Healing

This chapter discusses how yoga has helped two individuals heal and their different paths to teaching yoga.

The first is Loren Fishman, an MD in New York.  Fishman went to India before becoming a doctor.  While there, he studied with BKS Iyengar for a year at the end of which Mr. Iyengar sent Loren back to the US to teach yoga.  It was Loren’s quest to heal an ailing world that led him to yoga and eventually into medicine.  Dr. Fishman discovered that practicing yoga helped him recover from a rotator cuff tear.  He was scheduled to have surgery for his injury, but the actions of the arm work in the Head Stands he practiced helped him recover his strength and range of movement without that intervention.  Dr. Fishman also discovered that particular yoga poses helped his patients in a low cost, non-invasive way.  He leads yoga classes in his office after hours.  Because of his medical expertise Dr. Fishman mostly works with students who have specific issues.

(In this chapter, Dr. Fishman mentions a few of the Iyengar techniques that help people with some specific problems:  toe stretches for bunions, Head Stand for rotator cuff injuries, yoga stretches for osteoarthritis, exercises for osteoporosis, and although it is not stated in this book, Dr. Fishman also uses Side Plank for Scoliosis.  Before trying any of these, make sure you understand how to do them safely, or you could be exacerbating your condition!  I’d be happy to show you.)

And the other is Larry Payne who could be said to be the founding president of the Intenational Association of Yoga Therapists.  Mr. Payne is a former West Coast marketing executive who found that yoga cured the back pain he experienced from the stress of his career.  He quit marketing and became a yoga teacher.  He too, went to India and studied with a prominent teacher.  He founded a yoga center in LA.  Payne taught regular yoga.  But he also toiled to advance the kind of healing that he himself had experienced and to integrate it into western medicine. Mr. Broad says: “If nothing else, that was an astute business move that that helped distinguish his enterprise from the region’s growing number of yoga teachers.”

“The credential he needed for credibility in his new calling was a medical degree.  But for a man of forty who was trying to reinvent himself, the amount of time and money required to earn that degree was staggering.  He found a different route in an alternative, online college.  Mr. Payne has published books with his PhD prominently featured to lend his work an air of credibility in the hopes that you assume that his degree is a college accredited in the usual way.

The rest of the chapter talks about the process of becoming a yoga teacher and a yoga therapist.  In the US, there is no governing board that regulates yoga teachers or therapists.

Several years ago, I had a friend who attended yoga classes with me.  I decided to take a yoga teacher training program.  I guess because we hung out together, she felt that she learned how to teach yoga through osmosis.  So, she applied to be a yoga teacher at a school.  I was relieved when she didn’t get the job.  I couldn’t believe that she felt that she could just qualify herself to teach yoga!  Unfortunately, there is nothing to stop anyone from calling themselves a yoga teacher.  There is an organization called Yoga Alliance that “registers” yoga teachers.  It sets minimum standards and recommendations but it does not “certify” yoga teachers.  It is up to the individual teacher who runs the school to “certify” students.

This leads to great variety in the quality of teachers.  Most teacher training programs are about 200 hours, or approximately 4 to 5 weeks of training.  As Mr. Broad pointed out in the last chapter: “would you study with a violin teacher who had trained for a month? A sculptor? A basketball player?”  One interesting question I often get asked by potential students who are looking at my teacher training program : “Can it be done quicker?”

This is not to say that all yoga teachers are unqualified.  There are many teachers out there who have labored for years and decades to hone their healing expertise and have helped countless people.  The problem is finding them is a process of trial and error.  This, however, may also be true in professions where the credentials are regulated and inspected.