LA Yoga. Teacher Profile. Eric Small

:: November/December 2004 Volume 3/Number 6

Teacher Profile: Eric Small

By Laura Faye

Experience, credibility and wisdom in one teacher are not always easy to find. But you’ll find it here.

Eric Small, 74 years old, born and raised on Catalina Island in Southern California, has been practicing yoga regularly since 1951. That’s more than a decade since B.K.S. Iyengar‘s Light on Yoga, now considered a classic, was first published. Small demonstrates what we can all look forward to with age, the wisdom accumulated during a lifetime of yoga and the sophistication and refinement that come with maturity. He reveals possibilities of what we might be able to achieve through a yoga practice. Small’s yoga story is also a half-century’s worth of our own neighborhood yoga history.

Photo by: Karen Lee Fisher

Unlike most of us wandering into our first yoga class, Small first embraced yoga as a way to manage the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, which included visual and motor deficiency, speech difficulty and bad balance. He even briefly became dependant on a wheelchair. He had made “no progress with the traditional medical modality” and instead suffered “bad side effects such as nausea and fatigue.” Looking back, he reminisces about his “fantasy to use yoga to manage symptoms and continue with life.” What was once mere fantasy is now his reality.
Back in the 1950’s yoga was much harder to come by. Small often had to drive from Los Angeles as far as Santa Barbara to attend a single class.

Then, in 1974 Small had the insight that he would need to travel to Berkeley to meet B.K.S. Iyengar; that decision marked a turning point in his life. Small became one of Mr. Iyengar’s first students in the U.S. with what was then known in India as ‘shaking leg disease’. Small’s body became the paint to his guru’s artistic hand. By the mid 70’s Small’s classes had begun to flourish, as had his yoga practice, and on his second trip to India in the 80’s Small spent time observing the medical classes at the Iyengar Institute in Pune. That is when Mr. Iyengar suggested he begin teaching others with MS.

According to Small, the specific physical and psychological key to yoga for MS is the sequencing of poses. Since MS is a disease of the nervous system, stress is the major factor. “A staircase becomes hugely stressful when you know that your foot isn’t reaching to the next stair, you’re struggling, slowing down, and you start to worry about blocking the way of others behind you.” Restorative poses keep the nervous system quiet, establish a relationship of trust between teacher and student and give the teacher the time to assess the sequence that will be most effective. Only after a student learns to keep the nervous system cool and calm, can she begin to embrace the complexities of supported asanas and other more complicated postures.
Small considers it an obligation as well as a privilege to teach voluntarily twice a week at the MS Achievement Center at UCLA where students practice a range of postures, mostly seated in chairs or wheelchairs. ‘Chair walking’, for example, is an exercise that aids in peristalsis and elimination, two huge issues for those who don’t walk well.

Because Small has been there himself, he knows every rationalization and procrastination and often sees himself in his students. Although his demeanor is habitually joyous, he avoids giving false hope. His students benefit from a full spectrum of results that touch many aspects of their lives. One student asserts, “ I didn’t believe I could do any of it and then I found out that I could do a little and so my attitude about what I could do changed, I thought that if I could do this, maybe I could do a little bit on other things too.”

Having been exposed to thousands of students over the years, Small knows that just like snowflakes, each symptomology is unique. Therefore, Small is sensitive about flagrantly advocating a ‘prescription for MS’. He is deeply concerned about under qualified instructors teaching ‘yoga therapy’ without enough background, experience or training. “Yoga is not a free-form art,” he decries with impunity, “it is based on sound discipline that requires dedication, concentration and application.”
Fortunately, by holding a seat on the Board of Trustees of St. John’s Health Center as well as the National MS Society and by adhering to a rigorous set of standards himself, Small is uniquely positioned to insure that as yoga finds its way into the mainstream medical sphere, the utmost principles of quality are upheld.
Small is currently working on a manuscript that uses his lifetime of experience to reach out and make yoga more available to people with MS.

Eric Small holds a Senior Intermediate Iyengar Certification. Contact him at www.yogams.com.

Laura Faye holds degrees in Biology and Chemistry, as well as certification to teach yoga according to the Iyengar tradition. She has been teaching and practicing yoga for 19 years.