Being completely connected

Erica Kaufman owes her life, her well-being and what she is today, to yoga. She goes far as saying, “I am thankful for being introduced to the great science of yoga at age 9,” on her website.

As a young kid, she was, to describe in very layman terms, an unhealthy child, prone to a myriad health problems. Until her mother discovered Yoga and felt that, in it lay a safe and sure way to heal her daughter. Recalling it all, Erica says, “I had a lot of illnesses as a child but my mother never gave up trying to help me through my suffering.” In the early ’70s, her mother began being influenced by Jiddu Krishnamurthy. “His teachings influenced her parenting of me,” she says adding, “as she began practicing yoga, meditation, pranayama and visualisation, she felt that it would be beneficial for me, too.”

Her mother’s instincts proved right, too. Erica remembers that the “only time I didn’t suffer during the day was when I practiced yoga.” The experience and wonderment of being able to feel well had her “so excited that I would practice it every day. And by 14, I was practicing yoga 3-5 times a week with my meditation teacher Clayton McCracken,” she says, excitement still palpable in her voice.

The fascination then went further, with Erica exploring the asanas. “When I was 17, I started to practice all the yogasanas until I felt connected to pure energy. I was feeling energy flowing through me, beyond me. It was not utilitarian yoga; it was a mix of yoga with mantras and pranayama.” And this is how she literally created the Lila Yoga®.  Explaining the form of yoga on her website, Erica says, “Using the body as a tool to understand the mind, Lila Yoga® is a philosophy in motion — a meditation in motion.”

Starting to teach yoga in 1984, Erica today conducts classes in her studio at the State College in Pennsylvania. Not being someone who is choosy about her students, Erica says, “Jews, Christians, Hindus, I teach Lila Yoga®. to anyone who wants to find the pure energy within them.” Another interesting trivia we learn eventually is that since 2006, all Pennsylvania deputy sheriffs have been required to take 9 weeks of Lila Yoga® with Erica Kaufman as part of their physical training.

Erica was in India recently to teach dancers in Bangalore yoga and an interestingly titled movement concept called “Contact Improvisation”. At a glance, contact improvisation to an onlooker might seem like two people sticking to each other and moving around doing strange acrobatics, or to bluntly put it, ‘two people just wriggling together.’ Explaining the concept, however, Erica says, “Contact improvisation is a contemporary form that is based on the principles of communication through touch between dance partners.”

But why was she interested in teaching it to dancers in India? “My interest in sharing it was to teach the dancers the aesthetics of the dance form.” As she elucidates, you realise, the dance form is really about letting go of bodily inhibitions. Sharing her experience of interacting with the dancers, Erica says, “Being conservative, the male dancers initially danced only with other male dancers, but over the course of the workshop, I saw male artistes practicing contact improvisation with the females, too.” She also accedes to being “impressed with the energy and the intelligence of the artistes in India.”

Dancer, Yogini, contact improvisation instructor, a mother of two, yes, Erica Kaufman is like every average multitasking woman today. Until she reveals, right at the end that she is “legally blind.” Impossible, truly, is nothing!