ahhhh, the 3-day weekend

Memorial Day weekend, May 23–26, is just around the corner. What better way to kick-off the unofficial start of the summer season than with a fun, yoga-filled weekend at Kripalu with Sarah Powers, Shiva Rea, or Shobhan and Danna Faulds. You can also explore and get your body outside for Yoga and Hiking. Or take part in a writing program with creative goddess SARK. There’s something for everyone this weekend, including a self-renewal retreat for women and a Kids’ Fun program.

Take a look at our May calendar and get inspired!

There will also be a special Sunday night performance, with Kim Rosen and Jami Siber Only Breath: A Concert of Music, Poetry, Image, and Elephant Wisdom.

men might like

Whether you are exploring the pleasure of mindfulness practice in Zen Koans to Bring You Joy, connecting with your spiritual self in the Awakened Masculine weekend, expanding your fitness experience in Yoga and Kayaking, or learning rhythms and asana in Yoga and Hand Drumming, Kripalu gives you an opportunity to release stress and tension this spring and summer. Come deepen your relationship with your body, celebrate the season, connect with your spiritual potential, and take time for yourself.

Find out more about what you might like at Kripalu.

are you a baby boomer?

Take advantage of an energizing, empowering, and one-of-a-kind weekend—Boomer Boot Camp. Do you want something more fulfilling from your day-to-day but don’t know exactly what? Are you craving a big change but afraid of taking the leap? This workshop with life coach and retirement revolutionary Lin Schreiber will provide an enjoyable, safe, and dynamic environment to focus on what you want to do with the rest of your life. Don’t miss it!

Find out more about Boomer Boot Camp: Revolutionize Retirement by Designing a Remarkable Rest of Your Life, May 16–18, 2008.

vata, pitta, kapha: learn ayurvedic healing

Are you called to be a healer? Do you want to know more about treating imbalances with natural remedies like herbs, nutrition, and lifestyle changes?

In Kripalu’s professional Ayurvedic Consultant certification program, you will learn everything you need to know to evaluate and advise clients in order to guide them into balance and wholeness. Through a combination of weekend courses and at-home study, you will study for two years with the nation’s leading faculty, including Vasant Lad, John Douillard, Robert Svoboda, and Scott Blossom. All along the way, you’ll practice what you’re learning, coming into even greater personal health and establishing your knowledge from your own experience.

Next training begins this September!
Find out more about becoming an Ayurvedic Consultant—get an application, view the faculty, dates, and cost.

health for life success story

A month after returning home from Kripalu’s Health for Life program, Margie Roelands couldn’t have felt better. “Before I came to Kripalu, I felt like a 65-year-old,” said Margie, “but with the changes I’m incorporating into my lifestyle, I’ll turn 50 this fall feeling like I’m in my 30s.” Margie’s blood tests showed encouraging improvements in her cholesterol and glucose levels. The program, designed to address metabolic syndrome issues—such as high cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels—teaches people how to create lasting lifestyle and behavioral changes to reverse downward health trends.

Find out more about the Health for Life program in June 2008.

whole grains for health

Organic gourmet caterer and cooking teacher Leslie Cerier loves whole grains and loves telling people why—and how—to incorporate them into a daily, healthy diet. This month, she shares three delicious whole-grain breakfast recipes with us. And May 18–23 Leslie will be teaching Cooking for Women’s Health (both women and men welcome), a hands-on vegetarian cooking class designed to address a variety of women’s health issues, such as PMS and menopause.

Read more about Leslie’s take on whole grains and check out three delicious recipes:
Porridge with Coconut and Dates
Berry Good Waffles
Teff Banana Pancakes

Find out more about Leslie’s Cooking for Women’s Health program.

healthy living recipes

This month Executive Chef Deb Howard gives us the dish on two of her favorite simple salads—not only delicious but fun and easy to prepare. And who knew tuna noodle salad was so good for you? Nutritionist John Bagnulo tells us why.

May Healthy Living Recipes
Tuna Noodle Salad
Indonesian-Style Rice Salad

desktop wallpaper

we love to hear from you

Kripalu Online feedback
editor@kripalu.org

Registration and other questions
800-741-7353
registration@kripalu.org

Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to teach the art and science of yoga to produce thriving and health in individuals and society.

Visit Kripalu’s website.

welcome

May carries us into the wildest part of spring—flowers in full bloom, warmer weather, foliage alight with green. It’s a perfect time to start new activities and projects. In the spirit of spring, we've taken time to revitalize Kripalu Online, to open its windows and let more light in—we hope that you enjoy it! We also hope that during the rest of this season you reconnect with a sense of play and begin the transition into the outward, light-filled experience of summer. Enjoy the colors, the scents of spring, and this issue, which brings you fun-filled programs, reflections on transformation, tasty recipes to share with your friends, and more.

transformation: the art of
being willing

by Laura Didyk

If change is akin to rearranging the furniture in a room, transformation is the knocking down of a wall or the addition of a sliding glass door—it’s a dramatic alteration in structure that’s nearly permanent. In this piece, Kripalu’s Special Projects Editor, Laura Didyk, shares a personal story that expresses the challenges that exist at the core of a process of self-transformation—and the rewards that await on the other side.

I am at my stove in my kitchen stirring hot cereal, waiting for the grains to soak up the water. It’s quiet except for the bubbling from the pot and the faint hiss of the burner. Steam swirls up from the pot and clouds my glasses, which I take off, fold, and lay on top of a cookbook. For a few minutes, I am just stirring. Listening. Feeling the steam on my face. Removing my glasses. Folding them. Setting them down. It is a simple, unadorned moment in the early hours of an ordinary day. This is how it is now, a lot of the time—this kind of moment used to be incredibly rare.

I travel back six years to a time when I couldn’t do much of anything, to a depression so debilitating that food didn’t even make it on to the docket most days. Here are some things I considered accomplishments at the time: getting out of bed, making it to the shower, not looking in the mirror, not thinking “those thoughts,” which consisted of possible things I could do to guarantee not having to wake up and do this again, this enormous, nearly impossible task of getting through a day, an hour, the next five minutes.

Depression, as I’ve experienced it, isn’t about being sad. Or melancholy. Even the word “pain” doesn’t quite describe what inhabits a person in such a condition. It’s almost as if depression takes the person. During my worst bouts of it, it felt like this: I am hanging off the edge of a cliff over a deep, dark, echoey canyon. My fingers are growing tired, starting to slip, and I am about to fall. That’s what depression was like for me, living in that about-to-fall state all the time. Writer Andrew Solomon addresses this experience in his book Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, “What is happening to you in depression is horrible, but it seems to be very wrapped up in what is about to happen to you…the dying would not be so bad, but the living at the brink of dying…is horrible.” I couldn’t remember who I was before this thing had gripped me, and in hindsight, the idea of taking myself out of the running seems like a perfectly reasonable and humane consideration given my interior circumstances at the time. But how lucky I am, how blessed, that I didn’t go through with it.

I regularly push myself to reflect on that time because there are a few things that I never want to forget: 1) how bad it was, 2) how far I’ve come, and 3) that transformation from what seems like the most dire of circumstances is absolutely possible, if you are willing. I believe that what was going on with me at the time had roots in physiology, and I also believe I was suffering from a spiritual illness. So many of us suffer from it—a kind of viral emptiness that starts in the heart and spreads. When coupled with a certain physiological makeup and with particular circumstances, this disease of the spirit can become excruciating and unbearable. Some of us experience it in small ways, in different areas of our lives; for others it can, in its extreme forms, manifest as different shades and grades of mental illness.

In my case, immense and ugly forces from my past had come to bear on the present in a way that my psyche was unprepared for and my spirit didn’t know how to handle—up until then I’d always found ways to ward those spirits off, but I’d run out of ideas. They’d finally intersected inside me. And it was time.

It’s the ultimate spiritual paradox: we don’t have to step very far or very fast, yet the significance of that miniscule step is massive—it doesn’t have to be much, but we have to mean it. When the gods of transformation picked me up and had their way with me, I had to let them. I had to go in and stand at that intersection, and say, “OK. I’ll do it. I’m ready to face whatever it is I need to face so I can feel something different.” I had to be willing to embrace the same dark self that I’d been undone by. Carl Jung referred to it as the Shadow, and I knew if I wanted to live with any amount of peace I was going to have to bring it into the light of day and make friends with it. Unfortunately, this process didn’t look or feel how I wanted it to—I don’t think it does for anyone. It wasn’t graceful or beautiful or uplifting—the process of deep, permanent inner change hardly ever is, at first.

Also, it didn’t happen overnight—it happened over time. I was not suddenly okay. There wasn’t a singular moment when I stopped and said: now I’m different, now I’m transformed. But I feel that way today. Transformation isn’t what happens when the universe feels sorry enough for us to have mercy. And it isn’t the gift of instant relief. It’s what happens when we finally decide we’re going to stop running and instead face, head on, whatever it is we have not been willing to. My experience with depression and my experience surviving it has helped me, I believe, build the inner resources I'll need for whatever else comes down the pike.

*****

I have a mental photograph of myself from six years ago, and in my mind I like to place it next to who I am now. Me, who can sit in a room and just breathe. Me, who can sleep through the night, who can feel hungry, who can make breakfast, who can dance in my living room, and who can then get into my car and drive to my job—all in the span of a couple of hours. Remembering the before and taking stock of the now helps me untangle what I’ve traversed, how I’ve healed, what it took, and everything about my getting better that I can’t account for. I am humbled by the power of what happened, and the way the transformative process became a steadfast bridge over the gap between then and now.

I feel indebted to that process as if it were a person, an entity, a teacher, but the bridge could not have been built without my permission. I had to help with the construction. I had to admit to myself how badly I needed it. I had to pick up the telephone and tell people. I had to become willing to stand in the middle of that intersection, even if it meant risking what little life I had left. I had to access courage in its purest form. And I had to pray to a god I didn’t even believe in.

I still have episodes of depression, but I am lucky that they do not last long, aren’t paralyzing, and, generally, are made better by talking to people, getting more sleep, eating healthier food, and, well, dancing in my living room. In some ways, it might not even qualify as depression, as these are things that made no difference when I was in the worst stages of it those years ago.

Transformation—real transformation—leaves us at home in our own skin. The mind becomes something of a friend, a powerful tool which we can use to move in the direction of goodness. The transformative process, most of the time—from mental illness to health, heartbreak to serenity, addiction to recovery, confusion to clarity—will not feel good. And the biggest mistake a person can make is to expect it to. The journey can be difficult and lonely and, when we’re in the middle of it, it will feel like nothing is changing at all. But then one day we’ll realize we are on the other side of something. We can look behind us in awe, knowing that all we did to get to where we are now was give up, just a little.

Laura Didyk, MFA, Special Projects Editor for Kripalu Center, is an essayist and poet who earned her master’s degree from the University of Alabama. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and her work has been published in literary magazines throughout the country. She currently volunteers for PEN America’s Prison Writing Mentorship Program.

Read more about the process of transformation from a yogic perspective in “Thriving in a Stressed-Out World,” an article by Garrett Sarley (Dinabandhu).

spreading the word …

Lakshmi Voelker Chair Yoga DVD: “Get Fit Where You Sit!”™

Working to make yoga accessible to all, Lakshmi Voelker-Binder has just released the first in a series of groundbreaking DVDs: Lakshmi Voelker Chair Yoga: Single Chair Yoga, Volume 1. Featuring tailored routines for various flexibility levels, Lakshmi Voelker Chair Yoga is an easy-to-use program that results from Lakshmi’s 35 years as a yoga teacher.

Visit www.getfitwhereyousit.com for more information about the DVD.

Find out more about Lakshmi’s program, May 11–15 Teaching Chair Yoga: The Sitting Mountain Series Teacher Training.

43 Things: What Do You Want to Do with Your Life?

Whether it’s one thing or 43, do you need some reliable support in making change in your life? 43 Things is a free online goal-setting community—as the homepage describes it: “List your goals. Share your progress. Cheer each other on.” You can make a list of all the things you want to do, connect with others that have the same goals, get periodic e-mail reminders sent to you, track your progress, and share reflections.

Get started at www.43things.com.

quote of the month

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
—James Baldwin, U.S. essayist, novelist, and playwright