I love food. I love food so much I spent half my life trying to tell myself I hated food. Alas, despite my best efforts I indeed love the art of preparing and eating food from farm to belly. It brings me such great joy to have a refrigerator full of local produce and meat. Cutting, slicing and dicing is meditation. Creating artful plating of rustic homespun food is an extraordinary vinyasa of sensory delight. Knowing the source of products is like studying a great visionary’s work.

One Sunday night my Father asks me what I am up to.

“I’m cooking a chicken.” I tell him.

“Oh, that’s great. I love having a chicken” he replies with an audible smile.

“Yea, I love having a chicken.” I repeat equally as elated as the wafting smells of my Sunday summer permeate my home.

What I must explain to you is that if you are Jewish you have a chicken recipe. It is like some kind of domesticated Rite that you move through. My grandmother had a chicken recipe. My mother has her chicken recipe. My dad has his chicken recipe, aka buying a rotisserie chicken from the grocery. My uncles and aunts have their recipes.  I remember when I first nailed my chicken recipe. It was like an induction into Jewish cookery. I don’t know what this equates to in other faiths but for us, it is what Tevya (you know the guy from Fiddler On The Roof) says; “Tradition!”

Now of course if you are vegan I probably just offended you. I eat chicken. I apologize for my fowl behaviors.  I know our views do not always match in terms of what we should be eating for health of all beings. Having been vegan, vegetarian, raw, paleo and more I am not really interested in the “what diet are you?” conversation anymore. I am interested in what is sustainable in concentric circles from you body, to your family, to your community, to your society, to your planet. I am also very interested in tradition. I am curious about what my grandmothers ate and prepared. I am interested in how that can become my own.

I have dedicated my life to the practice, art and science of embodiment. Food is one of those doorways for me. Of course the irony is that food, for so many of us, can be the doorway out of our bodies. I know this path and paradigm all too painfully well. I can remember literally watching myself as a spectator in the vicious binge-purge cycle. I can still taste the remnants of the self-righteousness and power I gained from rejecting, neglecting and tossing away anything more than the barest minimum. I was so desperate to get in my body, but I couldn’t stand being in there. So floating off I went. Running, dashing, frantic like a chicken with its head cut off as the saying goes.

I remember the look of awe, confusion and disgust some family members had when they would see me enact my most wretched food-related behaviors. It was as if they couldn’t even comprehend the possibility of rejecting food. For my family food was and is love. Food is passion, joy and wealth. For my grandparents food was also survival and aliveness. They were simply grateful to have it. I think I hurt my grandmother the most when I stopped eating her chicken. It was like I severed an umbilical chord. It was one of the more painful times between us. I also remember the absolute joy and pride in her voice when  years later I told her I was roasting a chicken. “Sure” she used to say in her very Polish accent. “You have to have a chicken”.

And of course when my family first immigrated to the United States after the Second World War, they moved to a chicken farm. You can understand my father’s horror when he discovered his pet chicken was on the table for dinner. That in itself is a tale for another dinner. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why he buys his from the store instead of making it himself.

I have done the ascetic thing with food. Now I am much more interested in the aesthetic thing. I am into the beauty, the lushness, the deliciousness, the bounty, and the enoughness of food.

I have learned more about the importance of tradition from studying yoga than I did from going to Jewish Day School or having a Bat Mitzvah. Look, I am not the best Jew in the lot. I don’t like synagogue very much and I don’t know prayers by heart. I make altars with “idols”. I believe in the many faces of the Goddess. I know mantras by heart. I did not have a traditional Jewish wedding. But then again, I do have a chicken recipe and I am not the best yogi in the lot either. So I continue to build my own traditions. My family was centered on food, and low and behold, despite my best attempts to outrun The Family, I too am centered on the traditional chicken. 

Bubby, never understood my fascination with eastern traditions and she told me once in regards to teaching yoga; “You teach people to bend in half and break themselves”. So I am sure that wherever she is in heaven she is kvelling. Because what she always understood was nourishment, tradition and love. Which actually is a really high yogic teaching. 

I think it is far too easy to become a yoga teacher these days. With the operative word being become. Teaching, to me at least, seems to be an art of becoming. One in which you are devoted to the interplay between teaching the teachings and the teachings teaching you. It is a tango between exploration and delivery—a dance that costs more than a couple grand and two hundred hours of your time.

This is not to say the two hundred or more hours of grueling work one undertakes in a teacher training is worthless and for not. It is a perfect place to start. It is a useful launching pad. We must begin somewhere. Somewhere is better than nowhere. Somewhere marks the map of our becoming. Still, two hundred hours of study does not make one a teacher of yoga. It makes one a student of teaching yoga.

Teaching is not only a set of observation and articulation skills. It is not only the theoretical and conceptual knowledge. It is also a certain presence of having walked that knowledge. It is the presence of having tested the articulation and observation. It is the embodiment of the concept one is trying to convey. If the first form of learning is imitation, then as Rudolph Steiner said: “we must be worthy of imitation”. It is our presence, our own embodiment, that is the teaching itself. So two hundred hours of study is the beginning, not the end of one’s becoming a yoga teacher.

Perhaps we should worry less about becoming yoga teachers and concern ourselves more with becoming yogic teachings.

Come to think of it, I cannot even believe the audacity I had at twenty years old to teach a yoga class to a room full of people. It wasn’t like the class was a couple people in my back yard. It was like forty in a university gym. I had not even gone through a formal teacher training yet. To my own credit I had been practicing for four years before I dared to open my mouth to articulate a practice. And you only have to practice for two or sometimes one year before entering some teacher trainings.

I used to egregiously pride myself on this. As if I was some yoga-teaching prodigy. Waltzing in like a know-it-all. As if I was the hot ticket to hanumanasana and enlightenment in seventy-five minutes all under the age of twenty-three. Frankly I think that is some version of crazy. It is a miracle I did not hurt more people along the way.

We are a culture that prizes the archetype of the young prodigy over the wise crone. We are a society of do-more and be-more as quickly as possible. I certainly benefited from this leaning early on. But I’ll be honest with you the road has dead-ended. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. There is no get out of jail free card in the deck. Some people might call this Saturn Return. I call it “Quite wining, grow the fuck up, and be grateful for Life.” Rather than shove the process of yoga into the chaos of grow up and get rich, maybe we could still ourselves long enough to notice the process of becoming that is unfolding within us. That is witness consciousness. That is stillness in motion. 

A good friend once told me "you have to go through every age. If you skip one, eventually you go back." Well I can assure you this comment is accurate. I skipped right on through my adolescence into premature adulthood. And I went back. I went back hard. I am only now, in the past two years emerging from the fog of my adolescent repair. I consider myself lucky. There are others, much older than myself still trying to heal that cycle of life.  I also tucked away my creative young child nature in favor of the wise observant elder. Though I hope to retain my “Old Soul” spirit, the young She is reemerging stronger every day. Thank God.

Back to the yoga scene, I was handed things on a silver platter when I first started teaching yoga. Albeit grateful, I took advantage. I didn’t have to build a following from the ground up when I first started teaching. But I have had to go back to the beginning three times. I cannot waltz onto the scene as the next hot ticket. I have to earn the trust and respect of everyone I come in contact with. Frankly, the only way that seems possible is through the honest and earnest practice for practice. Practice for becoming the teaching I am practicing.

You can’t just skip the stage of the grunt work my fledgling teacher friends. Just so you know. Enjoy it while it lasts. The hard work is coming. The art of becoming is not glorious. Its not really one to follow on twitter or trend on Facebook. The art of becoming someone, that someone being yourself and having the chutzpah to sit that self down as Teacher is some serious business.

The yogis call it krama and deeksha. The shrinks call it human development. The yogis call it svadhaya. The shrinks call it self-knowing. These processes are all dependent on time. Time for digestion and integration.

~

Anyone can imitate. As noted earlier, it is the first step in learning. We are designed to do it. Though to make the leap from imitation and emulation to authentic delivery is a hard won process, not a flash in the pan success. What moves us out of the land of imitation and into the wellspring of authenticity? Time, practice, love, life, falling, recognizing success and practicing some more.

I pride myself now on the teachings I have earned and not so much the ones I have learned. I have learned many teachings from various traditions. Consuming knowledge is not lacking. I could probably regurgitate a ton of “stuff” if you asked.

Trust me, the ways in which I have become the information, digested, integrated, chosen to embody and articulate the teachings; is far more interesting and worthy of your attention.

There is a saying quite popular now; “Be the teachings”. From what I can tell, this is the simplest and most profound way to teach—being the teaching you are trying to teach.

I can help you. I can show you what you see. I can stand in the fire with you. But I must be worthy of your imitation. So that’s what I am working on.

I was a figure skater before I was a yogi.

I know.

I’ll pause for your reaction.

I was a figure skater before I was a yogi. In fact it was the competitive figure skating that took me to yoga. I was sixteen and skating regularly, and I began searching for its compliment. Some kind of cross-training if you will. I wanted to try something new, where I could be kind of anonymous but do a form of movement that would assist my skating. So I ended up in Iyengar Yoga. And so the story unfolds.

My private sessions with my figure skating coach often involved ten to twenty minutes of me talking about what was going on in my life and about ten or fifteen minutes of fierce maneuvering across the ice. We always started our time together with a “check-in”. It just so happened that since I thought my life kind of sucked, and I trusted her, I had quite a load to “check-in” about.

I was once asked to describe something from my past that had surely brought me to my current point on my path. These skating privates were my first experience with what I know now as Somatic Therapy. Now of course this was not Psychotherapy in the traditional sense. We weren’t in an office. I didn’t sign any confidentially agreement. It actually wasn’t the relationship we originally agreed upon. Other friends had purely teacher student relationships with their coaches. But some of us, myself included, also found solace in the intimacy of the teacher-student dyad.

So while it wasn’t psychotherapy, it was therapeutic in that the relationship was healing. She gave me a place to be heard. She gave me a place to tell the truth. She gave me a space to be validated and reminded that my experience was real. When you skate and you hurl yourself at high speeds across frozen icy surfaces and then you fall, you can’t say, “oh that didn’t hurt at all”. That is a lie. It hurts. It hurts a lot. But you get up and you keep going. You learn pretty quickly that your reality of the ice being cold and the falls hurting is true and real. And that you also have to get up, keep going, and where gloves. You also learn that you cannot see yourself clearly. You need someone to sometimes tell you why you keep falling.

It was the first time I understood that in order to process my emotions; I had to move my body. Everything I felt or had talked about in the first part of our lesson I left on the side, and poured myself whole-heart onto the ice. Sometimes I would empty my emotions into my jumps and spins. If I was angry I could leave that mark through my toe-pick. Sometimes I skated to sail away from problems. Sometimes I skated to remind myself of my sanity. But mostly skating just felt good. It felt like I could be home in my body for a little while. I bet the falling and shocking my body into feeling something, albeit pain, was also one of the allures. But that story is for later.

We are very emotionally sterile in our culture. Therapy goes over here, friendships go over there, and education goes in that corner, mentoring in the box over there. To maintain the sanctity, and specialty of the psychotherapeutic relationship is to everyone’s benefit. But sometimes healing does not actually work like that. Again and again we see that the therapeutic relationship itself is what creates healing not just the behavior modifications. In fact, I would argue that behavior modification does not work without a solid foundation in the relational dyad. We also know that moving our bodies in some kind of discipline (Even free form dance has a certain discipline) is regulatory. As my philosophy teacher says, “clear boundaries, no limits.”

So while I honor and abide by the notion that Psychotherapy is a special relationship with very clear documentation, language, structure and limits, we also need to remember that life is circuitous and strange. No relationship fits into a tidy box actually. Therapy and Healing are not isolated events occurring in a vacuum. We reveal our secrets to those we trust. We repair wounds when trust affords safety and offers love.