Major Points:
32:03 Grief is a developmental and learning process not a healing process. Grief is not pathological; it is a normal part of life.
35:22 But you don't need closure on a relationship of a person you love who you don't want to be done with.
48:50 You don't have to believe in yoga for it to work, because Yoga believes in you.
00:45 This is episode 119 of Changing the Face of Yoga and my guest today is Karla Hilbert and Karla is a licensed professional counselor, a certified yoga therapist, a compassionate Bereavement Care Provider, certified divine sleep Yoga Nidra guide, an award winning author, and a bereaved mother. Her life was forever changed after her firstborn son died of a brain tumor in 2006. Her therapy practice focuses on loss, grief and bereavement working in particular with those affected by trauma and traumatic death. She leads classes, workshops and retreats for the bereaved as well as training for professionals on how to work with those impacted by traumatic grief. Her book, Yoga for Grief and Loss describes each of the branches of Yoga and how they are ideally suited to support those in grief. Her newest book, the Chakras in Grief and Trauma is the first book of its kind to explore the energy body and how it is impacted by trauma and grief. Both books have creative ways to bring yoga and mindfulness into a regular practice to support your broken heart and remember your essential hope. Welcome Carla. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that introduction?
02:42 Oh no, that's really long and, but really beautiful. Thank you so much. I so appreciate being here, Stephanie.
02:49 Thank you. I wanted to start by asking you in, one of the things that you said, was that there is a societal and medical model of grief and then there's yoga's model of grief. And so can we define the medical and social model and then the yoga model and compare and contrast so we can see what the differences are.
03:26 I don't remember saying that but the Western model of medical model in general of what we call mental health. I don't particularly like that label because what I really do and what the people who are therapists and who do this profession really are dealing with our emotional health as well, which doesn't really get talked about.. Our thinking, our thoughts about things are not the same as our feelings and our emotions. And I think it's really interesting that we don't even talk about emotional health. It's always about quote unquote mental health. but anyway, the Western medical model deals with disease, right? And when something goes wrong, when something has caused pain or is a disease or a problem, the medical model goes in and says, let's fix this problem, cut it out, or put chemicals on it or do something to fix this and then bandage it up, send somebody home and hope it gets better. They don't really look at the whole being.
I don't know about a social model of grief. I think so it's hard to kind of pull those things apart. Our society, again, Western society and there's so many different layers of how various cultures deal with grief and I don't really think any one culture is perfect. I think there's a whole lot of other cultures around the globe who do a better job than our culture does. And when I talk about our, I mean like the Western culture, America, Europe, Australia. So the Western model societally, and socially we are not very hospitable to grieving people. And it's interesting cause death itself is having a moment right now, which is not bad. That's good.
I don't know if you've heard about the death cafes, which I believe started in England. Now they're all over the place and it's community-based things where people get together. There's a facilitator and it may or may not be supported by a community organization like a hospital or a hospice or it could just be a person. But you find the information about the death cafe and sort of the guidelines of how you run a conversation. And it can literally happen in a cafe or it might happen at somebody's house, but people sit around and drink coffee and eat some snacks and talk about death: planning our own deaths, what death must be like or how we deal with death. But that's not the same as grief.
And grief is the experience that we have when something precious to us is gone. And that can be anything that we love. It tends to be a lot more impactful when it's a person who dies, but there's all sorts of losses that people deal with all the time. But when people die, the grieving person, the bereaved person who's left behind has to deal with how to manage existence without this person in their lives like they were before as a living and breathing presence on the earth. It's different than death itself. It's a very difficult process and it varies individually. Grief is like a fingerprint really. We all have it at some point and it's completely, totally unique to us, but our society tends to be really unhelpful sometimes.
I mean, we have groups of people who experienced what we call, marginalized grief, disenfranchised grief, where that grief isn't necessarily recognized by society. And there's lots of categories for that. But, that could be your ex-husband dies and you've separated and gone on with your lives . Maybe he's remarried. He has children with this other person and a whole life that doesn't include you, but yet you have this major grief response. It's not the same as his current wife might be experiencing. Miscarriages are one of these places. Stillborn babies often are this way that's not very recognized by society as intense grief.
There's disenfranchised grief but when it's a socially sanctioned grief, everybody knows, of course she might be grieving. There's tends to be a lot of support. And then after the funeral, a few weeks, a few months, that support dwindles away and people expect the grieving person to go back to the person that they were before, which depending on, the grief itself, the relationship itself, whether or not there was trauma involved might be impossible to do. It usually is, and grief can go on for a long time and that, and it changes over and over. In fact, it really, truly never ends. It just changes and gets different. We learn, hopefully with good support, how to grow and develop through that process. But what happens is we tend to lose more people the longer that we live. So it's a thing that we're going to go through over and over and over. So we don't have a real good social model.
And a lot of people really love to talk about the five stages of grief from Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who is an incredibly wonderful, beautiful pioneer in this field. But she herself even said that she wished that her five stages model hadn't been so broadly applied to grief. In fact, it was meant not for bereaved people in the first place, but for dying people. She revolutionized the hospice model, the hospice care field in general. She worked with terminally ill people and she noticed that they tended to go through these stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It makes more sense in the context of a terminally ill person than it does in terms of a bereaved person.
So we don't have a very good social model for dealing with grief at all. And our medical model tends to want to pathologize grief in many ways, when in fact, grief is not pathological at all. It is a completely normal and natural response to a loss. Depending on whether trauma is overlaid, and the circumstances surrounding the death itself, and how intensely that person is grieving, how much they're functionally affected by their grief and their loss varies.
The medical community might come and say, oh, hey, you need to medicate that. It's gonna lead to depression, which isn't true necessarily. Grief and depression are two totally different things, but I see a lot, as soon as there is a death, often people days after the event or maybe even the day of are given prescription medications, either antidepressants or antianxiety medication, usually Benzodiazepines, which is really dangerous often. We see often in society people supporting grieving people and avoiding the pain. I'll come over, bring a bottle of wine and we'll just drown those sorrows for a little while. So we don't have a real good supportive, nurturing kind of model at all in the Western model period.
11:37 So how would we contrast it with either your model or a more generic model of yoga helping with this issue?
11:48 I personally feel that yoga offers us so many tools to help us deal with grief and loss. And there's not really a specific yoga grief model that really exists. I mean what I've done is taken the yoga teachings and philosophies that are already existed and applied it in this way. This is one of the things I think is so beautiful about yoga, is that we can take these tools and yoga really is the life path. It isn't just asana, it is so many other things. The asana as poses are a tiny fraction of what yoga is. I mean in fact yoga itself, the word means union. So, Yog in Sanskrit, if we spell it the way the Sanskrit translates, it's y o g with a little dot that says we say yog and that means yolk and it's this yoking together of body, mind, spirit and then our yoking together with something larger than ourselves. And that for me and for my clients, and readers who read my book, this thing that's larger than yourself is individual as well. I mean maybe that thing might be God, it could be community, it could be the universe, it could be the planet. It's something else. The thing that we really can't do alone. We need something to connect us. And then again to the tools of yoga help us.
Because I think it's crucial to continue to have a relationship with the people we love who have died. That's one of the things that I say is one of the most important tasks that we have to do is figure out how we have a relationship with somebody who's no longer physically here. And there's many tools in yoga that can help us to do that. All the branches of yoga have different tools that help us manage this. And a lot of my teachings when I work with people individually, really focus on not only different things from the various branches of Yoga, like Bhakti Yoga, Jhana Yoga, Tantra yoga, Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga. But in the Raja Yoga branch, the Yamas and Niyamas and it comes down to the first thing that's the most important is ahimsa, which is do no harm.
And so this is also nonviolence, meaning with yourself. We start with ourselves. Iyengar said in his book, the Tree of Yoga, which is one of my favorite books where he talks about the branches of Yoga. And I see how essentially within all the limbs of yoga, each limb is within all the other limbs. So you can practice one limb and you're practicing the whole entire branches and all of the tree of yoga itself. But he says about ahimsa he says I don't know why everybody focuses on the violence in the world when we don't first look at the violence in ourselves. So I talk to people about self-care and self-compassion, which can be very difficult to do in early days of grief, in traumatic grief because people tend to not want to care about themselves. It's very difficult to care about themselves or to have compassion for yourself when you're in such a terrible state.
But it is very important because, as I learned through my own research and I probably learned this in my initial teacher training but it really like hit me in a different way in all the research that I did. These things are in order. The limbs are in order. The yamas come first, and the first Yama is ahimsa. Everything else builds upon that. And so first you look at how much pain am I increasing for myself? What can I do right now in this moment to have compassion and care for myself? And that is the crux of my teaching with people, because sometimes that's just the very place to start. Which would be an awesome place too, for society to start.
But I know what's happening is that people who are in grief and in pain, it's difficult for other people to witness that pain. And I know that most people want to genuinely help. But the fact is, is that you can't just take this away. And even there's times when I'm with somebody who's in intense pain and I wish I could ease that pain and I know I can't, but also that grief is there and they have this grief for a person because they love that person so deeply. A good friend of mine who I work with Joanne Cacciatori says, where there is extraordinary grief, there is extraordinary love. And it's true, and again, this is one reason I support people in using Bhakti practices, the path of devotion, which is all about love and all about the heart, connecting with the love they have for the people who have died. Because I've not met a person yet who would trade the love that they have for this deeply beloved person to be rid of the grief. I've not met that person. And so when we can remember that right now I'm in this kind of pain and grief because I love this person so much. It really can help to soften the pain. And it is also a mindfulness practice because it's asking the person to be present in their pain, have compassion for themselves in this pain and recognize that its existing right now because of this deep love, which is really beautiful. So when we cannot escape pain, what happens is we get really scared of the pain. People are afraid of the depths of this pain that they can be in and the depths that they can go to. And I totally understand that. When we can be present to that and have compassion for ourselves and say, okay, let me connect with the love I have for this person I'm missing so much right now. It can really help us to be present instead of run away from the pain like everybody wants to do. Nobody wants to be in pain. And then to say, okay, I can bear this because of this love that I have. It's a strength and it's weird. It's almost like the pain can soften. And then what you learn is that you have the capacity to be present with that.
And every time you get through, I call them grief bursts, we go through these, like everything else in the universe, contraction and expansion. When we go and move into the winter time, when we move into that state, the earth moves into that state. It's contracting, and then it's going to expand again in the spring. Nothing lasts forever; no feeling. The poet Rilke said, no feeling is final. And that's true. No matter how much pain you're in right now, it's not going to stay like this. It's going to change. And if you allow yourself to be present and watch how that happens with compassion and as little judgment as possible, you can see it happen. And then what you learn is that you can trust yourself to move through these places of pain and then you come out of them. It's simple, but it's difficult, but it's kind of amazing. And all of that I learned from Yoga.
19:37 Some people will think they're helping by emphasizing positive thinking to bypass pain and that has a yoga link that would help in that particular instance. Because I have a lot of people say, oh no, I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm getting through this. It's okay. I'm not sure that helps a lot sometimes.
20:20 Well, I mean the person themselves is saying, oh no, I'm fine, I'm getting through this. It does depend on the context, where are you have somebody saying that and you're standing in the grocery store, it might not be the best place to say, oh no you can really tell me how you're really feeling. It depends on the context, and if the person themselves is saying, no, I'm fine, then maybe that's okay. I mean, cause we don't want to insinuate ourselves too much into somebody else's emotional place. I mean, that's another thing I talked to clients of mine about actually moving into the, the second Yama - Satya, (nonlying). So telling your truth, that follows ahimsa. And so again, this is the rule. Ahimsa comes first, do no harm or as little harm as possible, right? Nonviolence, it would do harm to you to start talking about your story right then or if you feel this is too sacred to share with somebody, then don't do it. You don't have to tell the truth all the time about how you're feeling. I mean, grieving people are approached a lot with questions that are very hard to answer and sometimes, how are you is one of them?
After my son died, I took like two weeks off of work. It had been six months of him dying and I had gone to work part time and one of us was home with him 24 hours a day. One of us was always with him and I stopped working for two weeks and when I came back it was really hard. I mean it was very difficult to go back to work and be able to focus. There's so much that that's going on and your entire being is consumed with this grief. It's very difficult to focus.
It really affects us on every layer of being. Yoga has this awesome model called the Koshas, which really helps us understand this. It impacts us physically, energetically, mentally, intuitively, emotionally, spiritually. The Koshas is a beautiful model for helping people understand that. And also teaching yoga teachers and therapists how to help people manage it. So when I went back I was like, okay, I know people are going to ask me how I am and I don't really want to stop in the hall and start talking about how I am. Because I don't want, this was me, to do that in the middle of the work day. I can't because I can't keep it together. If I do that, I know knew where I could go: coworkers, friends of mine, I could go in and have a safe space. If I needed to, I could go in my office and shut the door and cry, but I didn't want people talking to me. So I thought I have to come up with something. And so I couldn't say I was fine cause I wasn't. But to me I could say I'm okay. because to me that meant I'm here and I'm breathing and I'm getting through this day. And so it wasn't a lie, but it wasn't also the full truth either.
So sometimes we don't need to ask the grieving person. But sometimes it's helpful to be a listening, nonjudgmental, compassionate ear for this person to say, how are you really? And if it's an appropriate kind of context and space, then that's beautiful. It gives somebody the space to tell their story, which a lot of people really don't. And I think that this bypassing that you were saying like bypassing the pain with the positive stuff. So if a grieving person says the positive things, that's okay.
I mean, there's a lot of things that a grieving person can say that somebody else shouldn't say like for example, anything that starts with at least, at least you have all your other children, at least your house isn't burnt down or whatever. At least anything is never good. At least he's not in pain anymore. Now the grieving person can say that and that's okay to a point. Because it's true that everything can be worse. Things can always be worse. And sometimes that's kind of comforting in a way, to me anyway, to say, okay, and it helps you sort of put things in perspective. And for a long time I said things like that to myself, well, at least he didn't die in pain, I hope. At least he wasn't afraid. At least he was surrounded by love, at least, he was with us - all these things. At that time when my son died, there was a lot of focus on awful things happening in Darfur and how mothers were witnessing the death of their children right in front of them in terrible ways. And I just thought, well, at least that's not happening in our town where we live. There was a horrible murder of an entire family. And I just was like, at least he didn't die in that kind of way. And so, but eventually I had to say to myself, I need to stop saying that because what happened was bad enough. And I felt if I kept saying this at least stuff, then I was harming myself because what I was going through was bad enough. And I felt it was not honoring him and his life and also was not honoring myself and my own grief where I was. But it took me awhile to realize that.
I don't think, unless somebody could say to me in a compassionate, loving way: hey, I feel like when you say that over and over, this is harmful to you and here's why. And that's okay. And I think you've got to have a really trusting relationship with somebody to be able to say that to them. Because grieving people can say a lot of things that other people shouldn't. Like he's in a better place. People would say that all the time. And that's hurtful because to a mother there's not a better place. Was I glad he wasn't in pain? I wouldn't want him to be in pain, of course not, but I didn't feel he was in a better place necessarily. There's no better place.
This is another thing I hear all the time from people. People say they're in a better place, but where are they really? I don't know. And so when other people say that sort of line, it just sort of triggers, could potentially cause this cascade of other thoughts in the grieving person head. Well I don't know that they're in a better place. What is it really like where they are? I don't know where they really are and who knows? It's very difficult. I get in conversations with people fairly regularly who say, well people are just trying to be helpful and being defensive about it. And I say, I know that, but often it's not. It's so unfair to the grieving person that often the onus of educating the people falls on us. So it's either we say nothing or we get really angry, some people get really angry, which I totally identify with. That happened to me a lot. And then say things we might regret or mean things that maybe we don't mean in that moment out of pain or we feel like we have to educate you. And I wish it wasn't.
I don't mind educating people. It's my job now. I call myself a grief activist, because I feel like it's my job now to educate the public on how to deal with grief. But it shouldn't be on the newly grieving person and they don't know, you're so vulnerable and you're desperate. And it's just this really open wounded space that you're carrying around. And there's so much pain that's heaped on top of the pain when all they really need is compassion and non-judgment and presence and love.
And that is also a thing that yoga really teaches beautifully. It is also based on the teachings. The first thing is always ahimsa. And if you don't know if what you're about to say it's going to cause pain. Don't say it because it's better to say: I don't even know what to say to you. I'm so sorry. I just don't have the words. It is so much better than saying something that could be painful.
People really do think it's okay to say a lot of stuff that may not be because they've not been in that situation and I get it. If they express to you, well that's not helpful or that's hurtful or I don't think they're in a better place than don't argue it. Oh well I'm sorry. I didn't know. Tell me, tell me how you're feeling. Having active compassion for this person and open to wanting to hear what they're saying. Ahimsa, I don't want to do any more harm. Tell me what would be helpful or tell me what you're going through and then to be really aware of your own discomfort around it because it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable when you don't know what to say or if there's silence.
But in general, in our culture, I don't think we're very good at listening to people. We're thinking about what am I going to say to them before they're even done talking which means you're not really listening. To be able to really listen, you have to be fully present, which is another thing yoga can teach us how to do. You talked earlier about this bypassing and I think some of this comes along whenever I talk about aparigraha for example. So non-grasping and you hear a lot that you have to let it go and you can't hold onto that pain or whatever.
People when they are supported and they're able to grow; grief is really a developmental process. I haven't just learned this on my own because I've done a lot of study and work. But I do remember the moment when I was on my own and I was looking at a tree and it had been like five years since my son had died. I was doing this work at that point. And I had written a lot about healing and I talked about healing and I was trying to heal and doing my own healing stuff and I was looking at tree and how it was growing. I love trees; I find a lot of comfort from trees and nature. But I thought, what if this is not a healing process, but what if it's a growth process and a learning process? And that made sense to me because I want to always be growing and learning forever for the rest of my life. I saw a quote yesterday from Eartha Kitt that said, I'm always learning and my gravestone will be my diploma. I loved that. Anyway, I thought it's a growth and a learning process. What if it's not a healing thing? And at that it really felt like a weight was lifted off me because I thought, oh, what if I don't have to heal? And it was just so freeing because I am not going to heal from this. I don't need to heal from grief.
Because grief is not pathological. It is normal and it is natural. You don't need to heal from it. Now you can heal from trauma of all sorts. You can heal from the pain and relationships. So you might have unfinished business when the person has died and that can be healed. Any situation that is traumatic can be healed and integrated and processed. But the grief itself does not need to be healed. It's a normal and a natural thing that we're always moving through and growing through. There's not an end place.
Coming back to the yoga piece and the bypassing and looking at aparigraha and let it go and all these things, it doesn't make sense. it depends on the loss and it depends on the person. Like yesterday. I still have a landline phone. I'm one the very few people. I do have also a cell phone and we have an answer machine that's digital and it had like 14 old messages on it from when my daughter was like three. And there was a message to me on my birthday from my grandmother who died this past March and there was messages, all these birthday songs and just people's voices and we kept them for a long time. There was some weird things going on with the phone yesterday and it was beeping and doing weird things and ringing. I was touching buttons on the thing and then the man's voice said deleting all messages, all messages deleted. And I was like, oh my God. And I like was so devastated. That was a loss. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'll never get those things back. Like it was a loss for me. I was very upset for a few minutes and then I just thought, okay, I can let that go. I mean I have other things. I've got pictures, I've got some voicemails on my phone, there's videos of the same people talking. I can let that go. There's some stuff we can just let go.
Often really intense grief helps us to let things go. After my son died, I just didn't care about stuff anymore, my material things. That was an interesting because I collected a lot of different things and I don't care. And so when we moved, shortly after he died, which is a hard process, I got rid of so many things and I just did not care about the stuff. It was interesting how this changes you, but in terms of people letting somebody go, closure is not a real thing. It's really not. You might get closure on an incident and say, okay, this is done. But you don't need closure on a relationship of a person you love who you don't want to be done with. I'm never going to stop being his mother. If when somebody's parent dies, you don't stop being their child, when your friend dies, you don't stop being their friend.
It's weird to think like that to me now, but it's a cultural thing, but also what makes sense in terms of letting something go and grow. There's a difference in grasping onto something and releasing it. It's just holding with what is - is what I say. You don't have to let go of things. Our brains are literally wired for attachment. We have evolved to the state that we're in these big, huge brains that we have because of our ability to attach to each other. Our social attachment is our life. If we don't attach to others, we don't live. If a mother doesn't attach to her baby, that baby's not going to thrive. If you don't attach to your partner, then you're not going to have a good solid family unit and then you probably won't have children. And then the biological imperative to create the children isn't going to be there. All these things we're meant to attach and that doesn't go away.
It's a balance; are you grasping and that's different and maybe we can talk about that. Somebody in early days (of grief) you don't want to have that conversation with because they are grasping everything. Later when you're comfortable and you're growing in your grief, this is what happens when you develop as a being through your grief. You don't necessarily have to hold on to everything. But that's also individual. I mean I know people whose children have died and their room is exactly the same as it was the day that they last saw that person a lot. And that's fine. Look at Graceland, it's an entire house and this dude has been dead for a long time and people go to see it all the time and they don't even didn't even know Elvis in his life, but they want to go see his house, which is a memorial to him. Nobody thinks that's weird, but somebody thinks it's weird if a person keeps their child's room the same. I don't see the difference. I mean, in fact, it makes more sense that you would want to keep your child's room this way. What's interesting is that probably it changes over time that room. Little things happen and it evolves and it's fine.
But we need these attachments. There's a whole thing in grief now called continuing bonds. It's makes sense. Grieving people know that it makes sense, but now it's a therapeutic technique to help your clients have continuing bonds with their deceased beloveds. Because we know it's healthy. Instead of saying, Oh, I'm cutting it off, I'm getting closure. It doesn't make sense. The love goes on and the love can continue to grow. In fact it's like that relationship with that person can grow over time and you grow and you change just like it would if they were here. You grow and develop in that relationship in different ways.
But I think yoga also supports that through ahimsa and telling your truth and being aware of your own truth. You're the person who you have to tell the most truth to, 100% of the truth if you can. And then being honest with what you need and how you feel. Yoga gives us these tools to be able to do it. And then, having self-study around svadhyaya. You have the definition that includes holy scriptures, but I don't see how anybody can be helped by a holy scripture if they can't apply it with self-awareness, which is self-study and self-inquiry. And so you do this and you really look with honesty and with the most amount of compassion and how your behavior, how your inner dialogue, how it's affecting you and it helps you to grow through your grief and develop as a person. So you become more emotionally well-rounded eventually. If you let it, grief can just make you so much more compassionate and open to others. But it requires being present to your pain and hopefully having good support.
39:47 It's a really different way to think about it because I do agree that the societal norm is that this is going to end and that you will become okay and then it's all over with. I used to teach seniors and of course grief was something that was in the classroom often and anniversaries and stuff were always hard. I had some limited knowledge of that, but you've explained it very well. I think that's excellent. We don't have a whole lot of time left and I understand this is a very complex topic, but talk a little bit about your book about Chakras.
40:56 The first mention about the Chakras was in the Yoga for Grief and Loss book and the Tantra Yoga Chapter. That's where I first mentioned it. And when I started writing about the Chakras, I just kept going and going and going and going. And my husband said, you can't keep doing that. You can't write that much. I can't stop. I did go through all seven of them. But then I literally took it out and put it aside for later. It's interesting and I got this feedback from clients of mine who read it and friends too. And one person had said, you should have written this one first. And I said, well, I couldn't have because it just kinda grew from the other one. She said, well, it's so much easier to understand. And this is from a person who is not a yoga person at all and had no previous knowledge of Yoga.
And then I realized what the difference is. And I think it's true because the charkra book really talks about each of the chakras and describes some basic information about each one, the senses which each one is connected (the Muladhara, the root Chakra is connected to the sense of smell) and the colors and that basic sort of information. It talks about how each one of the chakras might be impacted in trauma and also grief. It's also about non-death trauma as well.
People who read it will say, oh my gosh, I totally understand that because that's exactly how I feel, that's what I went through. It totally resonates with my experience. Whereas the yoga book is more instructive. It does have some of that really personal stuff in it. It reads like a conversation that we might have. And I mentioned some of my story and talk a lot about social stuff around grief, but it's not that really intense inner experience. And I think when people read the Chakras book, they resonate with it because it mirrors their experience whether they know anything about it or not.
I've said before that I don't care whether people believe that they're real. It makes no difference whether you think that there are actual things that really exist. And I know in a lot of Tantric texts, they're meant to be points of meditation, but they do correspond with physical places in the body, like marma points do. So they're points on the body where you would put your focus. A lot of people have said, well all of this modern interpretation is not based in vedic texts, but I see sort of an inner interwoven place there. I think that the vedic texts really do talk about a lot of these things because it mentions the correspondences and it's all symbology as well. And I think it works metaphorically just as well as it works if you think it's factual. If you think I really do have this energetic space at the base of my spine and I'm going to work with it because I know it's there, it works just as well to see it as a symbol. I don't care either way.
I do a lot of artwork with people and all of that stuff, symbol, everything that we work with that's in our Vijnanamaya kosha, the wisdom body is a symbol. Like we're a whole being. We're spiritual and emotional and there's so much that resonates in the symbolic spaces for us. It doesn't mean it's not real quote unquote real. Because it definitely affects us in our real physical world. So to me it makes no difference. think they're real, but you don't have to believe they're real to get the benefit from looking at it this way. The book deals with each of the seven Chakras and speaks to my thinking around grief and trauma as a developmental process that we learn and grow through this process.
And we do that by having balance as much as possible in our lives and in all of our koshas. And we don't stay balanced all the time. It's not normal for your chakras to be balanced all the time. It's just like your physical body. It's always working toward homeostasis the best that it can. And so does our energetic body and this book really gives suggestions and ways that you can work with your own energy and to be as balanced as possible. And I think the Chakra system and the Chakra book itself breaks down a grief and trauma process in these ways that make sense in terms of the emotional aspects, the physical aspects, and the interactive social aspects. All the things that go along with each of the qualities of each different Chakra. And so you can think, oh well I know I've got those Chakra issues, let me read that chapter. You can do that. Or if you know nothing about chakras at all, you can read the introductory chapter and it helps to make a lot of sense of what that system can potentially do for you. You can read it straight through and there's so many exercises. I do energy work with people too. And I really try to tell people, look, you don't need me to do this for you. You need to be doing this at home. Like learning how to do your own energy work and have your own balancing. If you go get a pedicure, it's nice that somebody else can do it for you. Sometimes you just relax, but you can do it yourself if you need to know. And maybe you should take care of your nails yourself on a regular basis.
It's the same kind of concept, but I think it's a more personal, intimate look at your individual experience through grief and trauma. The yoga book doesn't do that exactly. In the Yoga for Grief and Loss book, l each chapter talks about a different branch of yoga and why that particular branch of Yoga is very helpful in grief. It gives you exercises and it says try these things. But I think the Chakra book really says, Oh, I can see you and this is your experience. And it's very valid thing to a lot of people. You don't have to believe in yoga for it to work, because Yoga believes in you. And it's like the force, when I explain Prana, I'll talk about it in terms of Chi and Qi. It's the same life force, but really it's also the thing they talk about in star wars. It's this force that binds us and surrounds us and connects all of us. And whether you believe it or not, these tools of Yoga work to support that. And then you end up getting the benefit, whether you believed in it or not in the first place. And I just think that's amazing.
49:07 Yes, I agree with you. It is amazing. Thank you so much Carla. It's really been interesting. I've heard other people talk about this idea of grief not being something that stops exactly, but your idea of it being an evolution, a growth opportunity. And I think your point about as we get older, we're going to have to deal with it more and more becomes quite relevant to know that this is something that just happens as lots of things happen in life. So I want to really thank you. I think it was really interesting. I think using yoga in this way is definitely an expansion of the way that people think about yoga. So, it was great to talk to you.
51:14 Oh, thank you. Stephanie. I'm so happy that you do this program because people have this really limited idea about yoga. People would even say to me, Oh, I really want to read your book, but I can't do yoga. People have this idea of what they think yoga is. And your show really flogs this and helps people to see, Well maybe this is something that I might be interested in. Maybe it is something that could be helpful to me. I really appreciate that because the concepts of yoga really help us to live our lives day to day. Thank you so much.
Contacts:
Website: www.karlahelbert.com
Facebook as KarlaHalbertLPC.
Instagram KarlaHelbert
Twitter is KarlaHelbertLPC
