On Losing a Parent and Choosing Life with Bex Tyrer

What does it look like to say yes to life in the very week your father has died?

I recorded this conversation with Bex Tyrer (she/her) at the Bali Spirit Festival in Ubud, exactly one week after her father passed away at the age of 98.

I wasn’t sure we were going to do it. We’d been planning this interview for a while, but when I heard about her dad, I thought we’d postpone.

It wasn’t until the morning of the recording that Bex said yes, and what unfolded was an incredibly intimate and honest conversation.

Bex is a yoga teacher and facilitator at the Yoga Barn in Ubud, where she’s been a resident teacher since 2008. She holds an MPhil from Oxford University, has taught yoga in Bali’s largest prison, in refugee camps in Palestine and in women’s refuges in Kathmandu, and brings a rare combination of intellectual depth and embodied wisdom to everything she does.

In this episode, we talked about what it’s like to grieve a parent you’ve been saying goodbye to for a decade. About compartmentalisation, and the patterns we carry from childhood loss. About sitting beside someone you love as they slowly leave, and how music and eye contact can reach through when words can’t.

Bex shared the story of her father’s extraordinary life, from working-class Scotland to the Australian outback to a care home nearly a century later, and the inheritance he left her that had nothing to do with material wealth.

We also talked about death itself. The myth of Eos and the grasshopper. Reincarnation, synchronicity and signs. And how we can hold the closeness of death in order to allow for more life.

This is a tender one.

In this episode, we explore:

• Bex’s father and his remarkable life, from 1920s Scotland to Australia as a £10 pom
• Losing a parent at age 11, and the patterns of compartmentalisation that followed
• Not being greedy with your grief and what it means to share grief as an offering rather than keeping it private
• The myth of Eos and the grasshopper
• What yoga, mindfulness and embodiment practices offered Bex through the grieving process
• What might happen after we die
• The parallels between the end of life and the beginning
• The “dance of life” exercise
• Choosing life in the face of loss, the inhale as a yes to life and the exhale as giving life back

Connect with Bex

Find out more about the Bali Spirit Festival

Join the Yoga Psychology Mentorship starting 28th May 2026

Join the Australian 2026 hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training

Join the online Mental Health Aware Yoga training in September

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