excerpted from the print magazine…
Day 1
I find a place on the floor in a tidy, white-walled yoga studio, with stained-glass
windows creating rosy light and a ceiling covered by bamboo mats arching overhead.
It is just before 8 a.m. on the first day of a six-day teacher training workshop.
My mat and those of the fourteen other participants are arranged like flower
petals around the room. The workshop will be led by Jennifer Steed and Mary-Jo
Fetterly, the founders of Trinity Yoga.
On Sunday, January 25, 2004, Mary-Jo Fetterly was skiing at Whitewater Mountain
in the South Selkirk Range near Nelson, BC. Encouraged by acquaintances to go
to “the backside” of the mountain, where untracked powder and steep
slopes beckoned, Mary-Jo decided to follow them onto a path, but she caught
an edge on its gently undulating surface and flipped through the air. She landed
on her head, sustaining severe damage to the C-5, C-6 and C-7 vertebrae.
A few weeks before her accident, I had spent a Saturday morning with Mary-Jo
in this same studio, learning about Manipura Chakra, “City of the Shining
Jewel.” The third chakra, Mary-Jo taught us, is “the key to the
esteemed self,” the gateway between the physical and spiritual worlds.
I recall her words and the image of her exquisitely strong, flexible body, demonstrating
the scissors pose. Balanced on her two hands, she extended one leg out behind
her and brought the other leg forward over its corresponding shoulder. After
watching her easily enter the pose and hold it for several breaths, we attempted
to do the same. Despite her careful instructions about how to enter and hold
the pose, none of us could match her strength and we quickly collapsed into
laughter and a tangle of yoga mats.
As we wait quietly for Mary-Jo to arrive, I think about the dramatic changes
in her body. She now has no sensation in her abdomen or middle spine, the region
associated with the Manipura Chakra. Medical doctors predict that she will never
do the scissors pose again, or even walk, for that matter. She is confined to
a wheelchair. She needs support from pillows or straps on her wheelchair even
to sit erect. She is as atypical a yoga teacher now as she was once typical,
with her mastery of poses, her vibrant teaching style and her enthusiasm for
the integration of body, mind and spirit.
Right after the Manipura Chakra workshop in early January, Mary-Jo urged me
to take a teacher training course with her. I had studied Ashtanga Yoga with
her for four years, had a steady home practice and moved with a certain amount
of confidence and poise, even if I had not mastered some of the more challenging
poses in the primary series of the Ashtanga system. Why did her suggestion surprise
me? Why did I feel hesitant? Perhaps an understanding that I needed a great
deal of formal training to be a responsible yoga teacher, and that I didn’t
have room in my life for what that would require. Perhaps a view of myself as
not being capable. I’m offering a teacher training in Nelson in the
spring, Mary-Jo had said, contradicting my internal doubts. You should
take it. You are ready.
Then, a few weeks after our conversation, the accident happened. A teacher
training workshop with her seemed less than a remote possibility. Don’t
you study with Mary-Jo Fetterly? a friend asked me the day after the accident.
She’s fallen, and she’s been air-ambulanced to Vancouver General’s
spinal cord unit. I can recall pressing the phone harder into my ear, as
if to hear something different, rather than the shocking truth. Mary-Jo? How
could she, of all people, fall? It’s not possible, I said.
But it was. The woman who had served as a powerful mental, physical and spiritual
model for me and many others had fallen. She was very near death. News of the
tragedy flew around our tight-knit community. Then, in the immediate and longer
aftermath of an event no one could have predicted, the meaning of yoga began
to expand.
Day 2
The next morning, seated in her wheelchair, Mary-Jo speaks to us of the accident.
Her grace rises through her words. Her eyes are clear and shining, her chest
open to the world, her voice soft but strong. She looks healthy and she speaks
with clarity, despite all that she has been through in the past several months:
major spinal surgery, a respirator, hours and hours of challenging therapy and
rehabilitation.
“Consciousness,” she says, “holds a space that transcends
physical reality.”
“I have learned a new appreciation of the physical form, of the human
ability to feel,” she adds. Her partially paralyzed hands lift off the
wheels of the chair in a stiff but expressive swirl. “My yoga practice,
from the moment I fell until now, has been a source of strength and a guide.
It kept me alive as I lay in the snow feeling the paralysis take hold and realized
I must rely on breathing from the diaphragm in order to live. It enabled me
to move out of the spinal cord unit in half the usual time,” she says.
Then she pauses and looks around the room. Using her arms to brace herself,
she leans slightly forward in her chair. “I have come to realize that
we are doing so little with our freedom and our capacity.”
Later, as she leads us through a series of asanas, I am surrounded
as if wrapped in a comforting blanket by her words. In a culture that relentlessly
pursues the physical aspects of yoga, sometimes with the goal to create the
“perfect body,” that body can so easily become a trap, rather than
a springboard to freedom.
I realize as I move through numerous sun salutations, then triangle, side
angle and half-moon, that I cannot really sense Mary-Jo’s physical presence
in the room. She is there, in her wheelchair. I am here, and others surround
me, but I must make an effort to hold on to this perception. Her intuitive grasp
of the body and its alignment remains identical in her teaching. I realize,
though, that the absence of her form demonstrating poses or striding through
the mats to energize the room has had an effect. From the limitation of her
wheelchair, she seems to be capable of leading us to a limitless place, beyond
the room, beyond the mats and the limbs we control.
During a lunch break, I puzzle over the wonderful feeling the asana
series has left me with. I have felt something inexplicable, something like
the Divine. I ask other workshop participants about it. One describes Mary-Jo’s
teaching as having become “completely whole.” Her comment makes
intuitive sense to me, but also suggests an irony that I puzzle over further.
How could Mary-Jo’s teaching be whole, if she herself is no longer WHOLE.
If she is, in the words of our culture, “disabled”?
Later that night, I ease my stiff body into a bath of Epsom salts, thinking
again about wholeness and yoga. The news of Mary-Jo’s accident initially
shattered the yoga community in and around Nelson. Tragedy does this. Yet, once
the truth had been absorbed and the shards of grief and loss were scattered
chaotically about, an opportunity arose to draw together. The willingness to
pick up the pieces and create a new whole exposed our community to a sort of
yoga few had experienced, a yoga that was fresh, though ancient, a yoga alive
with possibility.
