Healing on the mat

By Carolyn Sloan

The Spectator

NovaNewsNow.com

It seemed like a contradiction. I feel both relaxed an energized, powerful and gentle, all at the same time, she thought. How could this be?

At that time, Julie Palmer was 28 years old, living in downtown Toronto. One day she noticed a sign offering free yoga classes that were open to the public. So on a whim, she decided to give it a try.

While Julie had grown up watching her mother practice yoga, and had even done a little herself, it had never felt like this before. “I went in and I tell you, it was good,” she describes. “That first class that I took was quite a powerful experience for me.”

During this time, she remembers doing one of the poses, thinking that she was extending as far as she could, when the instructor encouraged her to go just a little bit deeper into the stretch. To her amazement, she was able to go beyond the point she believed was possible. “Wow, I can actually go a little further,” Julie recalls. “So you’re opening up into whole new dimensions, whole new worlds. “It’s an integrating thing. It brings your body in alignment with your mind.”

Eventually, she moved across town and started going to classes that offered a different style of yoga. Focusing on the same sequences of poses, repeated over and over again in a rigorous way, it was not the same experience that had initially sparked her interest. There was something about the gentleness of Kripalu yoga and its meditative quality that inspired her. “My heart told me, ‘You need the emotional aspect of Kripalu, the healing,” says Julie. “That’s when I got involved and became a teacher.”

As an instructor, she began teaching at a community centre in the city. However, she soon realized that she needed to be able to adapt the practice for students of all abilities, especially those with specific medical conditions. So after her first term of teaching, she attended the Kripalu Centre in Massachusetts for intensive training.

It was just around the time that yoga was becoming a much more conventional activity, whereas when her mother was practicing, it was quite unusual. These days, says Julie yoga’s become so widespread throughout North America that it’s a familiar part of popular culture and even advertising. “It was starting to get more mainstream, but it was no where near the high crest of popularity that it is today,” Julie explains. “Now, you don’t have to answer the question ‘What is Yoga?’ They have a feel for it. They know, at least, about the stretching [involved]. They may not know about the meditative or spiritual side.”

And yet, for Julie it’s the mental and emotional part of yoga that is so vital. While some styles are more athletic, Kripalu is about unifying the body, mind, and spirit. “It’s about closing your eyes and really touching base to see what it feels like from the inside,” she says. “It’s about unifying our body or spirit, our intentions. It’s hard to do that if you don’t look inward.”

YOGA FOR ALL

Julie moved to the Annapolis Valley in June of 1998. She initially came for romance, but in the end, it was the community that she fell in love with. When the relationship was over and Julie had nowhere to go, she was flabbergasted when two separate women she barely knew offered her a place to stay for as long as she needed. “Something told me, ‘Do not leave this place,’” she recalls. “‘You will never starve. You will never fall through the cracks in Annapolis Royal.’

In her new community, Julie also found an eager following as a yoga teacher. Eventually, in 2005, she started Yoga for All, built a website (www.yoga4all.ca) and even created an instructional CD. The vision behind the new venture was to make yoga accessible to everyone, young and old, beginner and advanced.

While the area doesn’t have the population to support a wide variety of classes, over the years, Julie has developed a style of instruction where she can adapt each pose to the individual requirements of her students based on their medical conditions, mobility and personal goals. “I’m much more comfortable now adapting even on the spot,” she says. “That’s the joy of it. That’s the fun of it. “Yoga is for everyone. There’s always a way to make it work no matter what’s going on with your body… For some people, it’s a little far out, but it’s so powerful… I encourage anyone to try it once.”