Guest blog by Michelle Marlahan, with selected poetry

TW: Pregnancy Loss

For nearly twenty years, I built my yoga practice—and my teaching—around the idea of trusting the body.

Meeting ourselves with gentleness and compassion. Approaching our inner resistance with curiosity rather than harshness. Making space in the body, exploring, and allowing for the release of anything we don’t need.

This is the backbone of yoga: developing a loving, trusting relationship with ourselves.

These words of wisdom all sound lovely until they're not enough. Until your body—the one you've spent two decades learning to trust—becomes the place of your deepest grief.

These words of wisdom all sound lovely until they're not enough.

I was forty-two years old and two months into a new relationship when I found out I was pregnant.

Seeing that "+" symbol on the First Response stick was unbelievable. I'd struggled with infertility in my thirties and was told I couldn't get pregnant without medical intervention.

As much as getting pregnant was a shock, there was a greater one coming. In my second trimester, results from a blood test showed a chromosomal issue. Like Noah’s Ark, we come with two of each – the baby had three of one. It was a terminal diagnosis.

In that two-minute conversation with the genetic counselor, my world broke into a million pieces. As I hung up, I gripped my chest where it felt like my heart had been ripped out as I sobbed.

Despite the accuracy of the blood test, my doctor urged that I wait three more weeks until I could have an amniocentesis, which would give a definitive result. "Could you live with the one percent chance that the blood test is wrong?" the doctor asked. I guess I couldn't. So I waited—through the entire Christmas season and New Year's Eve—carrying a baby I was terrified to bond with and terrified to lose.

Those weeks are mostly a blur. I was inconsolable, lifeless. I carved a dent in the couch where I spent hours just looking out the window. I was angry at everything – including my body. There was no meeting my body with curiosity or developing a loving, trusting relationship. Nearly two decades of dedicated yoga practice left me with a love of the body, yet mine had failed me.

The amnio appointment came and went. When the results came in, the extra chromosome was confirmed. Even though this seemingly perfect baby was growing at a normal rate and active in his watery world, he was going to die.

a collage of two images, a quote, and a stuffed lamb. the images are of a woman practicing an energetic yoga pose and of a woman holding a lit match in a soft focus close up

I was given options for how to move forward, and without much counsel or support, I decided to end the pregnancy. Honestly, it didn’t feel like a decision – it felt like the only option. A desperate part of me thought if “it” was over, my pain would be over. I wanted to put all this behind me and move on.

But moving on isn’t how life works.

We are encouraged to let go, find closure, and get back to normal. I did all the closure things – I had a ceremony on the due date, I burned sage, and buried ultrasound pictures. I got a therapist. I read spiritual texts and meditated. And still, it was a roller coaster. My emotions were at the whim of the wind. Some days I put on mascara, other days I don’t get out of bed.

I couldn’t even find peace in my yoga practice. In fact, I felt betrayed. By my body, by my ability to spiritually weather, by whatever I considered God to be. I found a few yogic writings on grief, and they suggested that I was too attached and not evolved enough – that was the source of my pain. The practice I had built my life around had become another way I was failing.

woman is sitting practicing yoga breathing in low sun outside

The image I held in those early days was of each day as a grain of sand. Every day, another grain of sand. Robotically brushing my teeth, making breakfast, mustering compassion for myself – one grain of sand at a time. I somehow trusted that eventually, even if it took a long time, there would be a new shore, a place to stand.

Months passed. I eventually returned to teaching, though I’d been stripped of everything I thought I knew. Telling people to trust their bodies was no longer an option. I still had so much anger—at my body for failing me, at yoga for not being enough, at a world that expected me to be healed by now.

What I started to sense was that I needed more space than my body could hold. All the yoga philosophy about trusting the body, meeting it with compassion, releasing what doesn't serve — it assumed the body was a reliable container. But what happens when it's not? What happens when your body becomes the place of loss, when you don’t trust it anymore?

I realized I needed something bigger to trust. I needed to trust life itself — the course of it, the losses I couldn't control, the person I was becoming through it all. When I allowed everything that was honest and real, even the parts I hated, to surface, I brought more of myself into my life. Like the line from a favorite poem by Izumi Shikibu: "I knew myself completely, no part left out."

When your body is too small a container, you must learn to trust your life.

When your body is too small a container, you must learn to trust your life.

a plush stuffed animal of a lamb sits on an ottoman in gentle soft focus

This doesn't mean the anger disappeared or that I found some tidy resolution. It means I stopped trying to amputate the past and started integrating the old person and the new person, weaving a life of the two. Not the life I imagined at forty-two, but a life that was mine nonetheless, no part left out.

My Underworld Tour redefined almost everything in my life. It took a long time, but I fell in love with yoga again – in fact, at fifty-four, I am more passionate than ever about caring for this vessel. And I still talk about trusting the body—but now I know it means something different than it did at twenty-two or forty-two. It means trusting that your body will hold you, even through what you cannot hold yourself.

Watching the moon

at midnight

solitary, mid-sky,

I knew myself completely,

no part left out

Izumi Shikibu

Death

Death, Your servant, is at my door. He has crossed the unknown sea and brought Your call to my home.

The night is dark, and my heart is fearful – yet I shall take up the lamp, open my gates, and bow to him my welcome. It is Your messenger who stands at my door.

I shall worship him with folded hands and with tears. I shall worship him, placing at his feet the treasure of my heart.

Rabindranath Tagore

Although the wind

blows terribly here,

the moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu

Accept Me

Accept me, dear God, accept me for this while.

Let those orphaned days that passed without You be forgotten.

Only spread this little moment wide across Your lap, holding it under Your light.

I have wandered in pursuit of voices that drew me, yet led me nowhere.

Now let me sit in peace and listen to Your words in the soul of my silence.

Do not turn away Your face from my heart’s dark secrets, but burn them till they are alight with Your fire.

Rabindranath Tagore

Real strength work. Pelvic health. Practices that honor what you've been through and prepare you for what's ahead.

Her online studio, It's All Yoga, is a come-as-you-are space for women who want to feel strong, capable, and at home in their changing bodies. Small classes mean personal attention, monthly themes create lasting change, and your body gets exactly what it needs.

The foundation of her teaching is kindness, welcoming all parts of ourselves to the party.

Website: https://www.michellemarlahan.com/

Facebook: @michelle.marlahan

Instagram: @michellemarlahan

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When Your Body is Too Small a Container

These words of wisdom all sound lovely until they're not enough.