How Yin Yoga Helped Me Find Closure After a Breakup

"Months before my breakup, I wrote in my journal, I feel like my body is preparing for a long winter ahead. When I look back on these words spilled out on the page, I take it as confirmation that each of us has a voice of knowing within our bodies - especially if we're willing to listen. My ex and I ended things in early December that year, and throughout the winter and spring that followed, I found myself frequently practicing stretches and twists on my yoga mat."

"I instinctually came back to the long holds of yin yoga week after week after week. Each Sunday evening, even on nights where Denver's city streets were dusted with snow, I rolled out my mat and attended a vin-yin yoga class that served as my source of solace, no matter how heavy my heart felt. Following the end of the relationship, I found it incredibly difficult to reclaim the city we both inhabited."

"In the months before my ex and I broke up, I found myself feeling extremely lost in the midst of change-having been laid off from a job, subsequently pivoting my career, and healing past traumas in therapy. We both wanted things to stay the same yet we were each changing. I know now that like any pattern or dynamic in a relationship, ours was co-created. But at that time, I had internalized a feeling and a fear that somehow I wasn't enough."

Months before a breakup, the narrator sensed bodily foreboding and later interpreted it as internal bodily knowing. The relationship ended in early December, prompting frequent yin and vin-yin yoga practice through winter and spring as a primary source of solace. The narrator struggled to reclaim shared spaces and mourned the loss of a best-friend partner. Concurrent life changes included job loss, career pivot, and therapy, producing feelings of being lost and unworthiness. The relationship's dynamics were co-created, yet breakup amplified self-doubt. A relative newcomer to yin yoga, the narrator valued its restorative long holds and inward-focused forward folds that allowed settling into and processing waves of grief.

Read at Yoga Journal