In this short conversation between Breathing Deeply Founder and Lead Teacher, Brandt Passalacqua, and Beth Christiano, clinical psychologist and Breathing Deeply graduate (C-IAYT), explore how yoga therapy supports individuals navigating grief.
Beth shares how she bridges the gap between conventional grief counseling and yoga therapy practices, and how this integrative approach addresses where grief actually lives.
How Yoga Therapy Helps You Navigate Grief and Loss
Grief is a normal response to the loss of someone or something to which we are deeply connected and touches every layer of who we are. Death, divorce, health diagnoses, career endings, relationship breakups. Loss is universal.
Everyone experiences loss, and grief is complex. Yoga Therapy recognizes that grief affects the whole self across multiple layers, including the physical, energetic, mental, intuitive, and spiritual.
Because grief doesn’t follow a single path, healing rarely does either. A yoga therapy approach normalizes grief as a natural response rather than pathologizing symptoms.
Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapy treats grief as a tailored, whole-person approach that supports people living with grief.
This is where yoga therapy becomes so powerful. Rather than offering one solution, it offers many, meeting each person uniquely where they are, with an infinitely customizable approach. Perhaps most importantly, yoga therapy gives people agency, ways to participate in their own healing, even when the condition itself feels out of their control.
Become a Yoga Therapist
If you feel called to support others through complex physical and mental health challenges, our professional Yoga Therapy Training provides mentorship, clinical thinking skills, and whole-person education.
Continue Your Healing Journey
If you are navigating physical and/or mental health challenges, Breathing Deeply Wellness offers accessible programs rooted in yoga therapy principles to support meaningful change.
Podcast: Listen to Yoga Therapy for Grief and Loss with Beth Christiano
Breathing Deeply is a Yoga Therapy and Meditation School co-founded by lead teacher Brandt Passalacqua in 2011. Breathing Deeply offers two levels of certification: Foundations of Yoga Therapy and an IAYT-accredited Advanced Program, offering C-IAYT eligibility.
Other offerings include Breathing Deeply Wellness, a service-driven community of Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapists dedicated to helping the public optimize their physical, mental, and spiritual health, an annual online meditation teacher training certification, and specialized yoga therapy courses. Breathing Deeply is an active and thriving community of meditators and yogis, caregivers, therapists, teachers, medical professionals, parents & children with the same intention—to serve others, lessen suffering, and co-create a new paradigm in wellness.