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Kareen Zebroff |
By Kareen Zebroff
We are grouped around a spindly, yellowing plant that is sicker than any of my severely challenged Yoga students at Pearson’s Hospital. It’s nearly Christmas some twenty years ago, and we are dedicating this class to the season’s spirit of giving.
The wheelchairs and gurneys take up a lot of room, and we can’t all reach the dying plant to whom we wish to send our love. Instead, we hold hands, close our eyes and I, as the last link in this remarkable chain, touch the ailing leaves. Though sometimes weak and trembling themselves, my students are concentrating with all their beings on transmitting every bit of individual healing-force from their frail bodies. We breathe deeply, focus and hope against hope. The next week the Dieffenbachia had sprouted a new leaf! We cry with joy over the hitherto hidden potential we each have – the power of love, thought, and Yoga.
Yoga works, I explained to my ecstatically beaming charges, because five millenia ago it was designed to help make bodies so healthy that they could sit still in meditation for hours on end. Traditionally, Yoga poses and of breath-control come first, followed by concentration, contemplation and, after much practice, meditation. Yoga is so flexible and forgiving that this order may be reversed somewhat when dealing with bodies so disabled that a wrist can bend only slightly, or a head incline a mere degree.
Hatha Yoga is meant to lead us toward controlling our restless minds and harnessing the ego, to make the sense of “I/myself” disappear. The eminent teacher B.K.S. Iyengar says that (1) after the body has been tempered by Yoga asanas or poses (2) the mind refined by the fire of pranayama or breath-control (3) pratyahara, the senses brought under control, and (4) dharana, the thoughts/mind stilled by being one-focused, only then can (5) niruddha, the now-restrained ego/mind/intellect be offered up to our Maker for His use and service.
Our classes at Pearson’s had consisted of the little we could do with the asanas, the more we could achieve (in our nearly immobile or spastic states) with breath-control, and the most we could accomplish with concentration. Towards that end, we had done some personalized and philosophical affirmations. We went for imaginary walks in each of our “ideal” places, putting all our senses into play. We candle-gazed and did healthy body visualizations. We chanted Om in harmony and repeated beautiful mantras such as “God is love.” We visualized a golden light in the middle of our foreheads, allowing it to spread to our hearts and bodies, into the room, through the hospital, out into the street, the city, the province, the country, the continent, and the entire earth until the whole world was ablaze with the light of love.
These the patients were able to accomplish within the spirit of the 11/12th meditative aspects of Hatha Yoga, and, as the sprouting plant had clearly shown, it had been a splendid and unexpectedly powerful practice. The remaining 1/12th aspect of Yoga – the practice of asanas – is best explained by Pegge Gabbot. An 83 year-old Yoga teacher with luminous skin and superb health, she still literally “gives” six classes a week for free on Vancouver Island. Before that, she had taught Yoga for over 30 years for the Vancouver School Board, and in the Downtown Eastside CCL Centre for addicts and alcoholics.
Pegge has always passionately asserted that Yoga is Yoga. It is not about tying oneself into knots. It’s about body, mind, and spirit yoking together to get the most out of life. It’s Patanjali’s Yoga philosophy, as taught to me by my beloved teacher Indra Devi (who was still actively teaching when she died at age 102). That is why my classes are meant for everyone no matter their age, flexibility, health, shape or economic status. Yoga should be non-competitive and all-inclusive. It ought to be something the average person can do, and it must never be out of reach (though some poses may be difficult and take more time to achieve). Yoga is about going only as far as you can go in challenging the joints, yet not so far that they become stiff. It’s about a stretching taking place by itself, even if only minimally. Yoga is about getting in touch with the science of self-awareness – of the True Self.
My patient-students at Pearson’s had nodded at this Yoga concept with a sense of startled recognition, and we had gone on to discuss what this True Self might be like. We knew that, no matter what the present self, the True Self was “whole” in all the three aspects of itself – it was undamaged, undying, loving and tolerant, even of its own human imperfections.
Greatly relieved at this monumental insight, we had done the breath every living creature does unconsciously, breathing in with the sound So’ham (the Immortal Spirit am I, or I am that which is) and breathing out with Hamsah (I am He). And then, we had sung a joyous, “Merry Christmas to All!”
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