I have always loved fast food. I love fountain sodas, french fries, and soft serve ice cream. I also love drive-thrus and those playgrounds with the giant ball pits and colorful, windy slides. Until recently, there wasn’t much about a fast food restaurant that didn’t make me weak in the knees.

My first year of college, I promised myself I would eat healthily to avoid the dreaded “Freshman 15.” But living in a shoebox dorm room with a refrigerator that froze everything, replaced my good intentions with walks to the campus Chick-Fil-A or Burger King for countless meals of fat, grease, and sugar. “I’m getting exercise by walking there,” I told myself to justify my dietary digressions.

When I was on the too-busy-to-worry-about-health diet I started to wonder if I was narcoleptic. I had to nap between classes. I regularly fell asleep while studying for tests and writing papers. It was an epidemic that was plaguing my classmates, too, so I decided I must be normal.

Things began to shift when I started to practice yoga regularly. After a while, I naturally began to crave fresh fruits and vegetables and became nauseated by the thought of another morsel of fried food. Amazingly, it was around the same time I stopped feeling so tired and sluggish! I don’t know why it had never occurred to me that my diet might actually be affecting me. Now I bounce back and forth between craving fruit and craving junk food, which is why I was so thankful for this week’s class on nutrition.

Before the class, I was afraid I’d feel guilty and embarassed about my dietary flaws, but instead I was reassured by the stories and concerns my classmates voiced. Few of us are vegetarians, and everyone I talked to seemed to feel at least a slight bit of guilt when they talked about their own eating patterns. As yoga students we often think about eating to support our yoga, but I am convinced we need yoga to help us make healthy decisions in the kitchen as well as in life.

We all need a reminder every now and then of the distinction between what our bodies need and what our taste buds want—yogis are no exception. Holistic health counselor and yoga teacher Darshana Weill suggested a yoga practice could help us become aware of our food needs, versus wants. (She also let us try an amazing whole grain salad and the tastiest vegan cookies I’ve ever eaten.)

Darshana recommends making mealtime a part of our yoga practice—a part that we do several times a day even when we don’t feel like meditating or practicing postures. If we’re really aware at the dinner table, of course, we’re more likely to make healthy decisions.

One of the decisions we have to make using our yogic intuition is whether or not we have to become vegetarians to practice the non-violence yama, ahimsa. Whatever we decide, Darshana says, we better be able to explain why we’ve chosen that path to our students when they ask.

I haven’t answered this for myself yet, but I do believe the answer will reveal itself when I’m ready to receive it. Perhaps I’ll decide to go back to my old fast food ways, but something tells me as long as I take care of my mind and spirit through yoga, the food thing will work itself out.

Posted by Erica Rodefer at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

As I was getting ready for work this morning, I watched NBC’s Today Show and pondered what I would write this week about my latest installment of yoga teacher training. Katie Couric interviewed the Harvard sophomore and best-selling author at the center of this week’s national news scandal: “Did Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarize parts of her book, How Opal Mahta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life?”

I’ve followed this story closely, and I’m torn between compassion and disgust for the inexperienced author. After all, I’m a young, aspiring writer myself who understands how easy it can be to unconsciously borrow from another writer’s tone and/or style. But I also would’ve loved to expose a story like this during my brief career as a reporter and editor for my college newspaper. (Harvard’s newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, was the first to break the story.)

The story also reminded me of something restorative yoga teacher Jennifer Morrice said during my yoga teacher training session this week on the importance of restorative yoga.

“Half of teaching is stealing from other teachers,” she said with a light-hearted laugh, then, she gave us permission to re-use her analogy comparing the mind in restorative yoga to snow settling at the bottom of a snow globe.

I’m also torn on this issue. Theoretically speaking, I don’t think most of what I learn in a yoga class is the brainchild of any one specific teacher. (The whole yoga concept started at least 2,000 years ago!) It seems to me like more like yoga today is a collaboration of many minds in the yoga community, both past and present. So how can we claim any of the ideas we come across by drawing on this rich tradition as our own?

This is yet another aspect of teaching yoga where balance seems to be key. As a teacher, I definitely wouldn’t want to pawn anyone else’s ideas off as my own. But I don’t always see the necessity of sharing where I got my knowledge about every little thing. (As a student, I find it extremely annoying when a yoga teacher stops class every five minutes to give kudos to Ana Forrest or Rodney Yee.)

Won’t it be understood that the things I’m teaching are not original? And since it’s so hard to differentiate between someone’s innovative idea and something seeded in years of yoga tradition, is it even possible to plagiarize another teacher’s pose modification or sequence? (Bikram Choudhury would argue ’yes‘.)

Lucky for me and all the other inexperienced and wannabe teachers out there, it seems like most yoga teachers, like Ms. Morrice, are happy if their teachings are so clear and insightful that other teachers would want to relay that information to their own students. It’s one of the things I love about the yoga community—most people in it agree in that whole concept of sharing and oneness.

On a lighter note, I also learned how to do some pretty neat arm balances I never thought I’d be able to do, and to spot a student’s handstand without getting kicked in the face! I never would’ve thought that learning to teach asana would be the easy part of my teacher training experience!

Posted by Erica Rodefer at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I skipped my teacher training classes this weekend because I was in Boston at the Yoga Journal conference watching how some of the best, most experienced yoga teachers in the world conduct their classes. I thought I'd take a few minutes to share with you some of my observances about why teachers like Seane Corn and Rodney Yee are known worldwide as yoga masters.

Here are some things I picked up that I would like to someday incorporate into my own yoga classes:

1. Believe you can really affect people's lives.

I believe the key to Seane Corn's success must be her passion. She speaks so eloquently and with such enthusiasm about yoga's potential to change the world, I think students gravitate to her for a reminder of why they practice. Passion is contagious.

2. Be bold. Let students know get out what they put into yoga.

In the first thirty minutes of Rodney Yee's class, he called a student in the back row out for lying down during a question and answer session. "You don't lay down in my class," he said. "Every student is responsible for keeping the energy and morale of the class up."

Although I'm sure some people were put off by his demonstration of authority, I think it was great that he held us accountable for our actions. It was a nice reminder that we can only get what we put into our yoga practice.

3. Project Your Energy

Edward Clark likens being a yoga teacher to being a performer. "I have to project my energy through to the back of the room," he says. "That's what being a performer is all about."
It's not enough to call out instructions and give adjustments to students. The best teachers project their personalities and energies into the class in a way that makes everyone feel welcome and included&mash;even if there are 100 students.

4. Practice Presentation

In her class on expanding the heart field, Shiva Rea masterfully wove her theme throughout the class through the opening talk, a visualization, the music, and the asana sequence. She gave us sheets depicting what we chanted in Sanskrit and in English as well as a packet of information we could reference later. This was planned out so thoughtfully and with such care I think everyone appreciated it. Wonderfully done!

5. Realize No Two Bodies are the Same

In Mary Dunn's class about protecting knees, I was thrilled that she took the time to go over the different ways that people's knees could be constructed. It was a really good reminder to me of just how important it will be for me as a teacher to learn to look for subtle differences in people's bodies. The variances in people's bodies can be so vast it should completely change the way you approach each individual. The hard part is knowing what difference to look for.

I should know. Here's a video clip of me at the conference learning something new from Edward Clark about how my very own elbows are built. Notice it took a while for me to understand... Then I had to keep looking at it just to make sure. I'm afraid it will be a thousand times harder when I'm looking at someone else's body.

Credits:
Seane Corn Photo by Susan Slattery
Video Clip by Chad Capellman

Posted by Erica Rodefer at 04:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

If I decide to finally become a hard-core vegetarian it won't be because I'm trying to practice the principles of ahimsa, the non-harming yama. It will be because the chicken I have yet to cut from my diet looks like the human flesh I saw this week at a cadaver workshop I attended for extra credit for my teacher training course.

We went to learn about anatomy, to see first-hand what we've been studying for the past couple of weeks. I admit, I wasn't able to process one bit of anatomy. Remaining upright was challenging enough, without trying to remember the names of muscles that were being pointed out.

I was affected more deeply during the excursion than I thought I would be. If you've read my earlier blog, you know I'm not really into looking at organs, muscles, and bones. I knew I'd be uncomfortable and a little freaked out by what I saw, but I didn't think I'd come so close to passing out that I'd have to leave the room. Surprise, surprise!: I was wrong again.

Amazingly, I wasn't even too disgusted by the dissected bodies. The faces were covered and most of the skin had been peeled away; the bodies didn't even seem human. There were few traces of the people who had once occupied them—a painted fingernail, a sign at the foot of the cot telling the person's age when he or she died. For the most part, they were empty shells.

I don't even think it was the smell of formaldehyde that caused me to swoon and feel a dark curtain closing in front of my eyes. I'm not sure what it was, but I suspect that my body reacted to an emotion my mind couldn't even grasp. Two days after the fact, I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the intensity of the experience.

The night before, we had a class on the Bhagavad Gita one of the ancient texts upon which yoga was founded. One thing that sticks out most on my mind is the concept of Dharma, that we each have a job a do while we're on Earth. Darren explained it like this: We are who we are and nothing we do can change that. But if we follow the yamas and niyamas (i.e. non-harming, non-stealing, etc.) it will help us to be conscious of who we are. Well, that doesn't make me feel much better about death, but it certainly makes me feel better about life.

Posted by Erica Rodefer at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)