Interview with yoga teacher Myra Rucker

Guest

Myra Rucker

Myra K. Rucker is a yoga teacher, and yoga student, who firmly believes in the benefits of “sthira sukham asanam” (Yoga Sutras, II:46) – steady, joyful practice. Her introduction to yoga, practicing once a week between professional dancers and musicians (of various ages and fitness levels), quickly illustrated how yoga provides a path for anyone and everyone to be the best version of themselves.

A native Texan, Myra has studied with Robert Boustany, Rie Congelio, Paul Barrera, Meredith Bowerman, and Jasna Chavalo Abrams. She has also taken workshops with Ana Forrest, Bryan Kest, and Dianne Bondy. Immediately after completing CorePower Yoga’s 200-Hour Teacher Training, Myra began teaching “yoga parties” in people’s homes. She has also completed Level I and Level II Yin Yoga Teacher Training with Michelle Pietrzak-Wegner and Vinyasa Teacher Training with Seane Corn.

Myra’s teaching philosophy centers around the fact that smiling changes brain chemistry. She is also inspired by the idea that yoga (union) – and life – are like a poem, which, as Robert Frost said, “. . . begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

• About Myra: Teaching Yoga | A Joyful Practice

Myra Rucker is a yoga instructor at the YMCA, Nokomis yoga, and a teacher at Common Ground Buddhist meditation centerin Minneapolis, MN. This episode was particularly fun for me because Myra was my first yoga teacher, and she has become a good friend and a wonderful conversation partner on this path of contemplative transformation. I met Myra about 7 or 8 years ago I walked into a yoga studio at the YMCA in downtown Minneapolis. Like many Americans who go to a yoga studio, I thought of it mostly as a physical practice. But gradually I learned so much more about how yoga is a truly contemplative tradition - how asana and pranayama (posture and breath) are only two aspects of the full eight limbs of ashtanga yoga, which culminates in a single-pointed union with the object of one's meditation in Samadhi. What I do recall during those first few classes - which were a vinyassa or "flow" style of yoga - is sweating really hard, feeling completely awkward, but then resting down into savassana at the end of the practice and experiencing a kind of joyful release that is hard to put into words.

It wasn't long before I began to stick around after class to ask Myra questions and she started feeding me reading suggestions. I now began to understand what I was experiencing in that ecstatic release - in yoga philosophy there are channels of energy that flow throughout the entire body called nadis, and when we store tension, stress, or trauma in our bodies those nadis become clogged, and those blockages are called granthis. This ancient wisdom is consistent with neuroscience that notes how memories can become stored in our implicit memory systems in the body at levels underneath our usual conscious level of awareness. The practice of yoga is one of refining our awareness into the subtle layers of our mind-body experience so that we can release those granthis; as we do so we naturally move toward deeper states of meditation, contemplation, or union.

Myra gets into some deeply personal reflections about religious and racial identity that we hadn't really breached in our previous conversations. I'm particularly grateful for her vulnerability in discussing this on the podcast, as I think it speaks directly to many of the issues we're dealing with at the crossroads between contemplative practice, identity, and social justice issues in our culture today. I hope you find this as refreshing and challenging as I did listening to her experience.

I'm very excited to share Myra's wisdom with you all! If you'd like to learn more about Myra, or attend one of her classes, check out the sites below: https://ajoyfulpractice.com/about/http://commongroundmeditation.org/about/teachers-and-leaders/teachers/myra-rucker/http://www.nokomisyoga.com/instructor.htm