Breath by Breath: A Journey of Yoga & Loss

By Julie Holly

A real-time account of coping with acute grief, Breath by Breath: A Journey of Yoga & Loss explores the intersection of tragedy and spiritual practice. After the sudden death of her beloved mother, yoga teache

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889267935

Book preview

Breath by Breath

A Journey of Yoga and Loss

Julie Holly

Copyright © 2023 Julie Holly

All Photos Copyright © 2023 Julie Holly

Photography by Clifford Holly III

All rights reserved.

Breath by Breath

A Journey of Yoga and Loss

ISBN

979-8-88926-792-8 Paperback

979-8-88926-793-5 Ebook

I rarely, if ever, uttered my mother’s name when she was alive. She was always Mommy, Mom, or Lady. The last being something between her and me. I would call her Lady, and she would call me Girl. Even as a woman of a certain age, I was always simply her girl.

After my mother left this world for the next, I have felt compelled to say her name, Jo-Ann. It is my mantram, my prayer, my peace.

I say my mother’s name

So that when I, like Hanuman, show you my heart

You’ll see Jo-Ann written all over it

I say her name so that her Ka is here with me

I say her name because Jo-Ann is the sweetest song I know

I say her name, so my prana touches hers

I say her name to see her face

I say her name to capture her scent in my nostrils

I say her name, to be held

I am Julie, daughter of Jo-Ann, daughter of Grace, daughter of Julia, daughter of Dinah, daughter of Hannah, daughter of the countless whose names are written on the soul of this world. Om Shanti Om. Ase.

Much of the myth and philosophy throughout this book is my interpretation of the teachings of Douglas R. Brooks. I have been studying with Douglas since 2018 and have spent countless hours listening to his wisdom, benefiting from his decades of research of the Sanskrit, Tamil, and Tibetan languages and his firsthand accounts from his many pilgrimages throughout India.

Over the years, Douglas has generously and lovingly shared the teachings of Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy, whom we affectionately call Appa, and I, too, am grateful to this sweet soul.

I extend my deepest gratitude to Douglas for deepening my understanding of yoga and being my mentor and dear friend.

Contents

---

Introduction

Finding Śrī

When Strength Exits

The Lord’s Dance

Shared Experiences

The Blessed Kula

A Matter of Heart

The Firsts Begin Again

Binge-Watching and Junk Food

In Earth’s Arms

In the Presence of Mama

The Divine at Play

Earth’s Steadiness

Moving With Love’s Shadow

The Thousand Petal Lotus

Love Tastes Like

Prana

Final Reflections

Acknowledgments

Appendix

About the Author

Introduction

---

My brothers and I surrounded our mother’s hospital bed and whispered our goodbyes, devotion, and gratitude as she crossed the veil between this world and the next. I was on her right side, stroking her hand and kissing her forehead. My baby brother, Jake, placed his head on her heart, and my older brother, Art, rubbed her left leg.

The hospital staff silently and reverently entered the room and held vigil with us. These people who witness death on a near daily basis were also in tears, as if they knew the greatness of my mother.

My mother, Jo-Ann, passed away on September 5, 2022, at 5:45 p.m. Sedated, she was on a respirator for two weeks, and I already missed the sound of her voice and laugh.

Saying goodbye to her for the final time detached me from reality, and I, too, felt I had left my body. It was a sunny Monday that contradicted the storm, drowning every part of me: mind, body, and spirit. The death of someone you love so deeply causes a rip in your universe, allowing loneliness, rage, confusion, and sadness to pour into every facet of your life.

I am writing to you while in this state of acute grief.

Like yoga, living with grief is a practice. For millennia, the yogins have studied myth, posture, and breathing techniques to develop algorithms for coping with the gifts and challenges of embodiment, including the challenge of loss.

I want to share my journey with you, but please don’t consider this a guidebook for navigating your grief. Instead, think of me as your companion on this journey, a friend to turn to when you feel overtaken by the specter of grief.

I am a yoga practitioner and teacher. I came to the practice after my own brush with death in 2006 when my heart rate went up to 300 beats per minute, and I coded. At the time, I was under a huge amount of stress and returned to yoga as a way to return balance to my life.

I took my first yoga teacher training in 2010, and there, I learned the sixty-minute classes taught at most studios only scratched the surface of how powerful yoga is. By deepening my practice over the years, I learned this:

•Moving my body with intention made me physically stronger and more flexible. It also taught me toxicity, such as grief, defeat, and rage, can be alchemized into the powers of love, forgiveness, and direction.

•Learning pranayama, the act of setting boundaries with the breath, increased my lung capacity and my resilience. When my stress rises, my body can take as little as one deep breath to regain equilibrium. Pranayama practice has taught me I can regain control over my life by pausing and getting clear.

•Meditation allows me to transcend space and time. When my practice is at its best, I gain a sense of calm in mind, body, and spirit. But as I am moving through acute grief, sometimes this time of stillness and quiet can take me back to places I don’t want to revisit. More on that later….

•And then there are the myths. Myths are intentional lies told to serve and lead us to higher truths.

All these teachings came into play when my mother died, but not immediately. In those first moments, days, weeks, and months following her transition, these modalities came into play in various ways at different times during my grief journey.

In the beginning, and much to my surprise, none of them served me. All I wanted to do and did do was lay on the sofa and watch anything on tv that would numb me. I would get up to care for my dog, Malcolm, and little else.

And it’s okay for you to do nothing too.

My story will take you from doing nothing to returning to asana (posture) practice, pranayama (breathing practice) and eventually meditation. Meditation can be especially difficult since, inevitably, painful memories will surface. When these memories arise, I turn to the lessons found in the myths of not only India but also African traditions and biblical teachings.

If you are unfamiliar with Shiva/Nataraj, Kali, Ganesha, or the wisdom found in the spiritual practices of West Africa or the Bible, please allow me to introduce you to them. They have provided me with spiritual insights and comfort.

I am a deeply spiritual person, but I refuse to spiritually bypass my grief. Many faith traditions, practices, or schools of thought want us to rush our healing by offering platitudes of strength, resiliency, thoughts, and prayers. Some around us will even question our practices or depth of faith based on how we move through our grief.

One purpose of this book is to shatter those expectations.

I believe I will hold my mother, my Jo-Ann, again, just not here. Never here again. That’s the fact of it. I cannot meditate my way back into her arms. She will not come to me in a dream, touch my third eye point, and make this suddenly better. And it sucks, but sometimes facts suck.

My hope is you will find the inspiration to take care of yourself in a way that works for you. If you are currently a yoga practitioner, be patient. It took a couple of weeks after my mother’s passing before I could return to any aspect of my practice.

But perhaps I was practicing yoga in its highest form: I was letting myself be.

This book is also an invitation to my colleagues to offer and hold space for those grieving. According to the World Population Review, in 2022, 183,671 people will die each day. That breaks down to 7,653 per hour, 128 per minute, and 2.13 every second (World Population Review 2023).

Chances are death and suffering touched someone in your class. They want to be soft, vulnerable, and free to feel sad. Welcome them, acknowledge what happened, and create the space necessary for your student to remember their loved one.

Healing happens in community, and if you are a yoga teacher, it is up to you to help build that sense of community for your students.

Remember yoga is the act of bringing artistry to life, balancing the light and the shadow, the love and the loss.

Finding Śrī

---

I am beginning with the beautiful things because even in times of great sorrow, you can still find beauty, expressed best through acts of love. Like the luckiest among us, my mother was the embodiment of love to me and my brothers. I would even dare say she loved us to her own detriment: unnecessarily going without, not asking for help when she needed it most for fear of burdening us, making her life smaller than it should have been. I wish the world could experience her light and not just the select few that had the honor of knowing her. I am not a mother, so, in some ways, I cannot fully understand her rationale for dimming her own light, but I am the beneficiary of it.

Maya—to measure. How do we measure love? After losing the one that means the world to me, I now measure my love in tears. Tears that outnumber the drops in the ocean and the drops from the sky. My love is immeasurable, as is my mother’s love for me. I feel her love all around because when she was still physically here, her love was all-encompassing. I was blessed to never live in fear of losing that love, no matter what. My mother, my Jo-Ann, was my best friend, and unlike many of my friends’ relationships with their mothers, our relationship was free of complications. We rarely argued and had the same sense of humor and love of family. I loved