SPOTLIGHT
PODC AST!
SPOTLIGHT:
BACK TO CENTER Laura Willenbring BY REEVE KLATT (SHE/HER)
A
holistic veterinarian and yoga teacher in Saint Cloud, MN, Laura Willenbring teaches through her own platform: Back to Center. She works on her family farm with her husband when she’s not tending to animals or guiding yogis. I talked with Willenbring about the interconnected web of nature and how she finds balance in a busy world.
REEVE KLATT: You have an interesting story because you’re a yoga teacher and a veterinarian — two things you don’t often hear in the same sentence! How did you get into both of those areas? LAURA WILLENBRING: I got into veterinary medicine due to a childhood love of helping animals in their suffering. As a little girl, I would hold armfuls of farm cats! I took my first yoga class in college, and there was very much an exactness to it. With a right and a wrong, my practice was focused on conquering the body rather than partnering with it. In retrospect, if we spend time to really study the things that need studying with compassion, with curiosity, it’s more about “what is this here to teach me?” rather than “how do I conquer this?”
18
I went to veterinary school overseas with the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The culture was a little bit different — and beautiful. The intersection of nature and humanity buffered right next to each other. One of the first times I started doing more yin and restorative [yoga], I absolutely fell in love with yoga nidra. I spent a month in India with an animal charity, where we stayed right next to an ashram; the bells would start ringing at two o’clock to three o’clock in the morning. We spent all day working with the animals and working with the villagers that would literally spend all day walking to this location for their goat to be looked at and [I’d be] exhausted and then “Da da da duh!” — these bells, this call of awareness. I did my 200-hour RYT with what was then the Yoga Center of Minneapolis. Tara Cindy Sherman, my main facilitator, shared about yoga nidra, and yin, and some of those very lunar, very feminine, very kind practices — and that’s what I kept coming back to.
RK: What spoke to you about those practices? LW: I realized I had so many things in boxes. I could be the veterinarian
over here, the yoga teacher over there, the partner and community member over here. It seemed as if these things couldn’t touch. And the reason why the things couldn’t touch tended more to be buffering against people’s perceptions about what a ‘fill in the blank’ should be.
“If we spend time to really study the things that need studying with compassion, with curiosity, it’s more about ‘what is this here to teach me?’ rather than ‘how do I conquer this?’”
I’m an integrated veterinary practitioner, so if a client comes to me with their sick pet, I’ll sometimes ask what’s happening with the people in the house — adding in the intersection between animals and humans. We affect everything around us and everything around affects us. And if we just pause for a moment and acknowledge we are with rather than over, that we’re part of
MNYOGALIFE.COM
