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- rebmendez23
- Mar 26
- 4 min read
The first 26 pages are missing. The binding is pretty beat up, water stains, tears, rips, curled edges, crushed corners. Amazing it is still here as it is almost as old as I am–received from my mother on February 8, 1967 when I was 6. Our family would have already moved as my parent's divorce was final the previous summer. Everything would have been new and scary and hard–and my mother comforted me as she would have comforted herself. With {cap-P} Poetry.
She always inscribed books for the recipient:
Poetry was her through line and I guess I didn't fall far from the tree having memorized a William Blake poem at the age of 6. How else do you garner approval from a lover of literature and poetry? Did I even know what the poem meant? But I loved the book and I loved the poem and I loved my mother. I probably recited this for her, my siblings and my grandparents (also poetry lovers) many times. My little show-off recital over-and-over.
My mother kept her poetry close at hand. She was a scholar and a teacher so all sorts of writing and courses and events came and went, and many students came and went. But most of all she was a writer and published novels, poems, magazine articles, essays, short stories, and anthologies. She wrote. A lot. She encouraged everyone around her to write and to read, especially within her family: her father, her siblings, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Everyone in her family could become a writer and she told us so often and with total conviction.
There were some constants in her writing: her internal and family life (especially her novels and her father's autobiography), feminism (writing for Ms Magazine, founding a journal for her women's studies department), nature writing (John Burroughs), and studying the Romantics, especially William and Dorothy (William's sister) Wordsworth. She knew it was probably Dorothy and her support and love of her brother William that allowed him to become a poet. Perhaps even, inspiring with her own words, his most famous poem.
And this, {cap-P} Poetry, is what stayed with her all the way to the very end. When it became too hard for her to read she asked us to read aloud to her–anything from the Wordsworths or any poem even. She would ask for a poem by sharing a line or a phrase and we would search for what she wanted us to read. A favorite ask was I am of Ireland by William Butler Yeats. One of the last things she wrote in her journal was "it all comes down to poetry." Her complete through line.
What does this have to do with yoga or the Yoga for Grief series that my friend Monica and I are hosting at Sellwood Yoga? Quite a bit.
Because of my mother's influence I came back to yoga in my 50s. Because of my mother's influence I went to Yoga Teacher Training and graduated in 2020. Because of the pandemic I had to learn to teach on zoom and my mother became my student. Because of her I started listening to and reading poetry more diligently, especially how it related to yoga. Because of her during the pandemic year when we practiced zoom chair yoga, the poems would creep in to finish class. (She even wrote and shared poems. I didn't dare write any but just read the ones I liked.) Because of her I kept teaching (and continue teaching), at first just Chair Yoga and then other yoga classes too.
Because of her illness I cared for her at the end of her life and we had our small ways of bringing yoga and poetry together, mostly poetry as a way to lessen her grief and some of mine. We did our yoga breaths together. Because of my grief over losing her I dove deep into ways that poetry could help: reading, listening to podcasts, more poems, finding Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (a poet I wished my mother could have read), searching for anywhere that poetry, yoga and grief intersected. Because of my mother I read a poem at the end of every class I teach. Because of her I wanted to teach a workshop on grief, using poetry as an anchor. (You can read here how that transpired back in 2023).
Because of her I didn't give up on finding a way to share poetry, yoga and grief in a way that could help other grievers.
My aha moment was realizing what I had added to the mix during my own (and ongoing) grief journey. Yoga was here, poetry was here, certainly grief was here, but there was more. The more was the Aroma Acu-touch and massages from my friend Monica. She is a talented and gifted bodyworker. But beyond that she also understands grief in a profound way and uses her understanding to help others with their grief. It is a unique and magical gift.
If I could combine those elements and recreate for others what helped me, helps me still, perhaps that is where the power lies. And that is where I am today. Monica and I teach Then & Now: Yoga for Grief. We taught one 4-week series in March and are teaching another coming up here in April.
We use everything we know and love: yoga movement, spoiler alert–poetry, aroma acu-touch, restorative yoga, community, kinship, writing, writing prompts, sharing, not sharing, tears, laughter, no tears, quiet, meditation, and breath. More poetry.
We do this together.
Our own grief shared and known.
We do this for each other's grief.
We do this for others, for their grief.
For any grief.
For all grief.
Nothing too big.
Nothing too small.
Recent, ancient, resurfacing.
Personal, global, ethereal.
Present, hidden, unknown.
For a beloved, a circumstance, a dream.
Devastating, manageable and seeming insignificant.
Whatever you carry we have a soft space for your grief to land.
We will hold it for you. For a moment, a day, a week, for as long as you need.
For forever.
Gratitude for yoga. Gratitude for poetry. Gratitude for grief.
Monica shares her own grief story on her blog Harvey The Hero. Her most recent post discusses another way to understand and define grief. We make a good team and I am grateful for her guidance, collaboration and support.
