:: January/February 2004 Volume 3/Number 1

Teacher Profile: Cheri Clampett

By Felicia Tomasko

When Cheri Clampett teaches yoga, it is with the intention of inspiring her students to find freedom within. This is important to her, because, as she said, “I knew what it was like to be in a body that was not free.”

Cheri was a successful film and television makeup artist in her twenties in Los Angeles when friends urged her to attend her first yoga class. “I was so out of touch with my body,” is how she describes what it felt like to be in her first class. The class turned out to be life-changing; but it was not really asana (postures) that had its initial impact.

“Savasana was a profound experience. I realized that something was wrong with my body. I had sharp shooting pains and I began crying.” Based on this shocking realization, Cheri rushed to a doctor where she was diagnosed with cancer.

“The experience I had in yoga class could have saved my life.” The diagnosis propelled Cheri into a surgery that successfully removed the cancer, but after four healthy years, she suffered a reoccurrence. She became motivated to pursue the path of healing from within, using yoga, imagery and meditation to delve into the emotional body to recover, rather than going through surgery again. “I felt that if I kept getting the cancer cut out, it would keep coming back.” Now, she describes having cancer as ultimately being a gift which showed her a new side of life and allowed her to heal deeper issues extending back to her childhood.

Cheri's personal experience with cancer and nontraditional healing techniques moved her to pursue healing as a profession. First she studied and practiced massage and hands-on healing. Then she completed the yoga teacher training at the White Lotus Foundation as well as Integrative Yoga Therapy Training. Initially, working with people with cancer was too fresh, so she practiced energy work and massage at Louise Hayhouse meetings and taught yoga to people with HIV and AIDS at the Marianne Williamson Center and the Carl Bean AIDS Care Center. Now, she works with people with cancer, helping them cope with the illness she herself has fortunately survived.

In her teaching, she has fallen in love with the therapeutic power of yoga. Through the process of adapting the practice to the individual, Cheri seeks to inspire in her students the experience of having a tactile understanding of the body. “Breathe like the breeze around the mountain,” she tells the class as they stand in tadasana, instructing them to feel that they are the mountain. While walking around the room, she pauses at each student, her hands smooth over wrinkles and tension. She adjusts less to correct alignment than to facilitate the ability for the body to let go. She massages shoulders, and strokes foreheads. At the end of class as students soften in savasana, she invites everyone to hold their palms open for a few drops of essential oil, choosing scents for relaxation, or for harmony and balance.

Cheri tells moving stories about the impact of therapeutic yoga on people’s lives, which continue to inspire her teaching. One of her students at the Santa Barbara Cancer Center, a man in his eighties, recently expressed to Cheri what the yoga class meant to him. It was the only time someone had physically touched him all week. In telling her how he felt, he began to cry. “People with cancer are subjected to tests, poked and prodded, and under a tremendous amount of stress and strain. Very few of the things that they experience are enjoyable in the body,” Cheri said.

In Cheri’s Yoga for Healing classes, students come in with back problems, cancer, autoimmune diseases, people who have lost their partners suddenly to cancer, those who have undergone knee and hip replacement as well as practitioners looking for a gentle practice. They know they can come and experience a calming, soothing, meditative, nurturing class where they will be touched in a loving way.

“My biggest vision,” Cheri told me, “is to take yoga into places needed: hospitals, hospice facilities, wellness centers, to the elderly and children; the people who wouldn’t be able to get into a yoga class.”

Cheri not only teaches her own classes, but trains teachers and medical professionals in the use of therapeutic yoga techniques. Through this work, she is living her vision of taking yoga into the places in the healthcare system where she found, from personal experience, that it is needed. Cheri Clampett has taught in Los Angeles for seven years and now in Santa Barbara for eight years: at the Santa Barbara Yoga Center, Santa Barbara Cancer Center, classes for women and private yoga therapy. She can be found at www.chericlampett.com and www.therapeuticyoga.com.