About us
Erin Geesaman Rabke "I have delighted in movement arts all my life and
have been studying meditation and human health for more than fifteen years. I
began practicing yoga in 1987 on my own, with the help of a few good books and
in 1991 I began attending regular yoga classes. I was first asked to teach yoga
in 1995 and have been doing so ever since. I have studied and taught Tai Chi
since 1992, and am one of few students with advanced teaching certification from
Red Lotus School of Movement.
www.redlotusschool.com I am grateful for my
many years of intensive study with Sifu Jerry Gardner. After leaving the U of
U's school of nursing, I designed my own degree in Integrated Somatics. I have
been a health enthusiast for many years and am a regular contributor to Catalyst
Magazine, www.catalystmagazine.net writing Health Notes since 1998. I
recently completed a 4 year training program in the Feldenkrais Method. I have taught yoga at Soma Yoga Studio in Salt Lake
City since it's opening in 1999, and continue to teach there regularly. I
currently teach Yoga for Your Back and Yoga for the Menopausal Years courses
through the U of U's Lifelong Learning program. I maintain a private practice
offering instruction in yoga, tai chi and therapeutic movement from my downtown
office. I love to share yoga and tai chi with individuals one on one, supporting
people who have an interest in developing a personal practice. I have had the
good fortune to study with several excellent yoga teachers over the years, but
consider my main influences to be my ongoing studies with Donna Farhi
www.donnafarhi.co.nz and Gary Kraftsow
www.viniyoga.com. My teaching
style is also strongly influenced by my beginning studies in Ayurveda and my
meditation practice. I completed a teacher training course with Charlotte Bell
in 1999. Central to my life and my understanding of the essence of yoga is my
practice and study in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which I began in 1994. My
many Buddhist teachers have been the greatest source of inspiration, compassion
and wisdom in my life. I consider asana (yoga posture practice), tai chi, and
Feldenkrais to be wonderful vehicles and gateways through which one can
experience one's deepest essence, one's innate wisdom, and the nature of being
itself.
*
Carl Rabke I began a mindful exploration of the body mostly
out of necessity. After many years of being physically active, yet with little
awareness--I experienced a juggernaut of back pain which grew and grew until I
had back surgery at the age of 21. At the time, I was unaware of any other
options, and my doctors and PTs didn't offer any alternatives to surgery. For
me, though I did not recognize it at the time, the experience of a slowly
growing, and seemingly all-pervasive back pain was what is called by the teacher
and writer Steven Levine, a "fierce grace." I was forced to see that how I was
living wasn't working-- that pushing through pain, and feeling oppositional to
my back and body didn't exactly leave me in a state of well-being. After moving
to Utah from the east coast, I happened to stumble across Tibetan Buddhist
meditation, yoga and tai chi, all in 1996, each of which has greatly influenced
my work and inspired the direction of my life.
My view of the body and of bodywork could be summed up through this passage from
the tao te ching:
"Learning is pursued through daily addition.
The tao is practiced through daily subtraction.
Keep on diminishing action.
When nothing is pursued through action
Nothing remains undone."
***Lao Tzu, The Tao te Ching
The perspective I take is that our natural state is one of ease, balance and
grace. We do however, generate a good amount of stuff which interferes with
that natural state. Our task is not to learn, and practice a whole bunch of new
things to discover ease, but to discover how to relax what we are doing that
blocks the ease. If you are driving in traffic, and you suddenly realize that
your jaw is locked up, chances are, with that recognition, the jaw will begin to
soften. With sufficient awareness, our bodyminds can naturally self-regulate. As
the great Tibetan teacher Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche says "once you taste inner
relaxation, your body will become your greatest teacher."
For me, some things which have been helpful in that discovery of
inner-relaxation are massage and Structural Integration, tai chi, yoga and
Feldenkrais.
I graduated from massage school, Myotherapy College of Utah, in 2000, and
completed an apprenticeship in Structural Integration in 2003. I started
practicing tai chi in 1996, and received a teaching certificate from Red Lotus
School of Movement in 2002. . I completed a yoga teacher-training course with Charlotte Bell
in Salt Lake City in 1999. I completed my Feldenkrais training in 2007. I
am currently completing certification in Bones For Life.
Click here to find out where the name "bodyhappy" came from
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