A Lesson in Humility with UnCruise Adventures Yoga Teacher Jo Zukovich
by Melissa Hagedorn

When I connect with yoga teacher Jo Zukovich on the phone, I quickly realize that I am in for a treat.  Though I am supposed to be focusing on learning more about Jo and her teaching methods, her humility guides her to share about her incredible teachers, including B.K.S. Iyengar.

Can you tell us about the beginning of your yoga practice and how you found your way to teaching yoga?
I sought out yoga in 1979 after a life of dance and ballet practice had led to shin splints.  I kept hearing great things about a local teacher, Mary Dunn.  Mary taught Iyengar yoga which is no surprise as her mother, Mary Palmer, was instrumental in bringing Mr. Iyengar to the United States for his first teaching tour in 1973.  Not unlike others, when I attended my first class, I realized how good the practice felt and started to attend classes with Mary as much as I could.  After a few years of dedicated study with Mary, I became an assistant at the yoga studio.  In 1984, I had the opportunity to study with Iyengar himself when he visited San Diego and it was the best class that I had ever taken.   Within the next year, Mary departed for New York City to start the Iyengar Association and I stepped into the role of teacher.  Because of my passion for the practice and sharing it with others, I opened several yoga studios, one by one, and started training yoga teachers in 1990.  It was not in the 200-hour format that is commonplace today but rather in a mentorship style.

Did you travel to India to study with Iyengar and if so, what was that experience like?  
In 1988, I traveled to India to study with Iyengar and completed the pilgrimage three more times in the 1990’s as well as studying with him when he traveled to the US.    Studying with Iyengar was different every time.  We would have class time with Iyengar in the mornings and practice time in the afternoon.  Iyengar would do his own personal practice alongside the students in the afternoons.  It was one of the most valuable learning opportunities for me with my practice.  Though Iyengar’s presence was notable during class time, it was subtle during practice time.  In fact, you might not even notice him.  While students were huffing and puffing their way through their practice, Iyengar moved silently with grace from one pose to the next without strain.  His practice was a moving meditation and it was a beautiful thing to watch.  Occasionally, he would come and adjust a student during the practice time.

I knew, and could feel that others knew too, that we were in the presence of somebody who knew what they were doing and what they were about.  Yes, there was a physical aspect to the yoga practice but ultimately, the practice was a tool to help you evolve as a human being.

Practicing with Iyengar lasted well beyond the time spent in India.  Once I returned home from India and started to apply all that I had learned, I had the realization that yoga was not only about the physical postures.  My understanding of the practice started to deepen, leading to new insights that were ultimately connected to this great yoga lineage.

You studied with Iyengar several times in the US.  Was that experience different than studying with him in India?
I remember attending a San Diego yoga conference in 1990 where Iyengar was present.  He wasn’t really teaching any workshops.  He was engaging and speaking with yogis and helping out.  On the last day of the conference, I was told there was going to be an impromptu yoga class.  My husband and I showed up and discovered that Iyengar was teaching the class.  It was the first class I had seen Iyengar teach where there were hundreds of yogis.  In India, there were typically about 50 yogis in class.  What I remember the most about this class with Iyengar in San Diego was his keen sense of awareness and ability to provide a verbal cue to one specific individual in a room of hundreds.

How did Iyengar come up with yoga props?
In 1937, Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar to Pune at the age of eighteen to spread the teaching of yoga.  Iyengar started by teaching strong and capable military soldiers but it wasn’t long before he was teaching people that had a wide-range of health conditions.  Iyengar felt that students needed to stay in poses for a certain duration of time to reap the benefits yet often times a student would be dealing with a health issue that would limit the students ability to do so.  It was during these early years that Iyengar first started to develop props to use during the yoga practice to extend the time a post could be held.  In class, he would provide the student with a piece of furniture or a rack to use as an aid.  Then Iyengar started experimenting at home and eventually came up with the block.  It was a statue that inspired him to create the yoga strap.  Iyengar saw a statue of someone sitting in Siddhasana with a belt around their knees and back and realized that a strap would help students stay in the poses longer.

What about the yoga practice has led to your life long dedication to the practice?
The first difference I noticed in my life from the yoga practice was in how I walked but it didn’t take long for me to discover that the changes would extend far beyond the physical.  The practice changes you physically and emotionally.  I feel strongly that each yogi should have their own personal practice.  I know that many people are intimidated by the idea of creating their own practice but it really can be something as simple as 10 minutes of practice.  A personal practice allows you to take what you learned in class and apply it to your life.  This is where transformation can happen.

I love teaching yoga and couldn’t imagine doing anything else.  My favorite piece of advice is to go slowly on the path.

You have been practicing for a while.  Have you had to deal with injuries?
About 8 years ago, I had physical setback with my yoga practice.  All of a sudden, much of the physical asana was no longer available to me.  Honestly, I was initially devastated but I kept practicing and slowly I regained many of the postures that had been lost to me.  Now, when I reflect back on the experience, I feel blessed because I learned much about myself during that challenging time.

Speaking of physical setbacks, you have been acknowledged by paraplegic Matthew Sanford as his first teacher and helping him to cultivate a presence within his body through awareness, breath and attention.  What was it like working with Matthew and do you have any advice for yoga teachers in working with disabilities?
Matthew had been going to school in Santa Barbara, where I used to teach once a month, and someone referred him to me.  I would give him a few poses to try and he would practice them throughout the month and we would reconnect the next time I was in Santa Barbara.  He was an exceptional student and applied himself to the practice.  It didn’t take long for Matthew to feel inner body changes from the practice and soon we started to practice together intensively for many hours at a time.   I learned a lot from working with Matthew.  He has now gone on to found Mind Body Solutions and offers training on working with people with disabilities.  If you are interested in working with disabilities, I highly recommend seeking specialized training with someone like Matthew.  Beyond that, I would also acknowledge that each injury is different and the teacher must go slowly and have an ongoing conversation with the student to ensure the practice is helping them.

You and I connected because of our mutual association with UnCruise.  Have you ever UnCruise’d before?
Yes, twice.  About a year ago, my daughter took me on an UnCruise to the Sea of Cortez. I was impressed with how well planned and thought out the experience is with UnCruise.  There are endless options for activities from hiking, snorkeling, kayaking and more.  The food was amazing, the employees were kind and knowledgeable.  The dozens of fellow cruisers are like-minded and it is easy to make new friends.  I loved the experience so much in fact that before I even got off the boat in the Sea of Cortez, I booked another UnCruise for my husband and I to the San Juan Islands and Olympic Peninsula.

You are leading a “Rivers of Wellness” cruise with UnCruise in October 2017 along the Columbia and Snake Rivers.  What can guests expect on this cruise and from your yoga classes?
The “Rivers of Wellness” UnCruise will offer daily yoga classes, nutrition workshops and sound healing as well as the typical excursions and adventures UnCruise is known for.  Yoga will be offered both on the boat and along the river.  In my yoga classes, I teach a mindful approach to the poses and I keep my eye on students to ensure that they are provided with modifications that best serve them.  One thing I am looking forward to in this immersive environment is the opportunity to be available for yogis to provide guidance and help answer questions about their practice.

This is the perfect opportunity to set aside the daily stresses of deciding what you are going to eat, tidying the house or running errands and shift your focus towards going inward.

In addition to daily yoga classes, the “Rivers of Wellness” UnCruise will offer a winery and vineyard tour and tasting, a jet boat ride into Hells Canyon, a tour of the Bonneville Dam, guided hikes and much more.  To learn more about the upcoming cruise, please visit:  https://www.uncruise.com/destinations/columbia-river-cruises/rivers-of-wellness

The Best of Both Worlds: Interview with Tiffany Cruikshank
by Jill Rivera Greene

Tiffany Cruikshank has dedicated 20+ years to crafting her unique method of teaching yoga. She draws on a vast range of experience, including her work as a holistic medicine practitioner, acupuncturist, and sports medicine expert, as well as private sessions with thousands of patients, students and athletes, including Seattle’s own Russell Wilson.

These experiences laid the foundation for her Yoga Medicine trainings, which draw on both Eastern and Western notions of medicine to address each patient/student’s unique needs. These days, Tiffany spends the majority of her time sharing these teachings in conferences, trainings and articles internationally. She was generous enough to share a few juicy tidbits in a recent phone conversation with NWYC.

Where did the inspiration for Yoga Medicine come from?
When I started seeing patients about 15 years ago, I noticed that my patients who practiced yoga got better a lot quicker. That prompted me to think about how I could better help my patients who don’t practice yoga, by giving them postures and other things they could do on their own to be more proactive in their health care.

Yoga Medicine was meant to bridge the gap between the yoga world and the medical world, so yoga could be an adjunct to people’s medical care. Yoga teachers aren’t meant to replace medical providers. Our mission is to train teachers to blend Eastern and Western modalities, so they can work effectively with medical providers and help people with injuries or illnesses, or improve general wellness.

Do a lot of health care providers come to your trainings?
All of our trainings are for people who want to teach yoga in some capacity, but maybe a quarter of participants are also health care providers, from mental health counselors, doctors, surgeons, physical therapists, acupuncturists, and more. The common denominator is people who are interested in both the East and West—the Western understanding of anatomy/physiology in addition to the Eastern practice of yoga.

Has Yoga Medicine changed the way that you personally approach yoga?
I have never seen [yoga and Yoga Medicine] as separate. That said, I definitely started out with a more physically based practice. I did a lot of Ashtanga when I was younger, and I was intrigued with inversions and arm balances. Then I had a bad injury, and that’s what forced me to start incorporating more of what I did with my patients into my own practice and teaching. This eventually evolved into Yoga Medicine.

I think we all evolve over the decades of our lives. If we practice yoga long enough, the practice changes to suit our needs. Yoga Medicine has definitely changed how I approach my practice; I now approach it more through a therapeutic lens than an exercise or gymnastic lens, though movement is also therapeutic of course.

Do you have specific suggestions for people of a certain age (ahem), as our practice evolves?
I think it’s important to acknowledge that the practice isn’t meant to be one practice for everybody. The beautiful thing about yoga is that there are so many different approaches. As we go through our life cycles, hopefully we are able to find a practice that suits us. And if you practice yoga long enough, that will change many times. What exactly that looks like is going to be different for each person.

The hard part is just staying open to that. We can get kind of rigid about what we think we need. We only have so much time, and we often feel like we have to get a physical practice in, to move because we sit all day. The yoga principles and practices are based on a framework of not just physical flexibility, but mental flexibility as well. It’s really important to our health and vitality to allow ourselves to pay attention to what our bodies need through different weeks, years, and decades of our lives.  After practicing for almost 25 years now and spanning several decades of my life, my own personal practice has changed immensely over the years and only when I was able to be adapt to that was I able to tap into the therapeutic potential of my practice.

Can you talk a little about the process you go through in developing a Yoga Medicine module?
The modules that I develop are all on topics that are personally meaningful to me. They are things I have experienced in my own practice, with students and patients. So I start by choosing subjects that are important not only from my lens but also for the people I work with.

I like to stick to what I’m good at and what I know. A lot of the course content comes from my own education, my 10+ years of training in holistic medicine, yoga, acupuncture, sports medicine, and orthopedics, as well as 15 years of seeing Chinese medicine/acupuncture patients with a specialty in sports medicine & orthopedics together with my experience of teaching yoga for the last 20 + years and running yoga teacher trainings for over 15 years.  And then I dig through my books, and consult with other teachers, doctors and health care providers who might be helpful. When we do modules that aren’t in my specialty or comfort zone, I bring in other people who are specialists in that area. We have a lot of doctors & experienced teachers who contribute to our curriculum.

One of the things that we do well in Yoga Medicine is keeping an open mind. We train our teachers to think for themselves, so that they can understand the lens of the human body and apply that to the yoga practice. Yoga Medicine is not a specific style or way of working with students. We always recommend that our teachers continue to study many different styles of yoga. We are helping our teachers to understand the body from an Eastern and Western perspective, so that they can decipher for themselves what might be helpful for their students.

One of the workshops that you’re offering at the NW Yoga Conference is on the SI joint. Can you talk about why you chose this topic, and share one or two key things that students in the workshop will learn?
The SI joint is becoming a popular topic right now, and rightfully so. In the medical world and in my training, almost 20 years ago, there was hardly any talk about it. Now it’s starting to get a more recognition, in the medical world, in yoga, and in the general population.

The SI is a really important joint, because it’s weight-bearing and a transition point between the upper and lower body. It doesn’t get a lot of movement; in fact, it barely moves at all. Most of the time it gets 2 to 4 degrees of movement. But there is a fine balance between not moving enough and moving too much that, in my experience, is critical to the health of this joint.

One of the easiest take-aways is the importance of having a balance of strength and flexibility. As a yoga practitioner you can do that in a general sense, by noticing areas that are tight or weak, and working on those areas.

For yoga students who are more flexible, it’s important to look at areas that they can strengthen around the hip, lower back, and core. You can’t really go wrong there. Any time there are recurrent SI joint issues, there is some layer of hypermobility. So in general, it’s looking at how to build symmetrical stability around this joint to help it function optimally within this fine range of motion.

I have found some specific techniques that are helpful in this area. In the workshop, we will look at some of the common tendencies and simple ways to work with them.

You’re offering another workshop, on myofascial release. Who do you find benefits most from this technique?
The thing I love most about myofascial release is that pretty much everyone can benefit from it. You can modify it to the individual pretty easily. Nothing is going to replace a great body worker or your medical provider, but it can be a great way to continue your care on your own.

Usually people feel results pretty much immediately, so that gives people encouragement to continue using it. Eventually, over time, they can reshape and shift the fascia and the connective tissue. We’re now starting to recognize, through research, that this is an important part of our physical health—not only our muscles, but our structural supportive system and how it’s all integrated together.

When people use myofascial release, they get to feel how one part of the body affects another. This is one of the reasons that I love teaching these workshops. A lot of times when we do myofascial release on our own, we just work on one specific area. But when you go through the body in a workshop, you may notice that there were completely separate areas that were even more helpful to the area where you have pain or limited range of motion. So it helps you uncover what I call “mystery areas.”

You have worked with a lot of athletes throughout your career. What do yoga teachers need to know about working with high-performance athletes?
We have a whole module on this in Yoga Medicine! I’ve worked with a lot of different kinds of athletes—from pro athletes to weekend warriors, in many different sports. Yoga is becoming a more and more prevalent resource for athletes, and there is a lot that yoga teachers can do with and for athletes.

One thing that’s really important to understand is that, in most athletics, there are very different stages of training. My goal as a yoga teacher is to meet athletes where they are, and to use the different tools and modalities of yoga to assist them through the different training & recovery stages, including joint stability & strength building, mobility, active recovery, passive recovery and the often over looked nervous system reset.

The great thing about working with athletes is that they are usually very much in tune with their bodies and changes in their performance, so that gives us good, quick feedback. However, depending on the athlete, there can also be a lot of parts that are very disconnected. I enjoy working with athletes because they generally respond really well to yoga and are usually surprised by all the things it affects not only in their performance but also their mental game and how they feel in general. They can really feel the differences yoga is making. Even simple additions can be very effective in an athlete’s routine.

What are some of the benefits, for yoga teachers and students alike, of attending an event like the Northwest Yoga Conference?
The great thing about coming to a conference like this is getting a sampling of a lot of different things. I enjoy being a participant as well as a teacher, and hearing the different viewpoints.

As a teacher, you not only get to take away new information from the classes, but it also sparks you to think in new ways. It fires parts of my brain that maybe haven’t been used recently. A conference is a great way to spark an interest to dig deeper and perhaps continue on to study more deeply with a teacher.

One of the things that I feel strongly about in Yoga Medicine is that often there isn’t a “right” or a “wrong” way. All of these teachings have some uses, otherwise they wouldn’t be around. They’ve worked for someone. So if I can go and see all of these different ways of working with the body, it helps me create more tools and resources to have at my fingertips when working with my students.

That’s the whole premise of our trainings: Being able to individualize the process, so that teachers can work in medical settings, or home settings, or wherever they are needed.

This year, we are asking conference presenters to share with us what the conference theme, “The Courage to Live From Your Heart-Center” means to them.  First up, the incredible, loving and inspiring Seattle based yogi, Terilyn Wyre!  Be careful, you might want a box of tissues neaby –  the beauty of this writing brought us to tears.

We can fall in love in an instant; utterly, completely, unequivocally in love. It takes but a moment for our hearts to open like a flower yearning for the kiss of sunlight and morning dew. We fall in love with our partner, our children, our friends, our pets, the sight of the sun setting over the water, the forest, the mountains, a piece of art, our favorite song. Falling in love is easy, natural, effortless even. It seems like the very thing we were born to do. Often we remember these moments as rare, monumental and fleeting. What we are witnessing in these magical moments is a reflection of the Beloved who resides within us. In essence, our outer environment is mirroring back to us our huge capacity to love and be loved. As tempting as it is to think we are falling in love with someone because they are so fabulous (which they very well may be) a deeper truth might be that our love interest is willing to hold space for us to dive into the unending well of love within our own heart.

So you might be thinking “well sure I’ve felt moments of deep love but it not a feeling that lasts, it shifts and changes and sometimes ends. How do I cultivate a feeling of open heartedness that guides my choices, my path, my life, when the risk of heartbreak seems inevitable? Won’t that hurt, a lot?” I’ve asked myself this question many times, especially when I see cruelty and tragedy in the world. Yes, you will experience pain, loss, heartbreak and unimaginable grief.

This is where courage comes in: to love without story, conditions or expectations; to love simply because it makes you come alive to do so; to love even in the face of disrespect, disregard and dismissal. This is the true work of a heart centered warrior. I’m not suggesting it’s the easy path, but rather one of integrity, authenticity and vulnerability.

I have found these three things are essential in living from the heart: forgiveness,  self-compassion and self-love. The courage comes in our willingness to look at our shadow self and all our wounds and old stories. When we are brave enough to bring the light of awareness to all the parts of ourselves that need healing we can begin the process of true forgiveness of ourselves and others which in time becomes the balm for our aching hearts. Forgiveness allows us to have compassion for our perceived failures and mistakes and love ourselves for all of who we are, the shiny side as well as the side we’d rather not look at or expose to another. When we experience this for ourselves first we can see our divine innocence and then eventually the divine innocence in others who deserve that same love, compassion, and forgiveness.

In every religion or mysticism there seems to be a yearning for God; the Divine, Beloved. We are yearning for the One who has never left us. When we recognize as truth that love is ours and the Beloved is within us, we lose some of our fears as we can never truly lose love or be abandoned.

In every moment we have an opportunity to contract in fear or expand in love, the choice is ours. It takes practice to trust the expansion of our hearts. Your very first down dog may have felt awkward or difficult but in time felt ease-full and familiar, so too is true of learning to live from your heart. The more we yoke ourselves back to love again and again, the less we shut down emotionally. We learn to navigate this world with grace and sovereignty and a steadfast willingness to open our hearts to each other and every moment of this wild life.

For me, the choice is clear: With my yoga practice as my medicine/ my elixir for the strength and courage it takes to live from my heart, I will continue to walk this path as a warrior of love and welcome home all the wounded parts of myself with a renewed sense of belonging. My prayer for you is to do the same.