Yoga and healing.

This week, I am pleased as punch to be able to introduce to you my beloved friend and yoga instructor from Seattle: Lisa Holtby. I've been thinking about this issue of complementary therapies, and then Lisa sent me this fabulous article written about her in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I've put it in the blog below.

Lisa has extensive experience teaching and thinking about doing yoga with people in physically compromised situations. She has taught classes for clients of Cancer Lifeline (a Seattle organization that provides emotional support and resources to people living with cancer). This experience led her to write a fabulous book, Healing Yoga for People Living with Cancer. This book reflects Lisa's compassionate understandings of what it means to be very sick, to be shuttled through a healthcare system that may or may not treat you like a real person, to be yearning for a connection or reconnection to a body radically changed.

She explains herself and her work much better than I can. Please see her website and the article below.

I would like to say a couple things about her practice and her ethic. Lisa teaches Anusara yoga, which intentionally incorporates spiritual intention into physical movement. This has been profoundly valuable for me, as a Postulant to Holy Orders for whom nothing in my life is not touched somehow with grace. It's gratifying to go to class, and have my practice on the mat be explcitly about healing me body and soul. Lisa encourages us to practice qualities we seek off the mat (courage, rest, forgiveness) with our bodies on the mat. This reminds me of liturgy, the way that what we do in liturgy is supposed to model how we are supposed to live outside church. At church, everyone is fed, everyone is offered peace and reconciliation, everyone is in touch with others, everyone is welcome. Liturgy is practice for how we want to be in the world, where we want everyone fed, peaceful, in community, and wanted.


A couple links:
Lisa's website.
Buy her book here!

I'd also like to hear from some chaplains about how bodywork has impacted their lives or practice.


Much love,
Shelly

Yoga article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Living Well: It's not a stretch: Anyone can do yoga
By BOB CONDOR
SPECIAL TO THE P-I

If you can breathe, you can do yoga. That's what Seattle yoga instructor Lisa Holtby says, and she has the credentials to support her statement.

Holtby has taught yoga since 1995 at Seattle Yoga Arts studio on Capitol Hill. She taught classes for Cancer Lifeline, a local non-profit organization that offers emotional support and resource services to people living with cancer. In 2004, she wrote a book, "Healing Yoga for People Living With Cancer." She is a faculty member for annual CURE Magazine national conferences open to cancer survivors.

And, when invited, Holtby speaks to health practitioners about how yoga can fit into medical treatment protocol. Just last Wednesday afternoon, she spoke to a gathering of Group Health doctors, nurses, researchers and other practitioners about the "power, potential and pitfalls" of yoga in health care.

"It's an interest-group meeting we have monthly to understand the range of things outside medical convention that might help patients," said Dan Cherkin, senior scientific investigator for Group Health Cooperative. "We are looking to define what is the future of health care. Can we find ways for people with diabetes or hypertension, for example, to get in touch with their bodies and make changes? Drugs have their place, but they don't help people change behaviors."

Holtby's approach is to make yoga accessible to everyone by developing routines that you can do from a chair, lying on your back or stomach, leaning against a wall for support and, of course, standing and participating in a mat class.

"What we see in the media is pictures of people (in yoga postures) who are in the best health of their lives," she said.

Here's a twist: Holtby said yoga has a quality of instant gratification otherwise too prevalent in our society.

"I tell students that whether you are sick or new in class, yoga can help you feel better right away," she explained.

Holtby recommends finding an experienced teacher who knows how to modify postures, plus committing to four yoga classes before reaching any conclusions. The first class is "a lot coming at you." By the fourth class your experience is "more meditative." From there, Holtby is a believer in "a little bit of yoga every day but whatever fits into your schedule is good."

The chair postures include back bends, forward bends, twists -- "a full practice but sitting," said Holtby. It works for someone who is challenged with a health condition -- Holtby designed it for cancer patients experiencing the deep fatigue of chemotherapy -- yet has great potential (to use one of her keywords at the Group Health talk) for office workers and others who sit at desks and computer terminals during long days.

For his part, Cherkin has explored yoga's health benefits in research. He co-authored a small study, receiving significant local and national media coverage, that showed yoga can significantly reduce lower back pain without medications or surgery. He and Group Health colleagues are working on a larger study that follows up those results and adds the comparison of yoga to physical therapy.

"We want to see if there is a difference between yoga and the stretching/strengthening component of physical therapy, which doesn't have the breathing and mindfulness elements of yoga," said Cherkin.

For example, Holtby starts her Seattle Yoga Arts classes by suggesting that each student select an intention. Someone might use the yoga postures that day as a vehicle for overcoming fear, while a parent with young kids might see the class as release from a hectic schedule and the requisite busy mind. Holtby knows: She has a 5-year-old son.

"Lisa amazes me with her calmness, insight and dedication to her practice," wrote student and Seattle physician Dr. Stephen Smith on Holtby's lisaholtby.com Web site. "What is especially impressive is that she is doing this while caring for a new child!"

"You can also hold that class for someone who is ill or someone you are worried about," Holtby said. "This mindfulness doesn't have to stop in class. You can do the same thing while doing the dishes."

During her Group Health talk, Holtby made the point that "yoga is a way to learn how to differentiate sensation versus pain" and that yoga can be "a way to come home after invasive treatments." She and the practitioners discussed how these inviting concepts can become more inherent to mainstream medical practice. The outlook for yoga in the medical setting is optimistic but realistic.

Holtby allowed that among the "pitfalls" of yoga is the largely unregulated teaching profession and that instructors will be more accepted by doctors and others if they can quantify their training and experience. She also endorsed "modifying appropriately" and that instructors can encourage progress of yoga on the medical track by maintaining a "do no harm" credo with small groups and one-on-one.

After the Group Health talk, Cherkin said that it is a slow process persuading doctors to add yoga to the therapy list. He noted a gap between the growing number of physicians who might say, "Oh, go ahead, yoga probably won't hurt," to health providers who suggest yoga as one of the possible treatment options. Cherkin sees the sense of trying to close that gap.

"Slowing down is not what we do," he said. "What we tend to do is go, go, go. We don't value slowing down. Yoga is a way for people at all stages of health to get more in touch with your body and yourself."

Berkeley in Bloom Revisited

I was so happy and interested to read of Shelley’s forays into complementary therapies and the challenges they pose. My recent visit to The Chaplaincy Institute for Arts and Interfaith Ministries in Berkeley began with a kind of alternative class in singing.

The task for the day was to work in dyads, each student presenting what was personally painful for them with her (there was only one man in the class) chaplain-partner poised to sing a two-minute prayer to the pained partner that would address the ailment. Gratefully, the “participant-observer” method I engage in my work did not entail my being in one of the dyads.

What began as rather pablum prescriptions, “May you find peace…” was gently and creatively prodded by instructor Polyanna Bush to bring greater concreteness, more incarnational reality, more guts into the encounter. There were tears aplenty, an abounding in positive trajectories, and a sense of gratitude on the part of all the students who bared their souls and felt met, held and healed in the process.

It may sound a bit too touchy-feeling for some, but I have to admire what they are about: creating a caring community of fellow ministers who attend to and attempt to heal the woundedness that so often gets in the way of being an effective minister. The woundedness that gets polite if still somewhat shamed lip-service in most seminary settings, or provision of side-lined learning avenues like CPE, but never the full-tilt, front-and-center integral treatment that I saw at Ch’I.

This is, in fact, their mission, their niche. This healing work does not preclude the more academic study they also undertake. I attended a very fine lecture on eschatology and another on pastoral care: both first rate. Having just visited a Pentecostal seminary, I took exception to the theologian’s initial characterization of evangelical eschatology, but was gratified by his graceful and gracious incorporation of my question into a larger more generous assessment which he himself espoused.

An evening panel of employed chaplains, graduates of the school, gave courage to the continuing students. Neither are board certified by the Association of Professional Chaplains, but both found lucrative settings in which to function at high levels of professional and personal efficacy. They evinced the ethos of the school and there were impressed, grateful listeners all around.

For me, one of the highlights of the trip was my lunch in a eucalyptus grove with the two co-directors. The story of their building this school, this community, was most impressive and inspiring, beginning with Gina Rose Halpern’s travel to the Soviet Union with Patch Adams and his instruction to her to begin to draw for a screaming, inconsolable pediatric burn victim. The child’s awed silence as the figure appeared on the page was the inception of an engagement with the magic of the arts and their healing power and a determination to share and train that gift with and in others.

Ch’Is model of week-long courses once a month enables students from as far as Michigan and North Carolina to come to California, study intensely, return home to reflect and prepare for the next round. In eleven of these modules, graduates have a start in becoming versed in the major world religious traditions, are equipped with palpable techniques, such as the singing instruction, and learn to bring all of themselves and a rich array of skill to the task of a ministry of presence. They are ordained as interfaith ministers. We are in conversation about the possibility of our chaplains coming out to take part in just one, two or three of the modules, short of earning the full degree.

An influential bishop visited with the Steering Committee of the Chaplaincy Training project last fall. He spoke of his hospitalization experience, where his colleagues “dispatched the visit with a tasteful collect” and how this ministry paled in comparison with the pat on the knee and the caring inquiry on the part of nursing and cleaning staff simply rendered, “How are ya doing today, honey? Is there anything I can do for you?” I was awed by his candor, humility and vision.

In the same way as it has become commonplace to acknowledge the power of music to reach people and address issues otherwise untouchable, I have a feeling that there are people and places among us who would be well-served by these interfaith ministers.

Faithfully submitted,
Maggie

A week of instability.

Thinking, of course, about the horrors at Virginia Tech. And also, on a more local scale, a young woman, a grad student at Columbia University was abducted, raped and tortured for 19 hours before the man set her bed on fire and left her to die. She escaped by using the fire to burn off her restraints and run. The man was at large this week, and he had been spotted at the nearest grocery store to Union and at the deli across the street where we all get our coffee 19 times a day. It's been particularly scary to just walk around my neighborhood: everyone's acting "normal", but it's not comforting. RAINN reports that in America, a woman is assaulted every two-and-a-half minutes. And the vast majority of sexual assaults are not by random crazy strangers: they are by "friends", dates, family members or acquaintances. I wish, when something this tragic happens, one of the articles would remind us of that. This is happening all the time. It will have happened a couple times before you finish reading this post.

Today in chapel we held a special service commemorating those who died at Virginia. I was surprised to hear that no one prayed for the gunman, until finally, mercifully, Rev. Carl Gerdau, from the pew, intoned, "And for our brother Cho" at the very end of the prayers of the people. I think about how grateful I am that in my New Testament class, when we prayed on Thursday, we prayed for all those who died, for the families and friends, for the community, of course. But we also prayed for Koreans and Korean-Americans, and for all those who are alienated, for all those who we render "alien", and for Cho. On campus at Union, there are several Korean and Korean-American students, who have been badly shaken by this, and worried about their own safety. I've noticed that the wikipedia page on South Korea has been disabled for revision until May 4 - it's likely that people were trying to alter it in ugly ways in response to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

This makes me wonder about blame: we are so ready to start looking for whose fault it was. Was it the professors who knew he was troubled? The school kids who ignored him? His family? Anyone but us, right? We certainly don't know anything about isolating and alienating people.

This also makes me think about how the New York Times reported that the school wasn't immediately put on alert after the first shooting because it was considered "just a domestic quarrel". Apparently men shooting women is so common it's not worth shutting down the campus. I mentioned this to a group of five friends at seminary, mentioning that just a few weeks ago, a young woman was killed at the University of Washington by her stalker ex-boyfriend. She had done everything: moved, got a restraining order, warned some of her co-workers. Three of the other five people said, "Yeah, that happened at my campus too." What??!! We have decided as a culture that this kind of violence is tolerable, that intimate partner violence is just something that happens. We don't talk about domestic violence or rape in church, even though it is certain that someone or many people in the congregation has/have experienced it. We are so scared, so scared that is violence is actually us, that we participate in hushing up pain, in looking the other way, in not looking at the very real ways women are punished for being women every day.

I realize now that this is not an Easter-y message. But it is what is happening. And God asks us to look at what is really there, and not what we want to be there. We are asked to look straight at the crucifixion, and Jesus looked straight at the woman with the hemorrhage. No hiding. No ducking, no convincing ourselves that it's not happening in our congregation, in our school, in our hospital. I was so grateful to the New York Times Sunday magazine article of a few weeks ago that took seriously the pain of women in the military, experiencing great trauma while sacrificing much for their beliefs (it's still available online here). It's real. And we called to heal, absolutely. Our Messiah was and is a healer, and if we truly the body of Christ, the hands and feet of Jesus, we must heal too. But first we must we willing to look at where it hurts. We must be willing to name certain violences, instead of just pretending there are multiple isolated incidents of this kind. We must retrain our eyes to see what we try not to see: the lonely, the afraid, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the violated, the scared, the alone, the alienated among us.




As a couple of final notes, Andrew recommends the college's website: they've done a truly admirable job dealing with the tragedy online. Go here to see. I also highly, highly, highly (can't emphasize this enough) recommend the Faith Trust Institute, a collection of advocacy and informational materials for congregations and other faithful people thinking and talking about intimate violence. The woman who founded it, the Rev. Dr. Marie Fortune, also has a lovely blog.

-Shelly

Easter.

Hello! I'm back in the office after a Triduum spent in the Pacific Northwest. It was beautiful, properly spring, lots of little bulbs popping in my mom's eastern WA garden, the pear blossoms about to burst.

This year I felt a bit of an "Easter creep." Some years Easter comes with a bang, and I'm startled into new awareness. But this year there was a long, slow build. I'm thinking a lot about my family, about how I want to structure my own intimate relationships, about my first year at seminary nearly coming to a close. I've been stacking the blocks very carefully, one little piece of information about myself at a time.

My mom and I went to an Easter Vigil service at a small church in Western Washington, near where my cousin lives. It was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first was the stellar choir - there was no good reason other than sheer and utter grace to have such powerful voices concentrated in a teeny little church, bringing the congregation to tears. Amazing solos, an astonishingly bone-shaking version of the Messiah...it was phenomenal. The second was the truly terrible rector: indeed, I don't think I have ever heard a worse Easter sermon in my life. I may have never heard a worse any kind of sermon in my life. He preached, in an oil-slick voice, about the glory of suffering, about how he preferred Catholic crosses with Jesus nailed right to them (like some kind of incredibly tacky 1st century wall hanging) rather than the empty Protestant cross. "The Resurrection CANNOT HAPPEN WITHOUT THE CROSSSS!" he thundered. Well, yes, sir, that's why we have Good Friday - remember yesterday, with all the veneration of the cross and the deathly silence? Remember how today is Easter and we're here to celebrate - yes, the Resurrection. Jesus eating fish, the empty tomb, Thomas's finger, new joy, better life, light and singing. So, you know, I set my jaw like stone and looked at him, and clenched my mom's hand to keep from running up there and preaching something actually easter-y. And he stopped right in the middle of the Eucharistic prayer - got all through "This is my body" and then coughed a little, gestured to the ALM, and slowly drank a cup of water before wiping his lips and continuting with the "This is my blood." What?! That is the peak moment of any liturgy! Everything we do builds up to this, and he, with his little silver bouffant, just hangs out drinking water while we wait on his every word. And, to top it off, he delivered Communion into my hands - literally dropped it off, without looking at me. Plop! Some, uh, bodyofchristbreadofheaven for you, you little insubordinate (my mom said the look on my face was rather deadly, but still!).

So an interesting Easter. I thought it was pretty funny, all told. I'm glad that Article 26 and my heart both tell me that the sacraments still work, now matter how dreadful the preaching/preacher. It makes me think both about humor (laughing both at my own grumpy reaction and at the horrible priest) as gift and sacraments sneaking in where I might not look.

As I think about this summer, my (first but maybe not last?) unit of CPE, and I think about what will sustain me. There's a lot of apprehension. I'm terrified of saying the wrong thing, but I also know that sometimes I will say the wrong thing. I'm scared to enter people's lives at their most vulnerable moments, but I also know that I must (and not just for my M. Div.). But I think about humor, about the ways people who get to know each other laugh together. I think about how the worst of puns can absolutely kill me - I double over, weeping and laughing. I think about how sometimes sacraments are hiding in the mud like the daffodils, sometimes are hiding in the drudgery of paperwork, sometimes are hiding in the 2:00 a.m. bleary typing of school papers.

Easter indeed.




-Shelly