Amy Wheeler
Hurdling To Yoga
There have been a lot of hurdles in Amy Wheeler’s life. For fourteen years, she was a heptathlete, training for and competing in division one track and field; heptathletes participate in high jump, shot put, javelin, 200 meter, 800 meter and hurdles. “You look like a hurdler,” T.K.V. Desikachar told her when Wheeler visited the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in India. His clues, she said, were the lingering imbalances in her hips from years of asymmetrical, and intense, activity leaping over hurdle after hurdle around a track.
This experience taught her something about the intensity of being a competitive athlete, a mindset she’s been privy to both as a racer sporting a numbered jersey and a member of an athletic support team. Dr. Wheeler earned a PhD in educational psychology, traveled the world with Olympic sports teams and joined the kinesiology department at California State University San Bernardino where she taught and conducted research in sports psychology.
Neither her interest in sports, nor her ongoing relationship with hurdler’s hips were the issues that brought Dr. Wheeler to yoga. The first yoga class she attended represented a hurdle she didn’t care to leap over. “I thought it was a waste of time,” said the consummate self-described type A athlete about the first yoga class she attended with a friend in Chicago.
Two years later, while living in LA, neck problems limited her mobility to the point where she couldn’t turn her head in order to change lanes while driving. Pain inspired her to give yoga another chance; this time, she fell in love with both power yoga and the Iyengar practice. Her love brought her to India, to the silver jubilee celebration at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute. While in India, she visited the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram and met her current teacher, Kausthub Desikachar.
Her growing interest in yoga started to infiltrate her professional life. Some of her time devoted to sports psychology started to make way for a greater involvement in yoga practice, philosophy, teaching and research. Dr. Wheeler sees this shift as a natural progression, and all part of the same quest to create a greater sense of balance in life. Dr. Wheeler says, we’re all coping, whether we’re an elite athlete, college freshman or a so-called normal person trying to get through daily life. We have the same issues of anxiety, negotiating family dynamics, fluctuating self-esteem and learning how to pay attention in all areas of our life.
Psychology provides some tools for this process; in her published studies using tools of sports psychology, Dr. Wheeler documented positive results in measures of increased concentration and motivation. Then, when she shifted the focus of her scientific studies from sports to yoga, she found that yogic teachings and techniques of counseling, pranayama (breathing techniques), meditation and philosophy were actually more effective than sports psychology in improving attention, concentration and motivation while simultaneously reducing anxiety.
Dr. Wheeler’s yoga study results have been published in the Journal of the International Association of Yoga Therapy and were presented in more mainstream venues like the 2007 meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine. She currently collects data from all of her classes at CSU San Bernandino, and some of her current topics of interest include the effects of yoga practice on women’s issues such as menstruation, fertility and dysmenorrhea. Seven years ago, she and another teacher encouraged the Department of Kinesiology at CSU San Bernardino to start offering yoga classes in the academic curriculum; many of her students are willing participants in her studies, and more than that, they comment on how yoga has changed their lives.
we’re all coping, whether we’re an elite athlete, college freshman
or a so-called normal person trying to get through daily life
Yet Amy Wheeler’s life on the mat is more than research. She commutes to teach at CSU San Bernandino from her home in the Southern California mountaintop resort area of Lake Arrowhead, where she moved in 1996 and resides with her two dogs and her husband, George (pictured with Amy at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai, India, above). Amidst the pines, she has a group of dedicated students and teaches on an ongoing basis at the Lake Arrowhead resort, where she ran an extensive yoga retreat program for 18 months. In their personal life, the couple is on a quest to build a self-sufficient yoga retreat and healing center in the mountains to be a transformative space for yoga therapy. Along the way, they’ve felled trees damaged by beetles on their land to hand-dry and build their staircase, kitchen cabinets and other furniture.
Dr. Wheeler knows something about the transformative aspect of yoga, particularly since she’s grateful for how her relationships have been transformed through her practice, from her teacher Kausthub, to her husband, parents and students. “By nature, I’m a type A competitive and impatient person, which doesn’t make for good relationships,” she relates.“Yoga practice and my husband have completely shifted me to be a much more tolerant, compassionate and patient person.” Through yoga, Wheeler has become changed from being a predominantly task-oriented person, to being more connected to her heart – giving her the ability to slow down and be more present in relationships.
Being present is part of how Dr. Wheeler feels we can all contribute to healing the world. Through connecting, through our individual relationships, we can cultivate sustainability, reduce violence and even create world peace. Relationships are the barometer that shows if our yoga practice is really working, she says; “If we just focus more attention and develop connections one on one, with the people who are right in front of us right now; if we all did that, the world would completely change.”
For more information on Dr. Amy Wheeler and her work, visit her website at: onesourceyoga.com
By Felicia M. Tomasko, RN
