When your body grieves

I had a miscarriage last week.  It was my first miscarriage.  I have three beautiful, healthy children who are still quite young.  So, in all honesty, losing the pregnancy was not a tragedy in my mind.  It's something that happens to a lot of women.

Of course it's sad.  I cried when the ultrasound doctor told me they could not find a heartbeat and that the fetus had stopped growing several weeks before.  But it didn't take long for my logical side to come out and say, "You know what, it's better this way."  My personal religious beliefs are that the spirit of this child will have another opportunity to come into our family at a later date.  This particular body was not developing properly or something.

Because I had so many reasons to be "okay" with the loss of this pregnancy (not the right time, my other kids are still too young, I have a lot going on right now, etc.), I moved forward.  I didn't really give myself much time to grieve because I felt closure.  

It was only a few weeks later that the actual miscarriage occurred.  My mind had moved on, but my body was just barely coming to terms with the loss of a child.  I found myself bursting into tears at random times.  I saw my friend's newborn boy and started sobbing.  I opened a letter from St. Jude's Cancer Research that contained a picture of a young child with cancer and I started wailing.  

Hormones, of course, were a large part of this, I'm sure.  But I also think my body--- my physical body-- was grieving for the loss of the pregnancy.  Whenever I would start crying,  I could step outside myself and look at the situation from an outsiders perspective.  I was thinking, "Who is this crazy lady? What is going on here?"  There was a separation between my emotional mind and my physical mind.  

Ganga White talks about our different energies in "Yoga Beyond Belief."  He talks of our physical bodies and our energetic bodies--- sometimes while in a pose, our physical body is only going so far, but our energetic body is reaching far beyond our capacity.  I feel like my energetic body was ready to move forward, let go.  But my physical body still needed time to grieve.

Each cell in our body has it's own little life, and each cell is renewed with prana as we deeply inhale and exhale.  We are renewing life force in all parts of our body.

So, for me, it holds true that those cells would also feel and experience that loss of energy that was my miscarriage.  That power to give life was stopped short, and I felt it physically and energetically.

This may make no sense to anyone but me.  It's an experience that brings home the fact that our emotions are completely intertwined with our physical body.  Releasing tension in the physical body will often release tension emotionally and vice versa.  Syl Carson is a wonderful practitioner of emotional healing as well and offers trainings in energy healing that I hope to attend one day.  See more here: Bodhi Yoga Quan.TM training