A Yoga CD offers a path to the self

Times Union article October 5, 2004

John Lennon wrote that "Life is just what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."

What he alerted us to in a song, yoga instructor Lisa Temoshok is hoping to rectify with a voyage of self-exploration—a guided voyage, that is, into experiences and emotions we too often forget to notice.

"It's like when you're driving, you're experiencing all these things at the same time but not being aware that you're experiencing them," said Temoshok, who's 42, and has practiced yoga and meditation since 1986. "How do you process what's happening to you? There's nowhere to take out the plug and let this all drain out."

Nowhere, save yoga, and Temoshok has committed about 45 minutes of her brand of yoga—Yoga Nidra, which means "yogic sleep," and involves breathing exercise, gentle movement and guided meditation—to a new CD called "Sacred Awakening." The $17 CD is available from her Web site at http://www.sraddhayoga.com.

sIf you don't know the lotus from the locust, don't fret, said Temoshok. Yoga Nidra is not so much about "yoga" in the traditional sense as in the state of mind that yoga is meant to facilitate, she said.

"I wanted this to be beneficial for people who do yoga; those who don't and those who can't," said Temoshok.

Gayalyn Wojtowicz, of Clifton Park, recently bought the CD for herself and her 37-year-old son, who is non-verbal autistic and suffers from epilepsy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

"I thought this might be a good tool for him," said Wojtowicz, who played the CD for her son as he lay in bed and she sat nearby. "You just relax. I thought I had more energy after I used it, even though it was late in the day."

Although Temoshok enjoyed yoga as a young child growing up in Texas, and continued to take classes as she matured, she didn't return to it full force until years later, after a career in the mid-'80s as a Hollywood screenwriter and script rewriter. Temoshok now traces the pivot in her focus back to 2000 and the death of her beloved grandmother, whom Temoshok cared for until the end. Yoga and meditation were the best medicine for dealing with her grief, she realized.

"I found that I could experience what I was feeling without having to push it away," said Temoshok, who moved to Scotia in 1996 with her husband and three sons to be near her husband's family. "That as painful as the feelings were, they weren't going to kill me."

A new feeling
temoshok realized she wanted to teach yoga. In 2002, she trained at the Kripalu Center in West Stockbridge, Mass. "That was a transformational experience," she said. Back in her classroom not long afterward, as a session was drawing to a close with the traditional period of relaxation, Temoshok felt a new sensation wash over her.

"All of a sudden, I started singing. It was a chant I'd heard once. It felt like tucking people into bed," she said. It didn't take long for her students to begin requesting that she sing, to lull them into a place of total relaxation. The CD was an obvious next step.

"Apparently, I'm really good at putting people to sleep," Temoshok said, with a laugh.