219. Reflections from the Yoga Mat on Life, Loss, and Spiritual Continuity Artwork

Feelings Fitness Podcast

Raising a family can be emotionally overwhelming. Managing the logistics of a household can be such a grind. Life in general can be extremely exhausting. Can you relate? Many families feel overwhelmed by the fast pace of family life. Enter yoga and mindfulness. Let The Feelings Fitness Podcast be your guide to understanding what yoga and mindfulness is and how it can help your family. Allow Feelings Fitness to show you how simple yoga sequences, yogic philosophy, and mindfulness practices can help on the home front. By using The Feelings Fitness hacks you can create a peace living space and a calm mindset for your family. Each week we will dive into how to make your home life more functional. You will learn how to use these yoga and mindfulness practices to guide you through the seasons of life. After listening to each episode, you will walk away with yoga and mindfulness tools and lots of inspiration. You will be all set to move through the fast pace of family life with intention and ease.Your host, Suzanne Bazarko, is a registered yoga teacher, licensed professional counselor, certified mindfulness practitioner, and mom of two. She created Feelings Fitness as a vehicle to share with you what she has learned from raising her own family and how yoga and mindfulness has helped along the way.

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Feelings Fitness Podcast

219. Reflections from the Yoga Mat on Life, Loss, and Spiritual Continuity

February 16, 2024 • Suzanne Bazarko

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Embarking on a spiritual odyssey, I found myself confronting the essence of emotion and character within the soul - all framed by the loss of my dearest mother. This week's reflection is steeped in the profound respect for spirit as we weave through the threads of memories, rituals, and the yoga mat as a sanctuary for inner dialogue. As I narrate my journey of grief and healing, there are moments of poignant vulnerability interspersed with uplifting realizations about the continuity of spirit and the legacy of love.

As the Thanksgiving table beckons me back to South Carolina, laden with the weight of nostalgia and the absence of a beloved presence, I share how traditions become a vessel for keeping my mother's spirit vibrantly alive. This episode isn't just about my story—it's an invitation to find comfort in the shared human experience of loss and to recognize the resilience of the spirit in the face of sorrow. Join me as we celebrate the transformative power of spiritual health and the tender rituals that honor and sustain us through life's cycles.

Speaker 0: 0:00

Welcome to the Feelings Fitness Podcast. Let's flash back to 2023, when we took a 52 week road trip together to discuss home, health, happiness and habits. We created a road trip to work towards feeling fit mind, body and spirit. Now we'll revisit those 52 weeks in just 52 days. There are many more adventures in store for 2024, but let's look back on how far we've come and set ourselves up for more success.

Speaker 0: 0:32

Welcome to week 47 of this 52 week journey through 2023 together. We are actually in the habits section of our journey and remember it's home, health, happiness and habits. And now we're actually taking this habits section and breaking it into home, health and happiness. So we are currently in the health section and within the health section, we've actually talked about mind, body and now we're talking about spirit. If you wanna listen back to a little bit more in depth episode about spirit, those episodes were 126 through 128. So you can check those out, and so we discussed what is spirit. Spirit is this belief that there really is something greater than yourself, and it's also the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character, or the soul, as opposed to religion, which is a more formal worship of a superhuman power or a God. So we're just looking at this idea of this spirit, this idea that there's something greater than ourselves and this non-physical part of a person. And I love this quote by Brene Brown and she says one day you will tell your story and it will be someone else's survival guide. Why do I bring up this quote?

Speaker 0: 2:04

Because I have shared a lot throughout the last year about my grief journey from losing my mom last April and it has been the hardest thing that I've ever had to deal with. My mom was my rock. She was my fun loving go-to gal. We had a good time. So many memories. I miss her so dearly and so I share this story of my grief journey in hopes that it really helps someone else get through their grief journey. And I've had some great friends along the way who've shared their grief story that have gotten me through it, and I hope that some of the things that I have to share can help others as well.

Speaker 0: 2:48

So it's kind of this idea of spiritual habits, things that I've done, and mainly as of late, it's this idea of getting through the loss of my mom. So I always say she is with me in spirit and I am currently prepping myself to go back to South Carolina where my mom lived. My dad is still there, but I'm preparing to go back to South Carolina for the first time since being back there for her services. So it's this really heavy thing. So celebrated last Thanksgiving without her, but where I live, and this Thanksgiving I am tasked with going back and sitting at that table where I shared my final meal with her. That was actually Thanksgiving meal, was actually the last meal I ever shared with her, because she wasn't able to really travel and then we weren't able to get there all too often, and so Thanksgiving meal was the last time that I sat down and had a meal with her or was physically together with her.

Speaker 0: 3:54

So this idea of keeping her spirit alive through food, through traditions, setting that table, pulling up a, a seat for her spirit, in a sense it's super heavy and also, in a sense, it really lifts my spirits because I need to know that she is still with me and I very, very much believe that she is. So I need to do these things, have these habits of staying connected to her spirit. So I plan to really do the tablescape the way that she would do it to prepare some of the foods that she would prepare and really sit down and lean into her being there in spirit, as opposed to being so sad that she's not there. And I think this fall season is a nice time where it teaches us really the art of letting go of things that are heavy and understanding that they just become something different and then the spirit lives on in that different form. So that's kind of what's happening and I think that another way so this keeping my mom's spirit alive through this Thanksgiving tradition that's happening.

Speaker 0: 5:15

And then there's also this other piece of spirit that I like to connect with and that is on my yoga mat.

Speaker 0: 5:22

So you can really find a greater connection to the self, to the soul, to your spirit.

Speaker 0: 5:28

On the yoga mat the body tunes into the emotions and the body finds those emotions and it releases stuck emotions so that you can move forward freely.

Speaker 0: 5:41

It is such a spiritual practice. If you've never practiced yoga before, I highly recommend giving it a try and start with a teacher who can teach you from the ground up, who can teach you the history, the traditions and how to move through it, so that you can layer upon the skills, so you don't get frustrated right out of the gate and you don't find it boring. Right out of the gate, you understand where the practice can take you. That's really all I'm going to leave you with for this episode, discussing spirit and the habits that you can form to really maintain a healthy connection to your spirit and the spirit of others who have gone before you. I hope you're enjoying 52 weeks and 52 days, a compact version of the transformational road trip we took through 2023. We're revisiting those 52 episodes and it's a review of home health, happiness and the habits that guide the way to feeling fit mind, body and spirit. It's also a food for thought for how you want to feel.