59: Can Yoga Actually Reduce Stress?

Hello, friends, and welcome to Grief Guts and Green Smoothies. I am your host, Melissa Dugalecki, and I am so excited to be here with you all to chat about ways in which we can all get through different adversities, challenges, and loss, and how getting outside of our comfort zone and maybe having a green smoothie or two can help us do so. We will cover different topics, ranging from interviews to recipes to sharing my own stories of my grief journey and the loss of my daughter, Layden. And I'm honored to be able to share her light in hopes of helping you spread yours. Now let's dive in. If you have ever wondered if yoga is actually gonna help you in your healing, if it's gonna help you reduce stress, if you feel like yoga makes things more stressful because you're just sitting there thinking, I hear you. I see you. I was you. And in this episode, I'm gonna talk specifically about how yoga can support us in our healing journey and let you know exactly how it supported me. So this week, I am preparing for my last yoga class, which feels incredible. It feels like it's come full circle, and, you know, it's really reflective of this continuous journey in grief and how we're all constantly evolving now. I practiced yoga before Leyden was born. I. To be completely honest, I integrated yoga in my off days or my light days, and it was something that I would do to move my body a little differently, and it was definitely a focus for my fitness level. When I got pregnant with Leiden, I did prenatal yoga at a studio in Watertown. At the time, it was called Inner Strength Studios, and loved that. It was a time where I felt like I really connected to being a mom. I slowed down my pace, right, because I wasn't able to do the hot power yoga I was doing before. So I was doing a more gentle version, less heat. And I felt like it was this really beautiful time to just, like, honor and celebrate being a mother, right? And essentially growing a human inside of me. And I didn't know when I was doing yoga that if Leyden was a boy or a girl. In fact, I actually expected. We all expected Leiden to be a boy for whatever reasons, but she wasn't, obviously. And I just felt this, like, this human growing inside of me. And, you know, I remember after Leyden was born and we were in the hospital, I just felt this calling to yoga. And actually, on the morning of her planned surgery, I got up really early and went out and took a yoga class, because I felt like I knew that I needed it. And intuitively I definitely knew I needed it. But I must have known that I needed it more subconsciously than I realized consciously, because that was the start of what ended up being a 99 night hospital stay. And as you know, during our time at Boston Children's Hospital, it was a roller coaster ride. It was up, it was down, it was highs, it was lows, it was, you're going home, you're not going home. Leiden's fine. Stuff's hit the fan. She's not doing well. She's not gonna live. She did live. We're gonna do everything to keep her living. She's suffering and she's not gonna make it. And when I left that hospital without my daughter Layden, it was. I was completely lost. I was completely shattered. And I didn't know how I was going to piece myself back together. And I thought about yoga and I thought about going, and I always seemed to be too busy or have an excuse or have a reason not to go. Right? And typically now I know when those times are presenting are the times we actually need it or anything the most. Right? That's typically where the discomfort and the growth lies. But it was something I had to figure out in my own journey, my own path, right? That's. That's the truth for all of us. So it took me a year to get back on my mat. An entire year. And when I went back, I remember being nervous and scared. And my instructor, who, you know, knew what I had gone through and knew about, you know, Leiden's loss and was there when I did prenatal yoga, greeted me with warmth and open arms, and it created a safe place for me, but not quite safe enough because it actually took me six months to get back onto my mat. What came up was really overwhelming. I had to leave the room a few times. And now, interesting fact for you who aren't maybe familiar with the earlier parts of my grief journey. Before I got on my yoga mat, I actually ran the Boston Marathon. So think about that. I ran the Boston Marathon well, too. I was writing about my grief. I was speaking about it here and there. I was spending Friday nights going through Layden's medical records. It was kind of my thing for that first year. But I couldn't get on my yoga mat. So that, to me was like the first indicator of, like, huh, there's something here, right? There's something more, there's something powerful. And from that, I kind of listened, I tuned in, and I leaned in and I got myself back on my mat six months later, and I began to show up more consistently. And as I began to show up more consistently, I was able to stay in the room the entire time. Sometimes I would cry on my mat, sometimes I would lay on my mat, sometimes I'd have an amazing practice. But I just felt this power and this need to keep showing up. And that new year, I set the intention that I wasn't going to do any resolutions, I wasn't going to set any major goals. All I was going to do was set the intention to live with gratitude, and I was going to practice that on my mat. And so that became a big part of my own healing, my own practice. Now, what happens in yoga and why so many people are uncomfortable with it is we're forced to sit with whatever is coming up, right? We're shifting energy. We physically trap emotion. We physically trap energy. It's why when we expose our heart, we can become really uncomfortable. We feel vulnerable. That fight or flight kicks in when we move into hip openers. That's where we store trauma. And that release can bring up a lot of emotion. So knowing that we store all of these emotions, all of these experiences in our bodies, it's really hard and really important to make space for this practice of physically and emotionally opening up and letting go, right? This let go and let in. I always say when I teach yoga that we have to be able to let go. Like, as a society, we're really, really good at setting goals of wanting more, of seeking the next thing. But we're also really good at emotionally hoarding things. Like, we hold on to things. We say we're over it and we bring it up 97 times or, you know, we try to move on, but we don't actually deal with it. We just stuff it, right? And we stuff it down by avoiding it or over busying or, you know, shopping, Netflix, binging food, drink, whatever it may be, right? We do. We come up with these kind of tools that don't serve us well, but there are tools for avoiding feeling what's coming up. And when we do that, we are placing so much emphasis on more and more and more, but we're not creating space. And so I compare this for my yoga students all the time. I say it's like sending out an invitation to. To a party, hoping the RSVP is no, right? Like, I'm going to set this goal, I'm going to try to achieve this thing, but I don't. I'm going to just try and go for it, but I'm not actually Going to make space for it. Right. There's no room for it. So if it doesn't come, that's okay. Right? And in order to really grow, we have to let go. And that was a huge part of my healing. And now a lot of people ask, do we have to practice yoga to grow? And absolutely not. Is it a great tool that's going to help? Absolutely. And so as I began to piece myself back on my mat, at the same time, you know, I was pursuing life coaching, you know, shortly after, and really taking a lot of what I had done in healing and helping others. And, you know, my background is in education, and I was specifically in athletics. So I spent 10 years in high school education as a teacher and a coach and then an athletic administrator. And I said, you know, my mission statement, my vision statement for our department was to teach life lessons through the playing field. And I had this light bulb moment of holy cow, really learning these life lessons on my mat. And for me, the type A who wanted to push through and figure things out and come up with the solution, it was, like, a lot easier to run a marathon than it was to consistently show up on my mat to deal with whatever came up, to just breathe, to not react. It's where we learn to not be so reactionary. So as I was growing and expanding, I said, you know, I've got to teach this. I have to hold space for other people to do the healing that I've been able to do on this tiny little piece of foam, right? We always overcomplicate things. Like, we. We want these solutions of, you know, big getaways or things that are going to make us feel better. And I always say, like, why don't we just try using our breath in this foam mat and just give it a shot, right? It's not that difficult, but at the same time, it is. So I began yoga teacher training, and interestingly enough, I decided to do it at the same studio I was practicing at when I was pregnant with Layden. It felt really symbolic to me. It felt like I was carrying light, and I knew I wanted to teach to carry her light. And lo and behold, I walk into training the very first night, and of 20 people who are there, one happens to be one of Layden's nurses in the cardiac intensive care unit from Boston Children's Hospital. And at first I felt horrified, and then I felt relieved, and then I felt sad. And I realized this was just the universe's way of, like, leaden, letting me know, like, you're in the right Place, mom. Like, this is where you need to be and you're seen. That was so powerful to have somebody there who saw me as a mom. Like, she saw me in action. Everyone else saw me as a bereaved mom, but Maura saw me as a mom, and she knew Leyden. And her being there just in that room was enough to really give me the strength and the courage to show up for a pretty intensive yoga teacher training. And I was fortunate enough that I was able to teach my very first class in the same studio that Leiden and I practiced. And I remember bawling, just absolutely bawling after my first class, because I couldn't believe. And at the same time, I could believe because I worked hard, right? With my grief coach, my yoga teacher training, and all the things that I bring here to share with all of you to help you build your toolboxes. It's hard work. You guys know, right? It's hard work to build your toolbox. And so I felt this wave of emotion of, I can't believe that I did that. And of course I can believe it. You know, this is what you've been working for. And I fell in love with teaching. And I felt as though every time I got to step into the classroom, I was teaching life lessons. And I will never forget one of my yoga mentors, Braxton, said to me, you know, you don't have to teach all the Dharma, which is, you know, basically the wisdom, the life lessons. You don't have to teach all the Dharma every class. Like, you can just do a little bit. And I was like, well, no, like I really want to teach life lessons. Like, that was what meant so much to me. And as I reflected more on that is kind of when I began to step back and look at alignment, right? And in terms of do I want to pursue building this teaching career, or is this teaching career just another way teaching life lessons? But as ways of teaching life lessons grow, does my teaching career shrink? And that's something that I think is important for everyone to kind of step back and think about, because for me, I felt like I was almost giving up or losing by backing away from yoga, right? I had pursued it. It was a goal. I did it. And was pulling back from my classes something that I was showing a sign of weakness or I couldn't do it all. And I had to get really clear on this. And it took a little bit of time because I didn't want to give up. I didn't want to, quote, unquote, quit. But I was also Finding myself out of alignment, right? Like, I was having some resistance to teaching or, you know, running late or, you know, missed a class, like, whatever it was. And. And these were these signs of, you know, something's not in alignment. And I had to really step back and look at that. And to me, it's just another one of the amazing, powerful lessons that I learned from yoga. And I realized that what I wanted was to utilize yoga as a vehicle to empower others to share life lessons, to show them their strength. And as I had grown other vehicles through the podcast, my life coaching Practice really grew. Move had grown. 90 days CEO was emerging all of these different avenues, right? I began writing more. I was an ambassador for my children's hospital marathon team. So all of these other avenues had surfaced. Well, if I was going to make space for all of them, I had to let something go, right? It was my own teaching wisdom of you can't send out an invite hoping the RSVP is no, or just hoping you're going to magically find more seats at the table. And I was trying to put way more seats at the table than there is room for. What is so beautiful is I was able to navigate these conversations collaboratively with yoga mentors and talk about it and work my schedule accordingly. So, you know, about a year ago, I was working 22 classes. I was in multiple studios, and then it cut down, right? And then it cut down even more, and then it cut down even more. And for a while, I was at, I think, four classes. And, you know, at the beginning of this year, when I knew that my calling was to be more mobile, right? And there's a lot of work to be done in different parts of the country, having that conversation and saying, look, like, let's talk about what's in alignment and being able to live the practice, right? To live what we teach. And it doesn't mean it's easy, right? Letting go isn't easy. And in a way, it stirs up grief because I'm letting go of a place that Laden was right? I'm letting go of one of the few places that Layden essentially lived, right? We practiced yoga in that room together. So it's reshaping what that means to me and what capacity that holds in my life right now. And ultimately, I'm just so grateful to be able to share the continued lessons I've learned from the practice of yoga here and with my students. And this week is my final yoga class. You know, my studio was so wonderful and allowed me to return for one Class after coming back from California, which I'm so grateful for, I really believe that's a testament to being able to have the open communication and the open dialogue. And so a couple of takeaways for those of you who are curious about the practice or curious about what it might do for you when you practice. Right. Notice that things are going to come up. You might find yourself like, I remember when I first practiced being like, well, the teacher stopped talking. This is my time to think about other things. And the teacher was like, this is your time to clear your mind. And I'm like, well, you must not be as busy as I am if you can clear your mind, because I can't clear my mind. And the reality was, is I absolutely needed to clear my mind. It absolutely needed to. But it's a practice. And so notice if you're having resistance to yoga or to any other type of meditation or stillness, that's exactly where you need to go. You can do it at home, you could do it in a studio, you can do it on an app, you can do meditation, you can do all different types of movement. There are a number of people who practice dance as a way of healing that same idea of movement and shifting energy. But notice that we trap our emotional experiences. We trap them in our body physically. So we've got to allow them to come up and we've got to release. And when we do that, we build trust in our ability to breathe through whatever surfaces. We no longer have to busy ourselves through it. We no longer have to avoid it. We no longer have to numb ourselves out. We find our strength in sitting in the discomfort and constantly assessing what's in alignment. Where's my capacity at? Because your practice will tell you. Some days you are going to be a balancing, flowing queen or king, and other days you're going to feel like a wobbly, chaotic mess. And you learn that that's not what matters. What matters is that you keep showing up. Just one day, one practice, one breath at a time. So I hope this is helpful for you in assessing whether it's your grief journey or your life journey. And where can you allow a little bit of stillness, some breath, some trust? Where can you allow some releasing, some opening to fuel your growth to the next level? Because whether you're doing it on an emotional or a physical level, that is absolutely the work that has to be done to grow. We have to build awareness. We have to let go of what doesn't serve us. We have to open up to something greater. And we've got to be consistent and keep showing up. And truly, those of you who have worked with me in move or in life coaching know that is the foundation of the four step method that I teach. If anyone listening wants to learn more about the four step method, just shoot me a message. I'll shoot it over to you. But truly, the first step is building awareness. The second step is letting go. The third step is inviting in. And the fourth step is building consistency. And that is exactly what I teach and coach on the mat and off the mat. And it has been an absolute privilege to be able to teach life lessons in both these physical and emotional forms. So thank you all for being a part of this journey. Anyways, I can support you. Let me know and we'll talk soon.