Welcome to Corpse Pose Yoga Substack

A digital space for practices to help you move, breathe, grieve, and be

This summer has been a wild journey with many unexpected twists and turns including jury duty, pneumonia, saying goodbye to the community at the yoga studio I’ve taught at for two years, saying hello to a new yoga studio space, and then realizing that studio wasn’t the right space for my offerings either. It’s been a series of pivots that have brought me to recognize my capacity to meet each moment as it comes. While I still serve my local community with Functional Fitness and Gentle Yoga classes at the rec center, my intention for this digital space is to create a container for techniques that can support everyone where they are in their movement, breath, grief, and meditation practices. Every month will include a free newsletter and/or podcast, while paid subscribers will receive a guided practice each week.

Move

The paid subscription includes one recorded movement practice every month that will incorporate different yoga and movement modalities. As a certified yoga instructor for over twelve years with well beyond 500 hours of training, over 3000 hours of teaching exeperience, and having led or coached over a dozen Yoga Teacher Training programs, I understand the importance of giving options for individuals to tailor their practice to their own needs. Therefore, these movment practices are designed for accessibility and optimal mind-body connection. Practices will integrate a variety of methods such as chair yoga, restorative yoga, gentle vinyasa or breath-to-movement, balancing, mild strength training, and techniques from or inspired by The Thinking Body - The Feeling Mind®.

Breathe

A second benefit for paid subscribers is a monthly guided breath or pranayama practice. While I’ve had a focused pranayama practice for years, my recovery from pneumonia these last couple of months has brought me a new appreciation for respiratory health and how focused breath work can support all different levels of experience physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Grieve

Creating ceremony and ritual around grief is something missing for most people in our modern world. There are many different types of grief that go beyond the physical death of a loved one. This subscription includes a monthly grief ritual that is inclusive of all types of grief with the intention of building individual capacity to acknowledge, hold, and integrate grief as a life skill to create a more grief-literate society. According to Francis Weller, there are at least five different readily identifiable gates or thresholds to grief that include:

1) Impermanence: everything we love, we will lose

This is the type of grief that our society primarily focuses on as the result of death and bereavement. This kind of loss is different from person to person and the nature of the relationship that has been lost. Experiences may include sadness, depression, anger, relief, and more. It’s important to build capacity to hold the full range of emotions that come with this type of grief.

2) Identity: the places that have not known love

It’s more common than you might think to have aspects of yourself that you have learned to shame or neglect. Abandoned or filtered aspects of identity often result in relying on unconscious coping mechanisms to get through daily life. Working with this type of grief requires deep vulnerability and compassion to integrate those pieces of ourselves back into the whole.

3) Ecology: the sorrows of the world

Ecopsychology is an emerging sub-discipline that acknowledges what ancient Yoga philosophy has noted for thousands of years - there is an enmeshment between the soul and nature. Indiginous cultures and animist traditions understood this in a way that modern civilization has forgotten and even dismissed by creating economies of extraction and dominance between humans and the more-than-human world. This has resulted in climate and ecological grief and anxiety.

4) Social: what we expected and did not receive

Modern life, especially in the US, emphasizes hyper-individuality. Not only have we replaced the communal lifestyles of our ancestors with television and other numbing activities, but we encounter political forces that keep us in an “us” versus “them” mindset. This leaves many of us craving communities of not only like-minded people, but couragous spaces where we can be vulnerable and accountable to show up as the best, whole versions of ourselves. Whether we have the ability to build, participate, and maintain these types of communities or not, this too is a type of grief that deserves to be honored.

5) Lineage: ancestral grief

As we know, the body keeps the score - and in most cases that score is old. Older than the individual body. What sorrows did your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents endure? Some of us don’t even know the stories of our ancestors due to generational trauma. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t feel it and carry it with us, even if we aren’t conscious of the source.

Be

Finally, this monthly subscription will include a guided meditation practice. Meditation, or dharana, is a state of deep concentration that allows us to examine our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs from an objective state beyond reactionary impulses. By practicing meditation we engage in the activity of critical thinking, not so that we are undisturbed by external forces in our lives, but so that we can make responsible choices about how to respond to those external forces when we encounter them.

Thank you for walking this journey with me. I look forward to moving, breathing, grieving, and being with you.