How Yin Yoga Helped Me Find Closure After a Breakup

Months before my breakup, I wrote in my journal, I feel like my body is preparing for a long winter ahead. When I look back on these words spilled out on the page, I take it as confirmation that each of us has a voice of knowing within our bodies—especially if we’re willing to listen.

My ex and I ended things in early December that year, and throughout the winter and spring that followed, I found myself frequently practicing stretches and twists on my yoga mat. I instinctually came back to the long holds of yin yoga week after week after week. Each Sunday evening, even on nights where Denver’s city streets were dusted with snow, I rolled out my mat and attended a vin-yin yoga class that served as my source of solace, no matter how heavy my heart felt.

Following the end of the relationship, I found it incredibly difficult to reclaim the city we both inhabited. There were many things I loved about the time we shared and I sorely missed aspects of the relationship with my ex. He had been my best friend.

In the months before my ex and I broke up, I found myself feeling extremely lost in the midst of change—having been laid off from a job, subsequently pivoting my career, and healing past traumas in therapy. We both wanted things to stay the same yet we were each changing. I know now that like any pattern or dynamic in a relationship, ours was co-created. But at that time, I had internalized a feeling and a fear that somehow I wasn’t enough.

When the relationship ended that winter, I was as heartbroken as I was confused, flooded with even more self-doubt and uncertainty.

How Yin Yoga Helped Me Navigate Heartbreak

Though I had been teaching yoga for over six months and practicing for over 10 years at the time, I was a relative newcomer to yin.

What I appreciated about this more restorative form of yoga was that I could simply show up and settle into various inward-focused forward folds. By providing a place to just be, yin yoga helped me through the waves of grief I was feeling.

It wasn’t until the spring after our breakup that I finally understood how those weekly yin classes had been supporting me in doing exactly this. I signed up for a weekend-long yin yoga training and learned that yin yoga is based on principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine by stretching the connective tissue along the meridians, or lines of energy associated with various organs. Each meridian holds a different function and connection to the elements, seasons, and emotions.

In yin yoga, we find our own personal “edge” of sensation along these meridians in a stretch that might be slightly uncomfortable but that we can stay with for time in stillness, often using yoga supports such as blocks, blankets, and bolsters.

During that weekend, I explored, discussed, and experienced yin postures such as Shoelace, Cat’s Tail, and Bridge differently. I began to understand how they can facilitate an aspect of letting go, using the breath as a vehicle to sink into the stretches.

I also learned that if we feel pain of any kind in a pose, there are options. We can change the angle of our arm or leg. We can add a block or bolster. Or we can change the pose altogether, choosing to leave behind what isn’t working for our bodies at that moment.

As I practiced the art of listening to my body, supporting myself, and becoming curious about my experience, I could not only feel the stored tension but release it. Finally, it made sense why I had gravitated toward yin yoga in the face of heartbreak. It helped me take a break from mental analysis so I could feel the anger and longing and hurt held deep within my body and to cry the tears I had otherwise been conditioned to hold back.

With therapy, support from friends, and finding space to be still with myself, I slowly realized that I didn’t need rescuing or fixing. What I needed was to come back to myself and my body.

How Yin Continues to Support Me

In the face of hard times, it can be annoyingly common to hear the phrase, “feel your feelings.” What that means isn’t always so clear.

There aren’t always sufficient resources or spaces to feel grief, especially in situations that are sometimes considered less significant or ambiguous, such as experiencing the loss of a love, being laid-off from work, or having a close friend move away. Without adequate tools for navigating our emotions, our default reaction can be to suppress or attempt to logically and outwardly solve our complicated and non-linear feelings—and inevitably take our wounds to our next relationship, workspace, or friendship. Yin yoga provided me with a safe space to feel and be held as I processed my grief.

In the time spent healing from this heartbreak, my yin yoga practice gave me space to explore the depths and crevices of what happens when previously held constants in life go away, through learning to really feel into my body.

My yoga practice continues to teach me how my hips, hamstrings, and shoulders can feel drastically different from one side of my body to the other, from one day to the next—just like my emotions, wants, and needs can vary. This kind of awareness, with time and gravity, slowly brought about a greater calm in experiencing the impermanence inherent in life. Along with that came an acceptance about something beautiful that didn’t last.

For me, healing my broken heart didn’t mean I fixed it. It meant I came back to myself more emotionally resilient than ever.