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