A Season of Grief, A Practice in Living

A Season of Grief, A Practice of Living

Everything feels hard right now. Grief has a weight this time of year that my body seems to remember before I do. It comes in a long season of dates: May 29, Jace’s birthday; June 29, Johnathan’s birthday; July 31, the day Johnathan shot himself; and August 2, the day we found out.

It is the space in between that torments me most, July 31 – August 2; the days when my son was already gone, but I was still moving through the world as if it were intact. There is something about that gap between what had happened and what I knew, that has never stopped aching.

March marked four years since losing Jace. That month, I held a ceremony and consciously chose to lift the veil of grief that had covered so much of my life. It was not about letting go of my boys. It was about letting go of the belief that grief was the only lens through which I could live.

After that, everything started to move. Ideas flowed. Doors opened. Human Recovery began taking shape in a way that felt undeniable. Everything seemed to be aligning. Serenity for Life was finding its rhythm, the new CEO believed in the vision. For the first time in a long time, I was not only surviving—I was creating.

Then the anniversary season arrived again and imperceptibly, the current began to change.

Grief returned, not as a tidal wave, but as an undertow. Life added its own pebbles—a little drama at work, a difficult conversation with a friend, a few disappointments. Looking back, I do not think those things derailed me. They simply found the tiny crack that was already there.

One missed practice became two. My sadhana slowly disappeared. I stopped dancing, stopped moving, stopped creating space to listen. Before I knew it, I was not just disconnected from my practice. I was disconnected from myself.

People do not usually describe me as cranky. Yet there I was—short-tempered, reactive, frustrated. Not because that is who I am, but because I had drifted away from the practices that remind me who I am.

Five years of therapy. Five years of trauma work. Five years of yoga, school, writing, believing, trusting, and practicing gratitude when it was the last thing I wanted to practice. Five years of doing everything I could think of just to feel a little bit better.

And somehow, this has been the hardest anniversary yet.

As I sat here tonight, I finally understood why. This is not just grief. This is a precipice. This is the edge.

All of the work I have done over the last five years has been leading to this beautiful thing called Human Recovery. It is close—so incredibly close—and I think that is why I feel such a tremendous pull.

Not only the pull of grief, but the pull to stay inside the controlled, familiar pain. There is something strangely safe about pain you have lived with for years. You know how to carry it. You know who you are inside of it. It becomes familiar, even when it is heartbreaking.

What is unfamiliar is truly living. What is unfamiliar is allowing myself to believe that everything I have learned, survived, studied, and embodied is enough. That I am enough. That is the leap.

Today, I came home. I rolled out my mat. I practiced kriya. I danced, breathed, moved. And something shifted.

It reminded me that consciousness has a felt quality. Whether we call it nervous system regulation, presence, spirit, or vibration, we know the difference. We know what it feels like to be contracted by fear, and we know what it feels like to be expanded by love.

The difficult part is not reaching that place once. The difficult part is remembering how to return when life convinces us we have wandered too far away. That is why it is called a practice—not because we are trying to become someone new, but because we need something that continually brings us back to ourselves.

I caught myself thinking, Maybe I should just say, “Fuck it.” Maybe I should walk away from Human Recovery from Serenity. Walk away from yoga. Just be done. Not because I do not believe in it, but because standing at the edge of something that matters this much is terrifying.

Then another thought came: in my deepest heart, I know the seeds are planted. They are already in the ground. They do not need me to keep digging them up to make sure they are there. It is time to trust what has already been planted.

Trust is not always loud or certain. Sometimes it is simply the quiet decision to follow the inner voice that has been there all along. I think that is where I am—not lacking vision, not lacking purpose, just remembering.

While I was sitting here, a dragonfly flew by. I have not seen one all year. Maybe it was just a dragonfly. Or maybe it was the exact sign I needed.

Remembering the practices that return me to myself. Remembering that grief and joy are allowed to exist together. Remembering that my boys would never ask me to stop living, they would want me to thrive. And remembering that we are the infinite expressing as the finite. That my boys are here, they are all around me, and in everything that I do.

 Transformation does not ask us to become someone else. It asks us to trust the person we have been been all along—to stop surviving long enough to remember how to live again.

I now realize that is the lesson: not learning how to escape pain, and not getting over grief, but recognizing the moment when grief is no longer asking us to stay with the dead. It is asking us to honor them by fully entering our own lives. Today I step up to that threshold and take a step across into the living.