Skip to content

Grief & Gratitude: Holding Both

What if grief and gratitude could exist together? A gentle Yoga Nidra inviting you to explore both, without needing to fix or change either.

A resource by Jocelyn Bates

display description

Grief & Gratitude: Holding Both

A 43-minute guided Yoga Nidra for what you've loved and what you've lost.

What if grief and gratitude aren't opposites? What if we don't have to move beyond one to experience the other?

This Yoga Nidra is an invitation to explore both, allowing them to exist together within the fullness of your life.

Yoga Nidra, sometimes called yogic sleep, is a guided practice of deep rest and awareness. Through breath, a gentle body scan, imagery, and Sankalpa (intention), we'll explore the felt sense of grief and gratitude in the body.

We'll move through the imagery of a tide washing through a sea cavern, noticing what lives within us without needing to change it. We'll make room for grief, make room for gratitude, and discover what happens when we allow ourselves to hold both.

There is nothing to accomplish. Nothing to get right. No particular feeling you're supposed to have.

Only an invitation to become curious about what is present.

Find a comfortable place where your body can be supported. You are welcome to pause, adapt, or stop the practice whenever you need.

Listen to the free Yoga Nidra:

https://jocelynbates.substack.com/p/grief-and-gratitude-a-yoga-nidra-a18?r=25cft4

About your guide

I'm Jocelyn Bates, a Shamanic Story Artist with nearly three decades of experience in expressive arts, storytelling, and creative exploration. My work invites people to become curious about their own lives through art, embodied practices, and spiritual inquiry.

Where ordinary life becomes sacred text.

https://jocelynbates.net

My Inspiration

In September 2021, I lost both of my parents seven days apart. Their deaths cracked my life open in ways I couldn't have anticipated. I had spent years accompanying others through difficult experiences as an expressive arts therapist, but suddenly I was the one standing in the depths of grief, searching for something I couldn't quite name. Over the following years, I explored my grief through art, writing, Yoga Nidra, spiritual practices, and deep personal inquiry. Five years after their deaths, I spent thirteen days publicly sharing stories of my parents, my grief, and the ways my life had changed. This Yoga Nidra was born from that experience. I began to recognize that gratitude doesn't erase grief, and grief doesn't diminish the extraordinary privilege of having loved. They can exist together. I created this practice not to help anyone move past their grief, but to offer a space where they might become curious about what they're carrying, without needing to find an answer or make anything different. Because I no longer believe that every experience needs to be resolved. Sometimes we simply need room to be with what is. And sometimes, in that spaciousness, we remember ourselves.
FREE

Other resources you may like