“Well, the people at our hospice wouldn’t be doing that.” This is what someone told me at an event I went to on the weekend when I said I specialized in yoga for people at the end of life.
It’s understandable that people think yoga is not for the dying. We’ve all seen Instagram-worthy photos of lithe young people doing mind-boggling yoga poses. But the truth is that yoga is accessible to everyone alive.
T.K.V. Desikachar put it simply: “Anybody can breathe; therefore anybody can practice yoga. But no one can practice every kind of yoga. It has to be the right yoga for the person.”
“Anybody who wants to can practice yoga.”
– T.K.V. Desikachar, The Heart of Yoga
At the end of life, a yoga practice might include gentle movement. Or not. Maybe a deeply relaxing body scan or yoga nidra would offer the greatest comfort. Yoga for palliative care might involve breath work (prānāyāma), but not exactly the way it’s practiced by a 30-year-old in the fullness of health.
As people reach the end of life, the outward concerns of day-to-day life often drop away and they turn inward to their own experience. At that point yoga’s meditation techniques can be a powerful way to make meaning of life and reach a place of acceptance.
Palliative care is for the whole person
As a culture, we’ve leaned heavily on the medical professions to handle death and dying. In the past, people died at home and were cared for by their families. A spiritual guide or religious leader might also be called on to perform last rites. But for the past century or more, we’ve turned to the many powerful tools offered by modern medicine.
Palliative care evolved out of the need to take care of people when medical cures no longer help. Some treatments, at this stage, can be harmful. Curative medicine only takes us so far.
Montreal doctor Balfour Mount coined the term palliative care in the 1970s. He was part of an international movement of health care professionals, led by Cicely Saunders and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who recognized patients needed better support in the final stages of life.
The focus is on improving quality of life. It’s the art in shifting from fighting disease to extend life towards comforting the whole person, and their family, at the end of life.
In practice, palliative care is heavily focused on pain management. The comfort offered by controlling pain is extremely valuable. But the psychosocial and spiritual experience of those who are dying is something that few medical professionals are trained to embrace.
The rich tapestry of yoga can pick up some of the loose threads of the medical system.
Yoga relieves suffering
Common symptoms for those nearing the end of life—pain, breathlessness, sleeplessness, fatigue, digestive upset, brain fog, depression, and anxiety—can all be soothed and improved by the right yoga practice and a qualified teacher.
For nearly every condition, from cancer to heart disease to bone fractures, the research shows that yoga helps to relieve symptoms, at a low cost and with no side effects.
To take one example, in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn began researching mindfulness. His program was rooted in yogic techniques like pranayama, progressive relaxation, and meditation.
Clinical trials involving hundreds of patients have shown that mindfulness offers relief to people suffering from pain and anxiety, including those at the end of life. Mindfulness is now offered in over 700 hospitals around the world.
A personal experience
My mother struggled with breathlessness in the weeks leading up to her death. Her medical team at the hospital was excellent. They stepped in to provide the right medications and oxygen when my mother panicked from the lack of it.
As a complement to her medical care, I did gentle exercises with her to regulate her breath. A simple arm movement to stretch the lungs, inhaling as she raised one arm, exhaling as she lowered her arm. We had practiced this movement and breath in our weekly chair yoga lessons before she was diagnosed with cancer, so she knew what to do.
Not only did this simple practice allow her to breathe easier, but it helped to calm her nervous system. It gave her something positive to focus her mind on.
The day before my mother died, I sat by her bed in the hospital and offered her a quiet meditation based on imagery that was meaningful to her. She had not opened her eyes or spoken for several days. But hearing is the last sense that remains for many through the dying process, and I believe she could hear my words. Yoga gave us a way to connect in her last days.
Yoga is accessible to anyone
Not only is yoga accessible to people facing death, but also it promotes well-being in mind, body, and spirit. In the true spirit of palliative care, yoga embraces the whole person to ease physical symptoms and calm anxieties that naturally arise at the end of life.
Yoga is, above all things, a way to regulate energy, or prana, the life force within each of us. As long as we’re alive, a yoga practice can be adapted to the abilities, needs, and goals of anyone who wants it. This includes those in palliative care. We never need to feel limited about our ability to find comfort and strength through yoga.