Gentle Jewish Yoga
Five years ago, Avivah Winocur Erlick was married, held a job as a newspaper editor at the California Real Estate Journal and was attending the same Jewish services and having the same experiences since her childhood, where she grew up practicing Reform Judaism in a secular household. Yet she was simultaneously and regularly attending yoga classes. This seemingly small act planted a seed that over twenty years of her practice would sprout to help transform her life.
Today, Avivah has divorced her husband, is in her fourth year of rabbinical school at the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, and has created a yoga class that combines the spiritual technology of yoga with the ancient wisdom of the Torah and the Kabbalah (the mystical branch of Judaism) to communicate a physical experience of Jewish teachings to her students. Avivah completed her yoga teacher training at A Gentle Way in La Mesa, California in the summer of 2006. She chose this approach because it allows her to work with practitioners at any level and almost any location – even from their seats. In her teaching, she focuses on the philosophical and practical teachings, as well as those that are universally spiritual.
It was during the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in 2003 that Avivah received her first inkling that she wanted to become a rabbi. Her yoga practice helped create the foundation for this decision because it was during a yoga class that she first experienced something greater than her body – her spirit. In fact, at the suggestion of one of her yoga teachers at her gym, she started doing visualization while in poses, such as seeing herself as a brave warrior in the Warrior sequences. The effect of the visualization practice was so powerful that, “I thought I was becoming a Hindu,” she jokes. She coupled her new awareness with ujjai breath and applied the two to traditional Jewish prayers. What she discovered was life-changing. She found herself, “one with the universe.” or as Jews call it, “cleaving to God.” Once Avivah experienced this, she knew she’d wanted to teach others to find that experience. Within a few months, she decided to become a “yoga rabbi.”
Avivah’s yoga has profoundly enriched the practice of her own tradition. “Yoga taught me to look at the Hebrew words I was saying – often by rote – as more than just syllables. [Through visualization] it was like I was experiencing these words for the first time.” Yoga also gives her a slightly different perspective than her fellow students at the Academy. In fact, during a recent lecture her professor asked Avivah and her fellow classmates which they would rather do, hear God or see him. “Most everyone replied that they wanted to hear God. Because of yoga, I hear God speak to me all the time…now I’d like to see Him,” she grins.
This intimacy with God is something that Avivah shares with her students so that they can cultivate their own relationship with Him. Her class follows a format that includes a warm-up period of breathing and light poses followed by more active asana (posture), with the sun salutation being the most active pose she does. During the active section, students practice poses that resemble letters of the Hebrew alphabet while she shares the Kabalistic teachings about the letter. The combination reinforces each other and serves to convey the ideas Avivah is trying to teach. She utilizes yoga as a method to train the mind to focus on the present and ask the questions: “What do I need to learn?” or “What is commanded of me?” She closes class with savasana (relaxation) then a period of singing. The songs are usually familiar Jewish prayers set to contemporary melodies.
Yoga is a method to train the mind to focus on the present and ask the questions: “What do I need to learn?” or “What is commanded of me?”
Avivah also offers a special class about the Sefirot, which according to the Kabbalah, are the ten channels of divine energy or life force in the body, each a divine emanation from God. Examples of the Sefirot include will, loving-kindness, knowledge and wisdom. Each Sefirah has an energetic position in the body and Avivah uses yoga poses to balance the Sefirot. The goal for the students is relaxation and to experience their bodies spiritually, which for Avivah, means that the body becomes a vessel through which God can speak. Avivah maintains that we are a “special creation of God because we can think and reason. As a result, we have a great responsibility to make the world a better place.”
With only a few more classes and her thesis left to write before becoming an ordained rabbi, Avivah is well on her way to offering congregants a more comprehensive way to experience Judaism. It is through this active practice that Avivah may help make the small change in her students that becomes the huge one, and in the process, change the world.
Avivah Winocur Erlick teaches “Yoga of the Sefirot” at the American Jewish University’s Whizin Center for Continuing Education, as well as classes for seniors at the Jewish Home for the Aging and the Westside Jewish Community Center. http://www.gentlejewishyoga.com/
Marie Black is a yoga teacher, writer, and actor now living in Austin, TX and still trying to give up coffee.
By Marie Black
