I am incredibly honored to have my writing featured on the Therapeutic Yoga Training Program website. I took this training with the incredible Cheri Clampett and Arturo Peal at Integral Yoga NYC last year. It changed my view of the world and my place within it. There are not enough words to thank Cheri and Arturo for their guidance and generosity in sharing their gifts, though I gave it a whirl in this piece.
Cheri and Arturo will be gracing the New York City stage again in June at Integral. Spend two weekends with them and watch your path open up before you.
Those Who Heal, Teach
“People who practice yoga and meditation are the most courageous people in the world. They are willing to sit with their pain in order to heal it. I don’t know anyone who’s had an easy life. Do you? Trauma and suffering are part of the human experience. Give yourself over to explore it; go into it. We are so complex and so amazing.” ~ Cheri Clampett, Yoga Therapist and Teacher
“Toni Morrison said, ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else,’ and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else.” ~ Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
New York City has a yogic dilemma: though an increasing number of people are practicing yoga, the paid opportunities for new teachers to teach full-time are tough to come by if they rely solely on the traditional yoga studio model. To make their way as full-time teachers, they need to expand their vision of who needs yoga and how best to provide it to non-traditional populations. We have to carve our own paths, rather than taking the predetermined ones defined by existing studios and the model upon which they’re all built. We need to grow the yoga market as a whole, and to do that we must draw upon a very deep understanding of our own yoga practice.
My opportunity to teach yoga full-time appeared slowly over the course of a year after I completed my teacher certification. My vision crystallized during Cheri Clampett and Arturo Peal’s Therapeutic Yoga Teacher Training at Integral Yoga. I originally started to practice yoga as a form of healing. I was under a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety from a very early age, and went through several bouts of PTSD as well as a lifelong battle with chronic insomnia. Nearly 20 years after his passing, I have now come to understand that my father had PTSD that went untreated for 40 years and ultimately it claimed his life after it caused him to develop an addiction to alcohol.
It was difficult for me to embrace all of this information; I had worked very hard for many years to suppress it far below the surface and suddenly in this therapeutic training this information would no longer lay in wait. It forced its way up into my consciousness and refused to be ignored any longer.
Luckily I was in the care of great expert guides. In every session, Cheri and Arturo would give us tiny jewels of wisdom and I picked each one up so carefully, grateful for its comfort. They helped me see beyond the walls I had constructed around my life for so long; they expanded my view of what I have to learn as a student and what I have to offer as a teacher.
Arturo taught me that a student who’s uncomfortable needs one of two things – support or space. Cheri taught me that I didn’t need to be ashamed of feeling so broken because everyone is always healing in one way or another. I was not alone on the path, and so I could keep going. The freedom I wanted would never be mine so long as I suppressed my pain; what I needed to do to be truly free was to give myself over to the pain. In that way, it would be healed. I knew that Cheri and Arturo’s training would help me to help others; I didn’t expect it to help me heal so profoundly. Of course, the deeper my healing, the more I am able to provide to my students. It is a virtuous cycle.
Cheri and Arturo helped me to understand how my own trauma, and the subsequent healing, could be the asset to help others through my teaching. I could use what I know, what I understand from my own practice and life, as my greatest resource. For a year I tried a countless number of avenues to make a go of full-time teaching. I kept looking for answers “out there” and tried a number of experiments that didn’t pan out as I hoped they would.
The practice of therapeutic yoga helps us to look deeply inside and tap our own wisdom, our own sense of prajna, “knowing beyond knowing”. The answers I sought to find were with me all along, and the practice of svadhyaya, self-study, helped me to recognize it. My true teaching path lies in helping people heal from trauma, whether they experience trauma themselves or suffer from it second-hand as a family member or caregiver to someone challenged with trauma. I especially understand the burden that trauma places on children; I know their challenge all too well.
Once my purpose became clear, the path of action revealed itself. I quickly began to see that the returning veteran population, as well as their family members and caregivers, are a group of people who need deep healing. And like yogis, their own training and strength is their greatest asset. They have what it takes to heal themselves; they just need a guide to help them become aware of their own power, just as Cheri and Arturo helped me to realize my own capacity for healing.
And so, I’m on my way to teaching full-time by own design, using the life experiences, good and bad, that I’ve collected for so many years. This path makes those experiences mean something, and in many ways it is breaking the cycles that have existed in my family for too long, cycles that needed repair. It is never too late to heal.
Christa Avampato 