Interview by Prajna Lorin Piper
How did you come to Yoga, Leslie?
I came to Yoga because I had back pain, and Yoga helped my back.
And that was it, you loved it?
Well, it helped my back and I could see that when I didn’t do it, my back would bother me, so I stayed in Yoga and got a little more interested. I was living in New York City at the time, back around 1992, maybe. A friend of mine had discovered Jivamukti Yoga, which was talking about all the spiritual texts and I became very enamored of that style. And then, the same friend said to me that she was going to take a teacher training at Integral Yoga and, did I want to do it?. I did, and that’s how I came to know Swami Ramananda and how I became familiar with the whole Integral Yoga lineage. I hadn’t planned to teach but at the end of the training, Swami Ramananda asked me if I’d like to and I decided to give it a try. It turned out that I really loved teaching and that set my trajectory to become a better teacher, to be able to answer the questions that people asked me and to help them. I knew that I needed more training in order to do that. Swami Ramananda invited Rodney Yee to do a workshop in New York, Rodney seemed to have all the answers. I could see that he was the kind of teacher that I wanted to be, that I wanted that kind of knowledge. I decided to take a training with Rodney in California and moved out here to do that. That’s how I ended up in California.
And when I moved out here, I started teaching full time. I was in my late 30’s and I figured, if not now, when? I gave it a go and I found out I could make a living out of it.
How did the pelvic floor come in?
The pelvic floor teaching came in about ten years later. I was doing a lot of yoga and I ended up having pelvic pain. Sitting was painful, long car rides were horrible and sex with my husband was becoming difficult. I ended up going to an Internal Physical Therapist in San Francisco who diagnosed me with hypertonic pelvic floor.
I was shocked. I thought ‘I’m a yogi, how can my pelvic floor be too tight, I’m so aware of my body.’ But then I thought about it and I realized I was aware of my body everywhere except the pelvis – which is really common for people who have trauma. That set me on my journey of healing myself, and when I shared a bit of it with my students they asked for more. They wanted a workshop and I felt I didn’t know enough, but they told me that I knew more than they did.
That’s kind of how it started. I started with a three hour workshop and then a four hour workshop and then Yoga Journal asked me to do a weekend workshop for their conference, which was triple the material, but I said ‘sure, I’ll do it’ and I came up with it. So I taught the short or the long form of pelvic floor workshops for a couple of years and then people started asking for a teacher training. It all developed very organically.
You have a foot workshop coming up, so let’s talk a little about the feet.
Two things inspired the foot workshop. One is that there’s a strong connection between what your feet are doing and what your pelvic floor’s doing. If you have really flat feet or really high arches, either extreme, often the pelvic floor will elevate in response to that, which means it gets tighter. You can actually release your pelvic floor by working with your feet, doing a lot of massaging or working with balls, rolling, things like that. The other thing that inspired the workshop is working with people privately, and a lot of my clients are over 65. They have crossed toes, or pain in their feet, or completely collapsed arches, and so I started doing more foot things with them and seeing how much it helped them. They would say ’my knee hurts’ and then when we worked on their feet, the knees would be better, or ‘my hip hurts’ and when we worked on their toes, the hips would be better. We work with balls, different sizes and densities, which can be targeted, and I got them all to get toe spreaders and use them, and I teach them to massage their feet. It’s helped them tremendously, and I thought that this is something we all need. We’re all aging and we’ve all been wearing shoes all our lives.
And what about how you spend your spare time?
Well, I do a lot of Yoga, and I read a lot of books about Yoga. I’m very passionate about social justice, so I serve on the board of KPFA, a local radio station, I try to get progressive candidates elected, and I do some fund-raising. And I love to hike in the natural beauty of this area, because the trees give me inspiration.
Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
I could say that Integral Yoga is how I began teaching, which says a lot about your organization, and that Swami Ramananda is very dear to my heart. He’s the reason that I ended up in Rodney’s program in 1988. It’s funny that we can all look back and there were certain people that changed the trajectory of your life. I might not have begun teaching if Swami Ramananda hadn’t asked me to and I might not have known Rodney Yee if he hadn’t invited him to teach at IYI. Studying with Rodney lead me to find my true teacher, Ramanand Patel.
I’d also like to say, after studying Yoga seriously for the last 30 years or so, that where I see my practice, and my interest going now, is to the energy body. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and practicing around the chakras and have become very interested in the nadi system, and that’s something that if you had told me, even 12 years ago, I would have said, ‘yeah, right.’ But now, I can do a mudra and really feel the difference, I can feel the subtle body, which, if you’re lucky, is something that comes after years of practice. So I’d like to put together some workshops around that. I just started teaching one called The Pelvic Floor and the Energy Body, and that’s really about the root chakra and what you can do to help your pelvic floor energetically through yoga practice, through mudras and affirmations.
After Rodney, I was very attracted to the Iyengar method, because I loved the therapeutic and alignment principals. My new interest is generally not practiced in the Iyengar system. So it’s a new direction now.
Please join Leslie for her upcoming 3 part series with Dr. Deborah Feltman called Menarche to Matriarch , each session offered individually:
Part I – Saturday, APR 30: Period is not Just Punctuation ~ Yoga and Physiology for Menstruation
Part II – Sunday, MAY 1: Riding the Tide: Yoga and Physiology of Menopause.
Part III – Saturday, MAY 7: Magnificent Matriarch
Leslie Howard, C-IAYT, specializes in the use of yoga for many issues but specifically for pelvic floor problems. She is currently the director of the Piedmont Yoga 200 Hour Teacher Training program. Her courses are approved as continuing education with Yoga Alliance and the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork and she is a certified Yoga Therapist through the International Association of Yoga Therapists.