March 20, 2008 Issue
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Classified Chestnut Hill Local Don't Miss an Issue, Tell us what you see or Winner of Two |
Came out of ‘yoga closet’
This month begins the 11th year I will be teaching yoga in Chestnut Hill. If someone had predicted the changes in yoga and holistic medicine, and the effect on my professional and personal life, that would occur over these 10 years, they would have seemed a fantasy, or more likely a joke. When I began teaching yoga in March, 1998, it was nothing short of insane. First of all, yoga was the remnant of the ’60s, with rare classes taught in church basements. Also, teaching yoga was not considered appropriate for a physician. Some warned that I might lose my medical license. At the time, I was the Medical Director of Chestnut Hill Rehabilitation Hospital. Chestnut Hill was considered a conservative community; how would it look? A spokesperson for Chestnut Hill Health Care sent me angry memos (this was the pre-e-mail era) about how the classes would reflect on the institution. After all, everyone knows that people who do yoga are hippies who have holes in their pants. However, despite the above obstacles and my own fears, teaching yoga was the right thing to do. I had been practicing yoga myself for over 15 years, and it helped me heal many of my aches and pains, including carpal tunnel syndrome, which, at the time, could only be helped by surgery. I had offered yoga in my practice to selected pain patients who had not succeeded with the usual fare of medications, physical therapy and surgery. Even then, I didn’t call it yoga; I called it “a special type of physical therapy where you add breath and awareness to the exercises.” The amazing thing for my patients, and even my skeptical self, was that it worked! As the number of patients with chronic pain increased, I didn’t have enough time to do “private lessons” with each patient. Therefore , I began to think about teaching a class. I wasn’t ready to call it yoga, so I called it “Healing Mind, Healthy Body.” With the help of Joanne Rosenbaum at the Chestnut Hill Women’s Center, I offered this class. A few people showed up. However, I couldn’t really explain what it was without calling it yoga, so it failed. Then, two events occurred within a one-week period that clinched my decision to come out of the “yoga closet.” First, one of my private patients, who had done well with the yoga, said to me, “Just get over it; teach a yoga class.” A day later, I got a call from a yoga class that needed a teacher; their teacher of several years had moved to California. There is a saying in yoga that “when the student is ready, the teacher (guru) will appear.” In this case, the opposite occurred. I was ready, and the class appeared. I immediately went from having no yoga class or students to 18 students. This was just the beginning of one of the most important lessons of my career as a physician. At the Rehab Hospital, there was a big, beautiful chapel that virtually sat empty. Despite the lack of adequate heat or air conditioning, the 100-year-old chapel with its wooden vaulted ceilings was a perfect place to teach yoga. Within a few weeks, with the administrative support of Joanne Rosenbaum of the Chestnut Hill Women’s Center, class began with 18 experienced yoga students. The communities of Chestnut Hill, Mt. Airy and Germantown enthusiastically supported the class, essentially through word of mouth. Within a year, I had two more classes and had an average census of 25 in the evening classes. People were choosing to come to Chestnut Hill Rehab Hospital for routine services because yoga class, even if they didn’t attend, represented a philosophy that they embraced. Yoga practice (sadhana) is, by its very nature, a microcosm of the macrocosm of a person’s mind, body and spirit. Just like watching a person doing sport, watching how people do yoga provides more information about their functioning and health than an MRI or many of the other diagnostic tests that conventional medicine utilizes. As a person moves through their postures, you can see how he/she breathes. You can even see where their minds go. That was not my only lesson. My average student was in his/her 40s or 50s. So we had to deal with lots of stiffness, pain, old injuries and even prior surgeries. Many would try to do the poses, but would strain, fall and hurt themselves. This was clearly not the desired goal of a yoga class — especially one taught by a medical doctor! I had previously learned about the work of a modern yoga guru named BKS Iyengar. His major contribution to yoga has been the precise alignment of yoga poses and the use of props (blocks, belts, blankets and chairs) to enable people to enter yoga poses in conformation with their body’s limitations. I immediately began reviewing Iyengar’s voluminous work and began studying with numerous Iyengar teachers, including two gems here in Philadelphia, senior instructors Joan White and Marion Garfinkel. I bought a few thousand dollars worth of props for my class. The rate of frustration, over-doing and injury decreased. The precision of the poses appealed to my scientific mind. I began to think of each pose like a drug. Each pose could be “dosed” by how far one went into the pose, and how much time one held a pose. (In my own practice, I learned that even a few seconds of certain poses had important effects.) At the same time I was studying Iyengar, I was also studying another style of yoga from the opposite side of the tracks, called Ashtanga Yoga. Ashtanga Yoga, sometimes called “power yoga” was the beginning of many of the current spin-offs that are now taught in gyms. I also included principles from neuro-physiology, rehabilitation, dance, Feldenkrais and other work that I had done when I was younger. I began to apply this curriculum to many conditions that conventional medicine could at best palliate but not cure. These included carpal tunnel syndrome, low back pain, neck and shoulder pain, and even non-physical problems such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, headache, gastrointestinal disorders, chest pain, anxiety and depression, to name a few. This success forced me to begin to think about other “alternative” methods, such as acupuncture and nutrition. Could they also be effective? I began thinking more and more about acupuncture, since it is as ancient as yoga and utilizes an “energy” system similar to that proposed by yoga. Michael Cheikin, M.D., is a holistic physician and published playwright. He is board-certified in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Pain Management, Spinal Cord Medicine and Electrodiagnostic Medicine. He has studied alternative modalities for 30 years. He runs a medical center in Plymouth Meeting, teaches yoga classes at Chestnut Hill United Methodist Church and is associate medical director at the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Wyndmoor. To be continued.
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