like lead. Grief is the parasite beast that eats me from within, growing from within. Grief is the beast I ignored none the less. In the night it lashed out at me grinding my teeth demanding I acknowledge it, but still I ignored it, my teeth blunt, worn stumps, but still I ignored it no matter the discomfort it caused me.
It was with this twisted and dark body I first stepped onto the mat.
Grief is not a parasite, we dance with it in a symbiotic relationship. Grief is the ability to remember. Grief is the fear that we might forget. So we do nothing with it in case we upset the delicate balance this new visitor to our body brings with it. Meeting this visitor for the first time is where my journey began, when I looked it in the eye, when I first discovered yoga.
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