Donia Spott
Teacher
My husband, Billy, and I found Humble Haven Yoga in the summer of 2020 and started joining the Zoom classes in an attempt to survive the pandemic shutdown. For the next year, we found community and strength with people we had never met while practicing at home together. We will be forever grateful to Suzanne, Camille, Jennie Ray, Margo, Tarole, Andrea, and everyone else for what they did to make that possible.
It took us far too long to make yoga a regular part of our lives, and like so many others who show up on their mats, it took trauma and grief to get us there.
We’ve been married a long time--it was 33 years in May--and raised three amazing kids, Sammy, Maia, and Ethan. Like most people, we went through our share of tough times over the years. In March of 2016, however, we found ourselves facing every parent’s worst nightmare. Our oldest child, Sammy, was 21, when we realized he was in a serious mental health crisis. Although we tried to help him and get him help, just weeks after we became aware of his struggle, he flew to Maui, and on April 6, 2016, he died there by suicide.
In the days after he died, we found a small notebook of his with to-do lists scribbled inside. On two of these lists, he wrote, “jiu jitsu”. We had no idea what that even was. In what seemed an unbelievable coincidence, the police detective in Maui who had called us to break the terrible news and met us when we flew there to bring Sammy’s ashes home told us how he trained jiu jitsu and how much it had helped him cope with the loss of his newborn son several years before. It felt like a connection that was meant to be.
Within just a few weeks, Billy signed up for an introductory class at Revolution BJJ and was almost immediately completely hooked on the sport. Although I had no interest in participating, I couldn’t help but notice the impact that it had on him. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it probably saved our marriage during those first few dark and awful months after our son died. Of course, he wanted me to join him on the mats, but I reminded him that I didn’t have an athletic bone in my body!
By December, Billy had worn me down enough that I agreed to try the intro class just to shut him up. Of course, by about week three, I couldn’t wait to sign up. At this point, Billy has been training for over six years and January was my five year anniversary. We love the physical and mental challenge, camaraderie, and mental distraction of the sport and jiu jitsu has changed us inside and out. Not only has it shifted our perspectives on who we each are, but Billy is nearly 100 pounds smaller than he was when Sammy died, and I’ve discovered the athlete I never knew I could be.
In the months before he died, Sammy had turned to yoga, and many of his to-do lists included notes about classes he was going to attend, or thoughts he had about his practice. On one page, he wrote, “take dad to yoga with me”. That never happened. As we struggled every day to function after his death, we tried running and yoga as part of our daily routine. At first, we found yoga videos on YouTube and eventually began joining Yin yoga classes at various YMCA locations. The turning point came in the late fall of 2018, when Billy had a serious rib injury that sidelined him from training jiu jitsu for over a month. As an alternative, he decided to try hot yoga and loved it. I soon joined him and we found it to be a wonderful complement to our jiu jitsu practice. By early 2019, Billy committed to a yoga teacher training program and earned his 200 hours certificate. In March, 2020, right before the world shut down, he started teaching classes at a local studio. While gyms and studios were shut down in 2020-2021, he taught a Zoom yoga class for our jiu jitsu gym, and continues that in person every Sunday.
When people know our story, they sometimes turn to us for advice about facing mental health challenges, both their own and that of their loved ones. Other grieving parents often ask us how we cope and how we find purpose after such a loss. There are no easy answers; all we can do is tell our story. If you’re struggling with your own demons, whether grief, depression, or thoughts of self harm, definitely seek help and we hope you find it. But do something else for yourself as well and get on your mat--push yourself to learn hard things and make your body do something new. We have discovered ourselves through jiu jitsu and yoga, and for an hour at a time, we leave our problems outside of the mat with our crocs.
We are forever grateful to the instructors and our classmates at Revolution BJJ and Humble Haven Yoga for the love and support we find there and look forward to growing even older on the mats.
