Trauma, Grief and the Practice of Returning

Please note this post includes events from my personal experience that some readers may find difficult. Please read only if it feels appropriate for you to do so. If you would like to talk about how yoga may support your relationship with stress, anxiety, grief, burnout or other difficult emotions, you are welcome to get in touch via email with Adri at adri@adriszigeti.com.

I'm going to share parts of my story, not because I believe my experience is unusual, but because I've come to see how many of us are quietly walking through similar landscapes.

I've always been fairly introverted, and I've often struggled with the idea of putting personal writing into the world. There's a vulnerability in it that I don't take lightly.

And yet, I also believe there is something important in recognising our shared humanity. We are all shaped by what we've lived through. The past is not something we can change, but there is space in how we meet it, and how we move forward from it.

In many traditions, including yoga and Buddhist philosophy, there is a simple idea that each day offers a kind of return - an opportunity to begin again, even in small ways. For me, this has become less about perfection or transformation, and more about learning how to stay with myself through the different seasons of life.

What follows is shared in that spirit, not as a conclusion, but as an ongoing process of understanding. I'm not interested in framing things as fixed or resolved, but rather as something we continue to meet with honesty, compassion and curiosity.

The work is not always straightforward. But I've often found that if you are reading something like this, you may already be familiar with what it feels like to begin that process of looking inward.

A few years ago, I found myself facing several experiences that brought old wounds back to the surface. I had the opportunity to reconnect with my mum after many years apart. We spent around three years rebuilding our relationship before she became seriously ill. Following a difficult exchange between us, our relationship broke down and we never found a way back to each other before she passed away. There is a name for this: complicated grief.

As I began working more deeply with therapists and other professionals, I started to understand that some of what I was experiencing was not only grief. Earlier experiences from childhood were also being reawakened, shaping the way I responded to loss, uncertainty and relationships.

What I had previously understood as personality traits or ways of coping began to make more sense through the lens of trauma, anxiety and attachment.

I was eventually diagnosed with separation anxiety as an adult. Looking back, many of the patterns had been present for years. Fear of losing people I loved. Compulsive behaviours. A tendency towards control during periods of uncertainty. The belief that something terrible might happen if I wasn't close to the people I cared about.

As the work deepened, so did my understanding of how interconnected these experiences were. Childhood trauma, complicated grief, attachment patterns and significant life stressors rarely exist in isolation. They influence one another in ways that can be difficult to see when we're living inside them.

Some of those patterns affected my marriage in ways I deeply regret. The need for control that emerged during periods of fear and uncertainty created suffering for both me and my wife, and we are now going through divorce. These are not easy realities to sit with. At the same time, part of healing has been learning to take responsibility for my actions while also developing compassion for the experiences that shaped them.

Even during the worst days, one thing I continued to do was roll out my yoga mat.

Sometimes I would manage one Sun Salutation before crying. Sometimes I would get through five. My body was used to two hours of physical practice each day, so the change felt strange and unfamiliar.

Most days, all I could do was sit and breathe.

Sit and breathe.

I found meditations that spoke about difficult emotions, about staying present with ourselves when everything feels unstable. I had taught some of these practices for years, but only now did I begin to understand them in a completely different, and very practical way.

Sit and breathe.

I would often finish with a twenty-minute yoga nidra. At a time when I was sleeping only a few hours each night and waking already wired, those practices became a small refuge.

Slowly, things started to change.

I noticed that when anxiety arrived, there was sometimes a tiny space between the trigger (my thoughts) and my reaction (crying). Not every time, and certainly not at first. But occasionally there was that tiny space for one conscious breath in, and one conscious breath out.

Every now and then, I managed to catch that moment.

Over the following weeks, I slowly rebuilt my practice, one posture at a time. Alongside it, I continued the longer meditation practices that seemed to offer just enough perspective for something new to emerge.

Michael Stone once said that practice does not make us perfect. We will continue to make mistakes and sometimes act unskillfully in emotional situations. What practice offers is the opportunity to return, again and again, and gradually discover another way.

I loved that.

The idea that letting go is just as important as the desire to change. That we can keep returning to our values with honesty and openness, even when we fall short. That compassion is not something we perfect, but something we continue practising.

He also said that one of the hardest parts of compassion is allowing others to offer it to us. For someone whose foundations were built on the belief that they were unlovable, those words felt like treasure.

Alongside my own healing, I've found myself reading more about trauma and its relationship to both emotional and physical wellbeing.

The work of Dr Gabor Maté has been particularly thought-provoking. He describes trauma not as the event that happened to us, but as the wound that remains afterwards. Healing begins when we recognise the wound that was caused and held onto, and work with it gently.

The word trauma itself comes from Ancient Greek and literally means "wound".

Whether or not one agrees with all of his conclusions, I find that understanding deeply meaningful. Many of us spend years focusing on what happened, while paying less attention to the ways those experiences continue to live in the body, shape our relationships, influence our beliefs and affect our health.

For me, this perspective offered another way of understanding my own experience.

The reason I share this is not to position my story as unusual, but to acknowledge how common it is for people to be carrying experiences that shape the way they move through the world, their relationships, and their own sense of self. It took me more than forty years, to deepen the work of svadhyaya, or self-exploration.

Whether you are navigating stress, grief, anxiety, burnout, or a period of change, you are not alone in what you are feeling.

Yoga is not a cure, and it is not a replacement for therapy or medical support. For many people, it can offer a complementary space to reconnect with the body, breathe, and begin to develop a steadier relationship with themselves over time.