YOGA helped me conquer the grief of losing my dad
THE final blow to my glamorous, all-consuming career came in the form of a tearful phone call from my mum: my dad was dying. He had just been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer — the most advanced stage — and didn’t have long left to live.
My dad had always been a strong, authoritarian figure and was the linchpin of our family. During my childhood, we had spent time living in Belgium, where Dad had worked in the air defence business. He taught my younger brother and me to embrace new challenges.
He encouraged me to have a career and be independent. And that is what I’d done.
After working as a writer on a London magazine in my 20s, when the opportunity of a job mixing in celebrity circles in Dubai came up, I grabbed it with both hands.
I was working on OK! Middle east, where I eventually became editor, and spent my days on private yachts with pop stars such as Kelly rowland, having lunch with Antonio Banderas at a five-star restaurant, laughing away with singer Beverley Knight and her beau, and hanging out with Lewis Hamilton in the pits at the formula 1.
But it had all started to feel rather vapid and meaningless.
Sometimes, it takes life to blow up around before you dare to step outside your comfort zone — and that’s what happened to me.
When I flew back to Dorset to see Dad for the first time after his diagnosis, he didn’t show any outward signs of being ill.
What I loved most about Dad was his positive attitude — he’d believe the impossible was possible, even when it might look bleak to everyone else.
He applied this same attitude to his cancer and planned his treatment down to the last meticulous detail.
Doctors told us Dad might have only a few months. I started researching alternative holistic therapies, but he chose to go down the traditional Western medical route and, as expected, the side-effects were horrific.
The last months of his life were hijacked by aggressive chemotherapy sessions, endless painkillers and emergency blood transfusions. Mum quickly became his full-time carer and regularly updated me with the practical, clinical details over the phone.
I was already feeling fragile, having recently split from the man I’d thought I would marry. I was in my late 30s, so felt my hopes of a family had also been dashed. Knowing what Mum and Dad were facing only heightened my sense of panic.
DAD had been fairly wary of some of my past boyfriends: he wished to see me happily married to a protective man who was capable of letting me flourish as an independent woman. The fact that that wasn’t working out made me feel I was letting him down, and I had to accept it was highly unlikely he’d get the chance to walk me down the aisle, let alone see me have children of my own.
His demise was alarmingly quick. Mum installed a stairlift, but soon he was bedridden. It goes without saying that I felt less able to concentrate at work, and attending celebrity events felt banal. I put on an act, greeting people with fake smiles, while all the time desperately aware my dad was at home in pain.
Thankfully, I was able to fly back to visit him relatively regularly and I made it back the day before he passed away.
By that stage, Dad was painfully thin and no longer able to speak. I’ll never forget the sound of his breath — they call it the death rattle. Shallow and raspy.
The aftermath is a bit of a blur — including the funeral. In some ways, having known from the outset he was going to die, the grieving process had started before his death. But I certainly hadn’t reached the acceptance stage: it felt surreal, desperately sad and unfair.
By the end of the summer of 2012, I had lost my boyfriend and my dad. Then I lost my job, after a financial crisis at my company meant I was made redundant.
It was like watching a sturdy building slowly collapse and crumble into rubble; a building you thought would stand for ever. It was a helpless, gut-wrenching feeling. But, instead of moving to another post in the same celebrity circles, I decided to listen to my heart. I could no longer ignore the void in the pit of my stomach.
I found myself embarking on what I call a ‘wellbeing shopping spree’ — a quest to find more meaning from life.
Over the next few months, I tried dozens of weird and wonderful holistic treatments, walked across hot coals ( an ancient practice often seen as a rite of passage to test an individual’s courage), listened to motivational gurus and even travelled to the Himalayas to visit the Dalai Lama. This led me to immerse myself in yoga.
I began to learn to channel my overwhelming grief into postures on the yoga mat. This inspired me to move to an ashram — a yoga school — to learn to meditate. The location? A remote mountain in South India run by an enlightened Himalayan Yogi I had met in Dubai.
Doing basic chores is part of the culture of living in an ashram. Part of the idea is to detach from our individualistic, ego- driven nature, which we tend to cultivate in the West.
How would I afford not to earn a living? In return for helping with the upkeep ( chopping vegetables, cleaning, gardening), I could live there for free.
My mum panicked when I told her. ‘What exactly do you hope to find on top of a mountain?’
Meanwhile, friends thought I was mad: ‘How can you leave all of this?’
But, in March 2014, I found myself on a plane to Karnataka in India. Think untouched dense forest where monkeys play in the treetops.
Days were spent digging my hands into the soil, pulling out weeds from their roots, scrubbing the stone floors of the ashram and cleaning the toilets. We chopped vegetables in the kitchen to help prepare the vegetarian dishes.
When, on the rare occasion, we did venture to the local town, it felt like stepping into a time warp. Women wore their black hair in long plaits tied with fresh jasmine flowers, sometimes carrying baskets on their heads.
Predictably, as the only non-Indian face, I was often charged three times the amount at street markets, despite wearing a long, colourful kurta and attempting to learn the local lingo.
It was times like these I missed my friends and the diversity of nationalities in Dubai.
There was plenty of time to meditate. At first when I did, I couldn’t escape the chatter of my mind. The ‘monkey mind’, as they call it. I wondered if I’d ever escape my worrying thoughts.
Months went by, and I persevered on a daily basis. Sometimes, I sat in silence for days on end, with hardly any human contact.
It was tough, and there were moments when I didn’t want to face my inner demons. But I sat with my uncomfortable feelings of self-doubt and loneliness. They eventually washed over me.
POWERFUL breathing exercises, such as Kapalabhati (known as ‘skull-shining breath’) — where you do a series of forceful exhalations — really helped me to release these negative emotions and let go of the pain I felt after losing Dad.
Six months later, the final turning point occurred when I was sitting on the ashram roof.
Surrounded by lush mountains, listening to the humming of the crickets, the jabbing of the woodpeckers and distant squawking of the peacocks, I noticed my mind was completely still. There were no troubling thoughts.
In fact, there were no thoughts at all — just Nature’s chorus.
That’s when I understood what mystics and hardcore meditators meant when they described an inner high from meditating. It was beyond liberating.
Any fear of missing out on my old life had evaporated. Instead, I started to relish solitude. I realised that suffering can be a blessing in disguise, an opportunity for us to channel emotional pain into something positive.
These days, I live a more balanced life. That’s not to say stressful events and disappointments don’t arise — but now, I have the tools and techniques to deal with them. I’ve also realised that, sometimes, when life feels like it’s veering out of control and going off the rails, it’s a chance to turn adversity into triumph.
If I had returned to my old life after my dad died, I would have missed out on so much. I like to think Dad would be proud I took a risk and it paid off. As the Zen saying goes: ‘No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place!’ He would agree with that.
Practical Zen For Health, Wealth and Mindfulness, by Julian Daizan Skinner and Sarah Bladen, is published by Singing Dragon on January 18 at £9.99.