Moving Forward With Loss

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Alex Hristov, One of Thousands of Health and Fitness Coaches on Noomii.

Loss comes in many forms and most of us know many of them. The loss of a loved one, a job, a relationship. We can even feel loss for ourselves – this happens when there is substantial change in who we are. So how do we move forward and enjoy life again? Especially when we’ve lost a loved one?

If you pay attention to the title above, you’ll notice it’s not “Moving forward FROM loss”. It’s moving forward WITH it. You can’t just turn your back on loss – it’s real and it matters. Something DID happen. So how can we find happiness and joy again?

In 2022 I started reintegrating into the world. I thought it would be the most wonderful time of my life. Instead, the losses I had to come to terms with were insurmountable.

It was 5 years after a health issue had ended my previous life and left me in bed. I was able to find a job that allowed me to work almost exclusively on the phone and ipad but my real profession (Software Engineer) was down the drain and my wife had left me (being with someone with a health problem was apparently not her version of “life”).

Over the years, good friends had moved away. The city I lived in had completely changed, the world had moved on without me and I’d lost my sister to cancer a few years prior.

The years in bed were spent purely in survival mode and I never had the opportunity to even consider all the loss let alone deal with it.

I was now free of the bed and the house and was slowly rediscovering the world outside. And I was crying. Constantly. Everything was a trigger. A soccer game, a tree, an innocuous thought, dinner. Literally anything. Then nothing. It all stopped. I knew I was still heavily depressed and in mourning but I couldn’t get a single tear out.

Spoiler alert: this isn’t about yoga.

Until I went to yoga. For whatever reason I started crying during yoga classes. Quietly, to myself so as not to disturb the others. But the tears were streaming the entire time. And then after class I would feel good.

At first I couldn’t understand why I felt better. And then it dawned on me: yoga provided an environment where everything is calm and for that 1 hour I didn’t give a shit about anything. My mind could tale a break and with that break I was doing something very important.

I was thinking about my losses and paying my respects to them. That’s why the tears were flowing. And that’s why I felt better afterwards. So, I quickly developed a useful exercise for myself:

I started every morning by standing, closing my eyes and putting my hand on my heart. Then, I would face the physical direction of one of my losses and take a few moments and pay my respects. I would thank whatever I had lost for being a part of my life. Then I would turn in the direction of another loss and do the same. I did this for all the things I was mourning.

I did this at the beginning of every day and something interesting started happening. Little by little I started accepting those losses and enjoying my days. Until I no longer had to do them. I had healed. I could simply enjoy my newfound freedom and the new life I was building.

If you’re coping with loss, do the above exercise. It pays respects. It allows you to say “I have not forgotten. You (whatever you’re mourning) matter to me.” It allows you to heal. As with any exercise, to be effective you have to do it regularly.

Do the exercise for as long as you need to. Certain kinds of loss will fade and you’ll find you don’t need to do the morning routine anymore. Other kinds of loss may last a lifetime.

Pro Tip:

Is it ok to “just let go” of things you’ve lost? Yes and no. The decision is very easy: yes, you can let go and leave behind the things that are replaceable. Those include almost everything: relationships, jobs, money, physical things, etc. The NO is reserved for irreplaceable things: if a loved one passes, you can’t replace them. Carry them with you always, pay your respects to them, thank them for being in your life.