Carrying Grief, Returning to Breath
Before I became a yoga therapist and Ayurvedic counselor, I spent five years teaching in Oakland Public Schools —
working as a classroom teacher and a restorative justice facilitator.
I loved my students fiercely. I loved our community fiercely.
And like so many educators, caregivers, and space-holders, I carried more grief than my heart and body sometimes knew how to hold.
During my years in Oakland, loss was not an isolated event — it was a constant current.
I lost a close friend to gun violence.
Several of my students were shot or incarcerated.
I visited hospitals where students had to register under fake names for protection.
I worked alongside gang interventionists — some of whom were later killed.
Even after leaving the classroom, I found myself checking homicide reports daily, trying to hold onto those I loved.
Among all these losses, one stands out with particular sharpness:
a brilliant, creative 15-year-old student — an artist, a leader, a light in our community — who was shot and killed.
Teachers are not trained — and truly can never be fully prepared — for the pain of losing a student.
There is no guidebook for how to grieve while still holding space for others.
I remember coming to school the day after her death, standing at the desk where she always sat, carefully gathering her things, trying to feel her presence in the corner of the classroom that had become her space.
I remember how our classroom — her siblings, her friends, our wider community — came together to build and tend an altar in her honor.
Long after the immediate mourning faded, her friends continued to care for her memory — bringing offerings, telling stories, tending the space where she lived in their hearts.
This is part of the truth too:
The violence was real, but so was the love.
The grief was real, but so was the community.
The loss was devastating, but so was the collective refusal to forget.
At the time, I didn’t have the tools I needed to care for myself in the wake of that much loss.
Like so many caregivers living inside systems of violence and scarcity, I turned to substances to numb the grief I didn’t know how to process.
I coped in the only ways I knew how — ways that allowed me to keep showing up, but slowly pulled me away from myself.
Looking back, I know that if I had been given more support — more tools for navigating my own grief, pain, and heartbreak —
I could have sustained myself longer.
I could have stayed more rooted — for myself and for the communities I loved.
I share this not to center my own suffering, but to say this:
I understand the weight of vicarious trauma.
I understand burnout doesn't just come from exhaustion — but from heartbreak, from chronic grief, from loving more deeply than one heart can sometimes bear.
It took me years to find my way back to my breath, my body, my center.
And it is from that lived place — from both the wound and the love — that I offer spaces for healing today.
Why This Work Is Needed Now
Today, as we move through a world where violence, racism, and systemic harm are again escalating —
where collective grief is mounting in the wake of rising fascism and political violence —
the need for spaces of healing, resilience, and remembrance is not a luxury.
It is a necessity.
The work of resistance — whether in classrooms, clinics, courtrooms, community centers, or streets — demands more than our labor.
It demands our breath. Our embodiment. Our resilience.
I know what it’s like to pour yourself into the work of care and justice, only to find yourself exhausted, grieving, and disconnected from your own center.
I know the cost of carrying too much without a place to set it down.
This is why I do the work I do now.
The spaces I offer — retreats, circles, somatic practices, collective care rituals — are not just about individual healing.
They are about restoring the breath of the movement.
Tending the hearts of those who resist.
Building inner resilience so that we can sustain the work of outer change.