Lifelong Practice: Felicity Green Paul Cheek

FELICITY GREEN

BY PAUL CHEEK

On July 15, 2017, I had a long conversation with my teacher Felicity Green. She was in the comfort of her home

on Lopez Island, Washington, and I was in Washougal, Washington. She shared her experience about the way her yoga practices have evolved over the years and of her relationship with the Iyengar Yoga community. Her example lights the way.

I knew about the body pretty well, and when I saw Iyengar Yoga, I saw that it fit. It had the integrity of the body in it.

Felicity Green at The Hamlet, where she lives on Lopez Island, WA

Paul Cheek: Why did you start yoga and how long have you been practicing?

Felicity Green: I started yoga in 1964, with a class at a community center in Palo Alto, California. The teacher was in his 70s and had been doing yoga for three years. He knew more than I knew.

I started yoga because, before I left South Africa in 1962, I had had a shoulder operation and I was given the prognosis that I would never lift my hand behind my head again or lift my elbow. After I settled down a little in the United States, I saw a notice for a class in yoga. I went to see if that could get me a little bit more movement in the shoulder.

PC: How long was it until you discovered the Iyengar Yoga method?

FG: I discovered the method in 1970. Before 1970, I just did yoga—whatever attracted me. I went to different workshops and worked from a book with good illustrations. In 1970, I saw a French teacher, Rishi Jean Bernard. As soon as I saw him, I knew Iyengar Yoga was what I wanted to do. He offered a teacher training in France in 1971, and I went to that. It was a two-week teacher training. He came every year for the next three years and did several workshops in the U.S.

PC: What do you think it was about Iyengar Yoga that made you know it was the one for you?

FG: I trained as an occupational therapist in South Africa. There were 10 of us, so we were just thrown in with the medical students for the first two years, which included a year of dissection, where we actually dissected the body from the skin down to the bone. I knew about the body pretty well, and when I saw Iyengar Yoga, I saw that it fit. It had the integrity of the body in it, whereas other forms of yoga didn’t really have that integrity of the body, of using the body in the way it was designed to be used. That was what attracted me to Iyengar Yoga. It seemed very pure in that way.

PC: So at that time, were the teachers teaching any of the philosophy or was it all body centered?

FG: For me, it was body centered, although it didn’t have much effect on my shoulder in the beginning. The reason I continued with yoga was that I felt the difference in me when I practiced. I was much calmer and more centered and able to deal with my three little kids, being in a strange country, and everything like that, which, for the first six months to a year, created a lot of stress for me.

The philosophical side, although I didn’t know a lot about it, definitely affected me and that was why I continued doing yoga. It was not so much because I felt there was a big difference to my shoulder, but because I felt that it made me feel different and able to cope more easily.

PC: When did you start your practice, besides taking classes and workshops?

My practice became very important to me as the first thing I would do to take care of myself. That has continued on throughout the years.

FG: I started my practice pretty soon, because of [the way it helped me cope]. When the kids were really small—it was the day of playpens and I used to put the playpen up. I did my practice and let the kids play. When the kids were in school, I would see them off to school and my husband off to work and then I did an hour’s practice before I washed dishes, made beds, or any of the other household chores.

My practice became very important to me as the first thing I would do to take care of myself. That has continued on throughout the years. I always did my practice first thing in the morning. When the children were grown, I would have a cup of tea, do my practice, rest a little, do my pranayama, and then do everything else. So, everything else came secondary to my practice; it came first.

PC: How did you meet Mr. Iyengar?

FG: He came to California in 1974 to teach. The first day we walked into class, he talked a little, and he said that he had done headstand for so many years that the hole in the top of his head had opened. I was amazed because I’d just read the Book of the Hopi, which presented the mythological beginnings, like ours about the ark and so on, you know, the floods and the fire, and everything. They said that the human beings who started the race again were the people who kept the hole at the top of their head open. That they were open to god.

That impressed me first, and then working with him was just amazing. When he came back in 1976, I was one of the people who was teaching—it was more Rishi’s style of Iyengar Yoga— but I was a teacher, and he needed assistance because there were 70 people in the class.

One of my first memories of him was with him present and me teaching. He had everybody in Uttanasana and was putting his head in the center of their sacrum and pulling on their thighs. I watched and thought I’m not going to put my head there. So I put my head on one buttock and pulled the thighs. And from across the room he immediately saw and shouted, “Felicity, it’s just part of the body. Just put your head in the middle.” I learned very soon how practical and down-to-earth he was. That your body is just a body. That was a big lesson that I learned from him.

In the early days, after meeting him and having experiences with him, I was convinced that he was my teacher. After a few years, he encouraged us to start certifying people. We said, “How can we certify people when we don’t have a certificate ourselves?” He gave some of us who had come to India a couple of times certificates so we could teach. An official one, a printed one.

We had a convention after that in Pasadena. He had given different groups the permission to do teacher training. There was the western group, and there was the eastern group. What we found was we weren’t doing exactly the same thing. We weren’t doing it in the same way. That was when the discussion came up of starting IYNAUS. We needed an umbrella association that we all belonged to so that all the teacher training would be, in a sense, the same.

PC: Talk about the evolution of your own practice and how it’s changed over the years.

FG: For the first 10 years, Mr. Iyengar would not let me do rope work, as I had an extensive operation on my left shoulder in 1961. After 10 years, he told me my shoulder was totally healed, which it was, and I could do anything. The prognosis I had from the orthopedic surgeon was that I would never lift my elbow above the shoulder or put my hand behind my head. If I had believed that and not tried, it would’ve been a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so, this is something that I’ve used in my teaching when people say to me, “Oh, the doc says this...”

I’ve learned that doctors always give the worst possible outcome. Because they don’t want to be sued. They won’t take a chance in saying, “Well, if you really work at it, you might get more movement back.” With frozen shoulders, where the doctor has said, “Sorry, you know, we can’t do anything about it,” we’ve actually been able to do something about it. There are lots of things that doctors don’t know.

I continued with my teaching, going to India every two or three years and learning what I didn’t know, then coming back and working two or three or years until I felt I did know. Then I would be ready to go back again. I felt it was important to need to go back to India, not just to want to go back. I didn’t go back yearly—I just went back every two or three years and worked hard in between those times. As I became older, I went through menopause before there was much advice on this. It was before Geeta’s book on women. I just followed my own feeling. I stopped doing head and shoulder stand because they didn’t feel good for me, and most of the standing poses I stopped, and I did restoratives and many forward bends. I went through menopause fairly well. I did have some hot flashes and things, but I found the restoratives and forward bends helped with those.

After 2005, I developed atrial fibrillation, and I think that was because I went to New Zealand for six weeks and taught too

much. I taught a teacher training where I taught six hours a day for six days. I was already in my 70s.

I came back with atrial fibrillation. Then my practice became very quiet. No inversions, as I would feel as though I had high blood pressure, my face would go red, and I would feel all this pressure in my head. I started doing many restoratives again, heart opening poses, and a lot of forward bends, poses that calmed me and didn’t demand a lot of energy.

I’m off most of the medications. I go to a naturopath, and my practice has come back except for headstand and some of the standing poses. I do a few standing poses, sitting forward bends, and shoulderstand. My body is aging, but I feel no aches and pains, and my body is surprising to me. It is very flexible, and my Padmasana has improved. I can still do Pindasana. I practice a good one hour a week. I don’t have a regular practice in the morning as I used to have. My morning practice is reading philosophy and doing meditation. My morning practice is not so much physical but being in touch with the psychological and philosophical.

That is what has happened to my practice. My body is very flexible, it doesn’t seem to stiffen up, even if I only do an intense practice once a week, it just is there. Which I’m very grateful for.

PC: What do you see as most important for the Iyengar Yoga community today compared with what was important in the 70s or 80s?

FG: I think the board is doing a very good job. I like the things they’ve introduced recently like giving people who are certified and who have enough experience a certificate for therapeutic yoga. I read something about them introducing a program on the internet where students and teachers can ask other teachers questions. I think that’s a great idea. I’m very happy to see the Iyengar Yoga community on Facebook. I think that’s most important, to have that public media exposure.

I’m happy with the way things are going, and it seems as Abhijata is turning into a very good teacher. She has just had her second baby, and yet she’s devoting herself to yoga. It’s very important because Mr. Iyengar has always said that his yoga is for the householder. And that’s what she’s being. She’s being a householder. She’s not being a swami, somebody who’s devoted their total life, in a sense, to yoga, but has an ordinary life as well as being a yoga master.

Paul Cheek (CIYT Intermediate Junior I) has been studying and practicing yoga since 1990 and teaching since 1999. He is the owner and director of Rushing Water Yoga in Camas, WA.