The End is Near!

Erich Schiffman. Photo: Christie Zepeda

In the last month, our yoga teacher training group events have included two weekend intensives, each of which ran from Friday evening through Sunday evening, plus one other amazing weekend workshop with master teacher Erich Schiffmann. 

Our final weekend intensive included a team-taught class that our group offered to the public, a very rewarding and exciting experience. I was so proud of each of my fellow teacher trainees -- and so proud of us and what we had accomplished in these last ten months.

On top of these group activities, I gave a Kirtan demo to my fellow teacher trainees, spent an average of ten hours a week observing experienced teachers, began to write up my project, which was the organization and launch of the Kirtan circle at the Sun & Moon studio, and started to get my handouts and books in order in preparation for the written final exam.

So, needless to say (!) I have been a little busy and have not had much time for blogging. The end of this 200-hour training has arrived so quickly, it seems, and it's hard to believe that we are almost done. Once I complete the final exam, which could be as early as the first of July, I will be a certified yoga instructor, which is even harder to believe.

And now, I'm heading back to the books. I have a paper to finish writing, a few more chapters to read in the yoga sutra book, a bit of anatomy to study, some sanskrit to practice, and on and on. I am beginning to realize, if I didn't know it before (and I did!) that yoga practice and study is a lifelong process that doesn't end when one finishes the 200-hour training.

Post-Kirtan joy! Photo: Ruth Ann Lowery

Nevertheless, I will be very happy to pass through these final checkpoints and will be very grateful when my certification is completed. It has been a lot of work, but never tedious - the work was challenging, but joyful, difficult, but gratifying, sometimes bewildering, but blessedly also enlightening. Oh, and it's been a lot of fun, too!


Namaste

PS: Big thanks to my fellow yogis, Ruth Ann and Christie! Both are fabulous photographers and graciously shared numerous photos, including these two, which they took during our weekend intensives.

The Courage to Teach

Yesterday, I began the apprenticeship portion of yoga teacher training by sitting in, along with several of my fellow teacher-trainees, on a beginner-level yoga class. I sat up along the wall, by the door, scribbling copious notes into my notebook, relieved that I had two fellow trainees to sit there with me. I took a lot of notes and tried to be inconspicuous and I was further relieved when the students in the class began, one by one, to close their eyes and turn inward to follow their own process. Very quickly it seemed that they forgot we were even there--which was just fine with me!

I had been quite nervous about apprenticing, counting down the days until we started, and the uneasiness surprised me very much. There have been a number of things about this training program that have generated a case of the jitters for me, but coming into a class of beginners to be introduced as one who was actually deliberating seeking to teach yoga really threw me for a loop. 

Why would this particular part of the training program be so nerve-wracking? I asked myself this question a number of times. After all, I was a teacher for over two decades (in one of my previous lives, and about a subject that is very different from yoga: chemistry!) so I can envision myself as a teacher. I assumed, at first, that the nervousness was about the usual sense of not being quite as athletically-accomplished as I used to think a yoga teacher must be.

This is part of it, and the thought of having to demonstrate a pose in front of a group can easily account for at least some of the fear. I also remember, though, that there was a great deal of fear involved in teaching chemistry--and not only for the students, many of whom are afraid of the subject, worried about their grades, fearful of the math they often felt they didn't understand, and on and on. Fear runs both ways in the classroom: teachers are often quite fearful and this fear can amplify the student's fears. 

I was no different than most teachers and always felt nervous and, yes, afraid on the first day of class. I never got over the first-day jitters when I was teaching chemistry, even though I was very confident about my knowledge of the material. Those first-day jitters became every-day jitters whenever I taught one of the large lecture courses. It's scary to walk to the front of a room filled with two, three or four hundred people, especially people who mostly don't want to be there and who sometimes see you as a barrier between themselves and where they want to be (like medical school!)

So, thinking about being a yoga teacher has reminded me of what it means to be a teacher, period, and I realize that I am continuing a process begun long ago when I first began exploring what Parker Palmer calls the "inner landscape of a teacher's life." This is a phrase from Parker's wonderful book The Courage to Teach, and I benefited greatly both from the book and from Parker himself as he led me and hundreds of other teachers through workshops and retreats designed to help us find the courage to teach and keep teaching.

Now, as I look through this book, which I have not opened for at least ten years, I see so many things that seem they might have at least a little to do with how a Chemistry professor could start in the lab and lecture hall and end up on a yoga mat. Parker says, "Teaching holds a mirror to the soul," and "Knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject." Ideas like these encouraged me to consider the possibility that knowing myself better, such as through the practice of yoga, was good not only for me but for my students. It's probably no accident that I began the study of yoga about the time I first encountered Parker and his ideas.

Parker's ideas were always quite unique among those I engaged with in academia and I was thrilled to recently learn that he is continuing his work at the Center for Courage and Renewal. The programs at the center are mostly aimed at classroom teachers for academic subjects, since there is so little support in the academy for the idea that "knowing oneself" can have anything to do with good teaching. Most yoga teachers would never question this truth, but until I opened up Parker's book this week, I had managed to suppress the memory that it was, and is, a completely foreign idea in most universities and colleges.

Parker writes a lot, and eloquently, about the academic bias that says "objective facts are regarded as pure, while subjective feelings are suspect and sullied." This is true in all academic subjects, but is nearly an article of faith in the physical sciences, which was my subject. As Parker has observed, in this type of culture, the self is not the source within but, somehow, dangerous and truth-obscuring. In this culture, subjective feelings are not a potential source of guidance but obstacles to be overcome. In this culture, the truth is "out there," while "in here" all we can hope to find are our muddled, confused thoughts--which, of course, we need a teacher to help us sort through.

So, I think I will read some more of Parker's book, remembering just how much courage it took to teach science for so many decades, and just how it was that I tried to stay true to the principle of "know thyself" that he taught to us--and, what a privilege it is going to be to be a teacher again. 

Namaste

Hearts and Hands and Voices

As we continued with our studies of the chakras this month, making our way from chakra 4, the heart center, through chakra 5, located in the throat, and on toward chakra 6 (the "third eye") and chakra 7 (the "crown chakra"), an old hymn started running through my mind. 

I'll get back to that hymn later, but I need, first, to confess that I never knew, until now, that the hands are also associated with chakra 4. I'm not sure why it's taken me twenty years of yoga study to know that while chakra 4, the heart center, is obviously centered near the middle of the chest, the hands (and shoulders and arms) are also considered part of chakra 4. As we moved toward chakra 5, which obviously is associated with voice, I became very confused because, as a writer, my voice is often expressed with my hands. 

I do, of course, talk in the normal way, using my vocal chords and mouth, but I almost always have to write something out before I know what my heart is saying to me. And I am often trying to find the  right voice for a character, or the right voice to use for an article I'm writing. I rejoiced, like all writers do, when I felt I had found "my voice" as a writer, and the words began to flow easily and without effort. I, therefore, have had a very hard time separating my heart, my hands and my voice. I didn't know whether it was even possible for me to differentiate these two important energy centers.

And then this hymn started playing in my head. Over and over and over. It's a very old Christian hymn, written around 1636 by a German clergyman, Martin Rinckart, just as the plague descended on his town, eventually killing upwards of 8000 people there. 

Rinckart obviously wrote the words of this hymn in German, but the best-known English translation goes like this:

  Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
  Who wondrous things hath done, in whom his world rejoices,
  Who from our mother's arms hath blessed us on our way
  With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today. 

I've always associated this hymn with the Mayflower pilgrims since, as children, we often sang it in church or Sunday School around Thanksgiving Day. Although it is clearly a song of thankfulness, I have always picked up on a strain of underlying suffering, which made sense, knowing that the pilgrims had just made it through a very tough year and were facing another harsh winter. Now, knowing the situation that the author himself was in, trying to minister to a flock that was suffering greatly, called on to bury thousands of his parishioners, I now see that there is much, much more to the story behind this hymn.

Despite the somewhat dated language (the use of words like "hath" and the sometimes-jarring reference to God using a male pronoun), I love this hymn, and not just because I've been singing it since childhood. Martin Rinckert's hymn is a hymn of devotion, so by singing it I can practice bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. 

I also love how Rinckart's hymn reminds me that my act of devotion can be offered up not just with my voice, but also with my heart as well as with my hands. I love the reminder that true thankfulness and gratitude comes by offering our heart and a hand to another, that it is often in the doing for others that we most deeply experience true gratitude. I love the deep lesson of this text that when we are truly thankful, the heart, hands and voice really cannot be separated.

Namate.

The Book of Gratitudes

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I love that this holiday has resisted commercialization but also that it gently reminds me, every year, to think about all that I have to be thankful for. 

Once I get started taking a mental inventory of all that I am grateful for, my list of gratitudes almost seems to write itself: I am grateful for my kids and my husband; my family, friends and neighbors; the blessing of plentiful food; a roof over my head and reliable heat and clean water; and on and on and on. I am truly blessed.

But, if I were ever to get stuck, and forget to think of all I have to be thankful for (and those moments DO come, when I am hurting or resentful or disappointed) I have a handy reference to turn to: my Book of Gratitudes.

This is a photo of my Book. It's actually a photo of "Volume 2," since I filled up "Volume 1" about three years ago. Both books contain short hand-written entries, started in 1997, for a reason I no longer remember. The entries are easy to compose: I simply write down what I feel especially grateful for on the day I feel moved to pick up the book and do so.

I don't write these Gratitudes every day, and sometimes the entries are spaced far apart. They are not always about specific people or things, and sometimes the thing I am most grateful for is quite small. The entry for Dec. 7, 1997 is typical: "I am grateful for the candles on my altar that remind me of the light within so that I can continue to say, 'Not my will, but thine.'"

And, then, there's this one, from Oct. 16, 2000, a few weeks after my youngest child went off to college: "Today is the first day of the 'rest of my life' - a newly empty nest, ready for more wonderful things to grow in it - and, for that, I am very grateful."

My Book of Gratitudes holds plenty of reminders that sometimes even those things that I wish were not true or had not happened, can be the things I am most grateful for. Here is the entry from Sept. 17, 2001, six days after 9/11: "I am grateful to be alive and that my family and friends are all safe. I am grateful for the deep caring exhibited by so many people in the last few days. I am grateful that God is with us."

And, then, there's this entry, written three months after a serious accident in which I nearly severed the index finger from my left hand. Feb. 8, 2006: "I am grateful for the ability to write and to have at least partial use of my hand again. I am grateful for the clarity this injury has provided, and the knowledge that I am, first and foremost, a writer -- and now I will begin to live that way."

I have much to be grateful for, most especially that this "Day for Giving Thanks" comes around every year, to remind me of just how much I have to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving! 

And Namaste.