Interview with Crescence Krueger

I am deep in midwinter hibernate mode, and feel somewhat disinclined to be online much at all, but this interview is just too good to wait!

Crescence and I found each other online via my post about Mark Whitwell, and I feel that she is a real wise-woman. I love the email conversations we have been having – it’s so wonderful to have women to look to who are a little further on the path of life, and who can turn to you and say ‘This way, you are on the right track’. It’s like having a yoga mother.

Along with Kris at Total Health Yoga, Linda at Linda’s Yoga, and others, (most notably my teacher Ann Behrend, who is currently in India but still too far from me for my liking) I count Cresence as one of my yoga mothers.

It is abundantly clear to me that Crescence gets it. She speaks with poetry, compassion, and authenticity. She is not just talking the talk. When I read her interview responses, I wanted to highlight so much of what she said: it just mirrors my own experience so deeply. But I will leave you to do your own underlining. Read on…

Nadine Fawell You are not just a yoga teacher, but also a doula. Which came first?

Crescence Krueger Giving birth to my daughter came first. The experience of bringing her here altered my understanding of who I am and how I fit into the world. It has remained a touchstone. Giving birth was a direct experience of Yoga; a deep integration occurred. Because I hadn’t been exposed to Yoga philosophy, it took me many years to be able to describe it this way. However, I felt I had been initiated into something ancient and true. I knew that spirit moved with breath, moved with sound, moved with sex, moved in tender intimacy and could not be controlled. I had entered the realm of Woman, the world of the Feminine. Out of this experience, I felt I might be useful to other women and I started to attend births as a doula. A few years later, my birth work brought me to Yoga where I began teaching pregnant women. I had experienced Yoga before I came to study it, so I came trusting the validity of my own experience. When I met Mark fourteen years later, it was the natural, logical and very necessary culmination of a journey that had begun so many years before.

It’s not quite accurate though, to say I had no technical training in Yoga before I gave birth. I began studying Voice with David Smukler soon after I became pregnant. I was an actor and David taught within the structure of the theatre but fundamentally, what he teaches is the Yoga of Sound.

I remember my midwife mentioning that making sound in labour was helpful, so I used the very simple technique I had learned to “let my inhale touch what I am feeling and release what I am feeling out on sound.” This was my meditation. Not that I was thinking of it that way but birth demands your undivided concentration. The source of my sound was my womb. Shakti and I moved through my body in waves of feeling, waves of pain, waves of vibration, hour after hour. They were waves of unspeakable strength and beauty.

Afterwards, I felt like I had lived through my own death and the experience is still something that gives me strength, strength and the feeling that what lives in the centre of the universe and what lives in the centre of me is infinite. I discovered that I was the Source. This still baffles my mind! I used to look at my daughter sleeping beside me and wonder where she had come from. Surely I should know? Giving birth to her had been a movement into the mystery of my life. When I actually began to study Yoga, I had this experience to weigh everything against. I had the means to evaluate what I was being taught. I had something like a very simple GPS system in me that ensured I would find my way.

NF How did you come to the teachings of Mark Whitwell? What was your yoga path before that point?

CK I met Mark at a Yoga Conference in Toronto in November 2004. Well, I didn’t introduce myself then, but I took his class. Shawna Levy, the producer of the conference, gave me the gift of a free workshop. I had been her doula when she gave birth to her daughter just days before the conference opened. The words Mark used in his class description drew me. I had read them very carefully because I was looking for a teacher.

I can’t separate Mark’s “teachings” from Mark himself. They live in him. An image from that first meeting is still vivid in my mind. He is standing in a cavernous basement room of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. There is no air, no natural light and spreading out under our feet are vast expanses of grey, slightly grubby carpet. Just before he is about to chant, he pauses. What a thing to do! I am so used to the aggression of Yoga teachers that his hesitation shocks me. In that pause there is such vulnerability, such surrender and such dignity. I recognize him. He’s someone I trust. I had to teach shortly after the class but I had enough time to buy his book. I read it, read it again and when he returned to Toronto in the spring, I introduced myself!

My relationship with my daughter was my primary Yoga. When she was born, we were two individuals sharing the same state. I’m not spouting Yoga philosophy here! Well, I am, but simply from a bio-chemical perspective this statement is true. Oxytocin and endorphins, the “hormones of love”, saturated our bodies during and after the birth. Shakti enveloped us. To live with my daughter in a way that nurtured our unity was a great joy. Conventional child rearing practices in the West decimate the harmony that naturally exists between mother and child.

My relationship with my birth clients was also my Yoga and it remains so. In connecting with a woman through breath, sound and touch, we open each other and in the process, a child is able to come through. Being with a birthing woman is a very powerful Yoga. The energy of Life is pouring through her, at once sexual and spiritual.

And finally, my artistic life as an actor brought me to the study of Kathak. This was also my Yoga. Kathak is a North Indian classical performance art that weaves together pure dance, storytelling, and music. I danced for eight years with Joanna de Souza. My daughter continues with her. The Shakti that moves through Joanna and through her guru Chitresh Das is channelled in a ferociously complex and alive form. Joanna maintains the essential nature of a traditional teaching relationship: direct experience. The intimacy in this way of teaching is deep. It nourished me.

I haven’t spoken about the physical Yoga I was doing before I met Mark. Asana was hurting me, however carefully and in beautiful alignment I practiced, so I stopped. I had severe lumbar and sacral pain and the physical act of teaching hurt me too.

NF Do you think becoming a mother has changed the way you experience your life?

CK Yes. Very simply, I am connected to Life in a way I had no awareness of before my daughter was born.

NF Tell us about your own yoga practice – every day? How long for? Etc.

CK When I practice in the morning and before bed, I am enveloped in Yoga. I find that containment very comforting, very helpful. When I don’t have it, I feel its absence. It is spring here and to practice out on my back deck with the sky above me and the trees breathing along with me and the birds singing and flying is heaven.

NF Tell us about the things that bring you joy!

CK To be received! To be in harmony with another. I’m guessing all joy comes down to this, knowing you’re in love. My teaching brings me joy. My birth work brings me joy. To be part of someone finding their strength in connection to Life is wonderful. My daughter brings me joy; even her simple presence makes me glad.

To be received by the world is love too. Swimming in oceans and lakes. Walking in crowded city streets. To be absorbed in music, words, food, colour, texture, scent…the sensuality and inherent sexuality of existence!

NF What type of a yoga teacher do you aspire to be?

CK The people who have helped me the most have been those who have really, truly received me. In their presence, I’ve felt free to be what I am. It’s then dawned on me that what I am is enough. In fact, what I am is everything. There is nothing lacking. With this understanding, there is nothing I need to get from anyone. I am free. Paradoxically, in this freedom I am inextricably linked to the lineage of Yoga. What is my part in it?

I am figuring this out! What I experience when I attend births often leaves me in despair. The Feminine is invisible in our culture and therefore in our healthcare system. But she is visible in me so moving out into the world as much as I can might be a helpful thing now. My focus has been in the personal realm over the last few years, teaching privately from my home and working in the intimacy of the birthing room. My writing has become one way to penetrate the larger world.

Mark speaks of how Yoga is “the regeneration of Life”. Yoga gets reborn in each of us. We are what keep it alive. We need to do this in our own way so that what we are doing is true. Otherwise we are passing on someone else’s skeleton rather than our own living body. U.G. said there is no blueprint in Nature; every flower is unique. So is every Yogi. Remembering that I am my own template gives me the courage to be that reminder for others. We need each other!