In 1975, environmentalist, medical doctor, educator, and visionary Michael Lerner imagined a center that would change the way we care for our health as well as the health and wellbeing of Mother Earth.
Over the ensuing years, Commonweal has served as the 21st century model for healthcare, education, and the environment, and supports a wide range of programs that include cancer support, health professional education, environmental health, yoga, healing nutrition, permaculture gardening, and juvenile justice.
As part of Commonweal’s continuing mind/body expansion, The Healing Yoga Foundation was founded in 2006 so that everyone—regardless of physical capability, health, background, age, experience, or financial means—could learn from yoga’s healing benefits.
Their innovative teacher training offers participants a unique skill set that includes observation, modification, and therapeutic applications, and currently stands alone as the most rigorous, in-depth training in the country.
Dr. Lerner will be one of this year’s keynote speakers as the International Association of Yoga Therapy (IAYT) celebrates 25 years at its June Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR) in Austin, Texas. In anticipation of this always exciting event, we caught up with Dr. Lerner and asked him to share some thoughts on how yoga therapy can play a major role in our everyday lives.
LA YOGA: The theme of this year’s IAYT conference, “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross” by Aristotle, suits you. What was your original vision quest? Has Commonweal exceeded those initial expectations?
Michael Lerner: That is a wonderful quote from Aristotle. The complete quote is, “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross—there lies your vocation.” The second part is important because vocation literally means “calling.” So it is not simply a calculus of what we are good at and what the world needs. It is also, critically, a question of finding our calling.
In 1975, I was called to create Commonweal by a vision of a center where we would work to heal people and heal the earth. Forty years later, that vision is intact, with a dozen programs at Commonweal in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice.
Each program is led by a strong visionary program director who has great autonomy to shape her work as she sees fit. Take Kate Holcombe’s Healing Yoga Foundation as an example: Kate has a passion for bringing yoga to low-income communities and to offer yoga for people living with cancer.
How has Commonweal impacted the acceptance of integrated therapies, like yoga, within the modern medical community?
We clearly have contributed to the acceptance of integrative cancer care over the past three decades. When Bill Moyers produced his classic PBS series “Healing and the Mind,” the Commonweal Cancer Help Program was featured in the fifth and final segment. More than any other single event, that series moved integrative medicine into the mainstream. But we are only one slender thread in the national and global fabric of movement toward contemplative mind, yoga and other psychophysiological disciplines, healthy foods, exercise, and finding meaning in our lives and work. We’ve done our small part, but we are simply one photon in a beam of light shining into the human dilemma.
Is the idea of integrating ecology, nutrition, mind/body wellbeing and scientific/medical breakthroughs becoming more widely accepted? Do you think that today’s doctors consider this approach to be essential in order for society to survive and thrive?
All these factors are gaining traction culturally and in medicine. But medicine is in crisis. Most physicians—with ten minute visits, electronic medical records, and all the other challenges they face—have little or no time to do lifestyle counseling, so most lifestyle work is done outside the medical community. There are important and growing exceptions. Dr. Dean Ornish’s work with heart disease is a notable example. Given that a central challenge of mainstream medicine is just to get the most basic medical care to everyone who needs it, I think that lifestyle work at present is often better done independently of the medical system—or at most, in parallel with it.
What are some must-have qualities for a yoga teacher or yoga therapist to cultivate in order to create an atmosphere conducive for healing and student/teacher relationship?
I think one of the worst qualities a teacher can have is an exaggerated sense of his or her level of spiritual attainment. Yogic pride is said to be one of the most difficult things to overcome. What I especially like about therapeutic yoga teachers Kate Holcombe and Jnani Chapman is that they are real; they know who they are.
None of us is without shadow. Every human being is a weave of light and shadow. Knowing that is of great assistance in nourishing one of the greatest virtues, which is simple humility. Humility, honesty, actually caring—those seem to me to be three good practices.
How do you incorporate the healing value of yoga into your daily routine?
My yoga and contemplative practice needs a lot of work right now. There were years when I practiced at least an hour a day. I truly hope to build my practice back up, but that isn’t the deepest impact yoga has had on me. My life was affected at a time of crisis in 1982 when I discovered Swami Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga. Integral Yoga has provided an accessible entry point to the great traditions of yoga for thousands of people around the world. The parallels between Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga and Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga have struck many observers.
What has been most important to me are the core spiritual and philosophical teachings of yoga in the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. The three great yogas of the Gita: Bhakti, Jnana, and Karma Yoga—the work of the heart, the head and the hands—resonate down through the ages in all the great wisdom traditions.
Love, wisdom, and will. Bhakti, Jnana and Karma yoga. The work of our hearts, our heads, and our hands. These are the eternal instruments that human beings have been given. It is through love, wisdom, and will that we create meaning in our lives and discover ourselves and our vocations.
IAYT is celebrating their 25th anniversary at the Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR 2014) in Austin, Texas, June 5-8: sytar.org.
Rita Trieger is the former editor-in-chief of Fit Yoga magazine, and the author of Yoga Heals Your Back (Fairwinds, 2005). She teaches yoga therapy for both cancer and heart patients at Stamford Hospital, in Stamford Connecticut.
Rita Trieger is a yoga therapist working in New York and Connecticut.