When Yoga Doesn’t Take the Pain Away
· @ErikaSmithIluszko
On grief, suffering, and what yoga was really meant to do.
Students often come to me after class with the same story. They have been practicing for years, with several classes a week, a home practice, and retreats. Their bodies are stronger than ever, and yet the grief hasn’t moved. The loss is still there every morning, and so is the pain.
“Why isn’t it working?” they ask. I want to answer this honestly. The answer is not that you are doing yoga wrong. It may be that you haven’t yet started the part of yoga that this kind of pain is asking for. First, though: your grief is not a failure of your practice. Loss hurts, and it is supposed to. Grief is what love becomes when it has nowhere to go. Nothing in yoga asks you to stop feeling it.
What do you mean by “yoga”?
So let me ask you back: when you say you practice yoga, what do you practice?
If you mean asana, it is good for you. Asana makes the body stronger and more resilient, and it can support healing from illness. It let’s you understand the bofy more, your Annamaykosha. Pranayama and meditation bring balance to the nervous system, and you learn to breathe through what used to overwhelm you. I would never tell you to stop any of it.
But look at what these practices work on: the body, the breath, the nervous system. Grief doesn’t live only there. It lives in your memories, in the meaning you’ve made of what happened, and in the beliefs you carry about yourself and the world.
Patañjali defines yoga in his second sūtra as yogaś citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ: yoga is the settling of the movements of the mind (YS 1.2). He means the mind, not the muscles. And by mind I don’t mean the brain. I mean everything you have lived and everything you believe about it.
Pain is not the same as suffering
One of the most hopeful lines in the Yoga Sūtras is also one of the shortest: heyaṁ duḥkham anāgatam, the suffering that has not yet come can be avoided (YS 2.16).
Notice what Patañjali does not say. He doesn’t say pain can be avoided, or loss, or death. Those are part of being alive. What he points to is duḥkha, the suffering we keep producing around our pain, again and again, long after the event itself has passed.
He also names where that suffering comes from. He calls them the kleśas, the afflictions (YS 2.3):
- Avidyā, misperception: seeing what is temporary as permanent, and what we are not as what we are
- Asmitā, the sense of “I” that fuses with whatever happens to it
- Rāga, clinging to what brought pleasure
- Dveṣa, aversion to what brought pain
- Abhiniveśa, the deep fear of ending, of loss, of death
Read that list again with your grief in mind. Clinging to how things were. Refusing how things are. A self that says this loss is who I am now. Beneath all of it, the fear that something in us won’t survive. The loss is real. But much of the suffering is the mind’s ongoing response to it. That is where yoga works, and that is why asana alone can’t reach it.
The Gita begins in grief
People forget that the teaching of the Bhagavad Gītā, perhaps the most loved text in the yoga tradition, begins only after a man collapses in grief. Arjuna stands on the battlefield, facing teachers, cousins, and friends. His bow slips from his hand. His body trembles, his mouth goes dry, and he sits down in his chariot, unable to act. The first chapter is even called Arjuna Viṣāda Yoga, the yoga of Arjuna’s despair.
Kṛṣṇa doesn’t tell him to breathe deeper or to stretch. He doesn’t tell him the pain isn’t real. He begins teaching him who he is. One of his first teachings is this: the contacts of the senses bring heat and cold, pleasure and pain. They come and they go; they are impermanent. Bear them patiently (BG 2.14). This isn’t a dismissal of pain. It is an invitation to stop mistaking what passes through you for what you are. The tradition understood something we often forget. Grief isn’t an obstacle on the path. Very often, it is where the path begins.
You are not your grief
In Advaita Vedānta, the first qualification of a seeker is viveka: discernment between what you are and what you are experiencing. Thoughts arise and pass. Emotions arise and pass. Even the deepest grief has moments when it rises and moments when it softens. But something in you is present for all of it. It was there before the loss, it is there now, and it notices the grief without being made of grief. The tradition calls it sākṣī, the witness. This is not detachment in the cold sense. The witness doesn’t stop caring. It is the part of you that can hold the pain without being swallowed by it, the way the sky holds a storm without becoming the storm. When you begin to rest there, even for a moment, something shifts. The grief is still present, but you are no longer lost inside it. You can feel it fully, perhaps more fully than before, because you are no longer afraid it will destroy you.
Grief arises in you. It is not you.
Are you ready?
Here is the uncomfortable truth: a yoga practice can become a very good place to hide. We flow, we sweat, we lie down in savasana and feel calm for an hour. Then we go home and the grief is waiting, exactly where we left it. The practice gave us relief, which is valuable, but it never asked us to look. Patañjali’s practice asks for more. It begins with tapas, the willingness to stay in the heat, and svādhyāya, the study of oneself (YS 2.1). That means turning toward the very things we built our routines to avoid: the beliefs we’ve never questioned, the memories we keep away from, the story we tell about what happened and who we became because of it. And it ends with īśvara praṇidhāna, surrender to what is larger than us, which may be the hardest teaching of all for someone who has lost what they loved.
So I’ll ask you directly. Are you able, and are you ready, to step out of your comfort zone? Can you face those truths, those beliefs, and those events in your mind, then watch them, take them apart, and come to understand them? Only from that understanding can you really choose. Do you keep doing what you’ve been doing, or do you change your path? Either answer can be right. What matters is that it is a choice, not a habit.
Where to begin
You don’t need to dismantle your whole life to start. Begin with one practice of inquiry:
- After your asana, sit for ten minutes. Let the body be still and the breath be easy.
- Bring to mind one belief that keeps returning around your loss. It might be I should be over this by now, it was my fault, or I will never feel whole again.
- Don’t try to fix it. Just look at it and ask: Where did this come from? Is it true? What happens in my body when I believe it?
- Notice who is doing the noticing.
- Write down whatever you see, even a single line.
Do this for a week. You may find that some beliefs loosen simply from being seen, and that others hold on. Both tell you something. And please hear this as well: if your grief feels too heavy to hold alone, reach out to a therapist, a counselor, or someone you trust. Inquiry and support don’t compete with each other. They work together. Even Arjuna didn’t face his grief alone; he had Kṛṣṇa beside him.
The practice was never meant to make you numb
Yoga doesn’t promise a life without loss. It promises something quieter and more lasting: that you can meet your loss without losing yourself. The pain may stay for a while. Let it. But when you begin to see your mind clearly, the suffering built on top of the pain slowly comes undone. And what remains is not emptiness. It is love, without the fear.