Living With Fear, Trauma, and Healing: What Yoga Teaches Me as a Heart Mom

I wanted to share a piece of me with you this morning.

February is known as National Heart Month. It raises awareness about cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, and encourages preventative, heart-healthy habits. Much of the focus is on adult heart health for the general population, which is incredibly important. But there is also another piece of awareness that matters deeply to me, Congenital Heart Defects (CHD), the most common birth defect, affecting about 1 in 100 babies. About 25% of babies born with CHD have a critical condition requiring surgery within their first year of life. And even when diagnosed and treated early, many children and adults with CHD require specialized, lifelong cardiac care.

My son was born with three undiagnosed congenital heart defects. Two required emergency open heart surgery when he was just 13 days old. This past summer, at 12 years old, he developed a complication and needed another emergency open heart surgery.

We didn’t know about his diagnoses during pregnancy. We found out when he went into heart failure at 10 days old at home. Both surgeries were a complete shock to our system.

Because it is National Heart Month, I wanted to share a little about the personal struggles I am working through right now, to give you a window into the perspective of a heart mom and the weight I carry with me. This is vulnerable to share, but I believe it is important to show up with our baggage. We all carry pain in different ways.

As I sit down to write this morning, at this exact moment six months ago my son was rolled away from me for his second emergency, life-saving open heart surgery.

I woke up today with loud echoes of panic that something bad was going to happen again. That fear voice can be incredibly loud. It is the part of me that feels armored up, trying to protect me from the two moments in my life where my ground was ripped out from under me. It is the part that keeps my nervous system in constant activation, the part that tells me that if I relax and fully arrive in the present moment, something bad could happen.

Most people have no idea I live like that, because other parts of me keep me functioning at a very high level. Sometimes it feels like I wear a mask that shows a calm, centered person to the world, while underneath that mask is a mom who lives afraid.

Because I am skilled at masking, I keep doing all the things. Showing up. Teaching. Parenting. Functioning.

My therapist told me last week that it is possible to move through life and do hard things without being anxious and tense. Right now, that feels hard to believe, but I’m trying to stay open to it.

The truth is, I have lived this way before.

After my son’s first surgery, I spent years terrified it would happen again. I didn’t believe the doctors when they said he was okay. Surgery being over did not make me feel safe. I lived waiting for the next emergency.

Over time, as I started doing my own healing work, every day stopped feeling like a countdown to bad news. I could go to cardiology appointments and echocardiograms without assuming we were heading back to surgery. I started trusting his medical team.

Last April, after new symptoms and testing, we were told his heart was stable and that if he ever needed surgery again it would likely be in adulthood. Slow growing. Not emergent. For the first time, I believed it.

Then less than four months later, what we were told would likely never happen… happened.

And now, trusting again feels complicated.

When Ari was little, part of my healing involved starting a local Mended Little Hearts of Boston group with another heart mom. I threw myself into the heart community by raising money, visiting families in the hospital, bringing care bags, and trying to make sure no family felt alone.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t only helping others. I was also trying to validate and survive my own reality.

As the years passed, I realized staying deeply immersed in the heart world was keeping me stuck in fear. And as Ari got older, I didn’t want him defined by his heart history. It is possible he just wants to be Ari, not “the kid with heart defects and the scared mom who is trying to protect him from pain.”

This has led me to think deeply about identity.

If I look at my life as a timeline, I have held many identities: daughter, sister, friend, student, musician, wife, mother, vegan, social worker, yogi, heart mom.

For a long time I wondered if identifying with these roles limited me. Through Internal Family Systems work, I now see these parts as having seats at the table. They are all trying to protect something.

Right now, the Heart Mom identity feels the most stuck. Living in constant fear is my system trying to protect me from the unbearable pain of loss or crisis.

But this stage of life feels different. When my kids were little, I could process my fear without worrying as much about how it shaped them. Now that they are 12 and 14, I am very aware that how I live inside my identities impacts how they experience the world.

A recent example was when we booked a trip to London for the upcoming April vacation. The kids were excited, talking about Europe and all the places they are going to want to see.

I was part of the conversation… but also watching it happen from the outside.

All I could think about was Ari having a cardiac emergency on a six-hour flight, or in another country. My brain immediately went to risk and worst-case scenarios.

Then another part of me stepped in. He is seeing his cardiologist two weeks before we go. London has excellent cardiac care. I speak the language. We will not be without support.

I also knew I didn’t want my fear to teach Ari to be afraid to live his life.

So my anxious part had to take a step back.

Not disappear. Just not drive the car.

I’m sharing this not just to share my story, but because I believe many of us are working through anxiety or trauma in our own ways. Maybe not congenital heart defects. But most of us have some version of a moment where our world changed and safety felt fragile.

Yoga has been a huge part of my healing.

Sometimes yoga is simply moving my body so I can get out of my head and back into my breath and the ground beneath me. Other times it is studying philosophy and realizing I don’t have to fight myself so hard.

One of the most healing truths yoga has given me is this:

Yoga is not about removing the parts of us that formed in pain.It is about helping those parts realize they don’t have to work so hard anymore.

When I am in the hospital with Ari, hypervigilance serves a purpose. It helps me stay alert and responsive.

But six months later, sitting with my cup of coffee before teaching a class, rereading medical reports and scanning old photos is my trauma response trying to keep me safe by keeping me scared.

Yoga helps me recognize when my mind is creating suffering by replaying fear.

In yoga philosophy, suffering is often explained through the five root causes of mental distress, the patterns that keep us stuck in pain:

• Misunderstanding reality

• Over-identifying with identities

• Attachment to control or certainty

• Avoidance of pain

• Deep survival fear

When I look at anxiety and trauma through this lens, it is not about being broken. It is about a nervous system trying to protect itself using old information.

The challenge for me is that the data doesn’t always feel old. I cannot predict my son’s future. So my brain scans constantly, trying to prepare me for the next emergency.

And it is exhausting to live in constant internal alarm while appearing calm on the outside.

So my practice right now is not about eliminating fear.

It is about creating enough safety that my nervous system does not have to stay in alarm mode all the time.

My yoga practice looks like reminding myself:

Right now, in this breath, Ari is okay.

Right now, in this moment, I am okay.

I cannot predict tomorrow. None of us can. But I have survived this twice already. And if I ever have to face it again, the parts of me that learned how to survive will be there to help me.

But for now, I am practicing trusting myself.

Trusting this moment.

Trusting that I am allowed to be here, living my life, even while uncertainty exists.

If you are carrying your own version of fear or trauma, you are not alone. And you are not broken. You are patterned. And patterns can change.

That is yoga.

This is also why I teach the way I do.

At The Yoga Barn, yoga is not about forcing yourself into shapes or becoming some ideal version of calm or healed. It is about meeting yourself honestly, wherever you are that day.

Some days that means strength.

Some days that means rest.

Some days that means simply breathing and realizing you made it through something you once thought you couldn’t survive.

My teaching is rooted in the belief that you are allowed to have agency in your practice. You are allowed to listen to your body. You are allowed to have parts of you that are strong and parts of you that are scared and parts of you that are still healing.

Yoga, to me, is not about becoming someone new.

It is about creating enough safety inside yourself that you can be fully who you already are.

And sometimes, that is the most courageous practice there is.

2013 in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit

2025 one month after surgery