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"Visually
Impaired Get a Lift From Yoga"
The first time Bill Rupel tried yoga blindfolded, he felt disoriented and ill at ease. Though he'd been doing yoga for several years, he'd always been able to focus on an object to steady his balance, check his position in the mirror or shoot a glance at the instructor if he missed a movement. With his eyes covered, he had to listen harder to the directions. He had to feel for the edges of the mat with his feet to know where he was standing. He had to struggle to find his balance. And he got a small taste of what life might be like for his wife of 15 years, Bonnie, who is visually impaired. "All you have to do is put a blindfold on and understand what people who are visually impaired have to do,'' he said. Through the Inner Sight yoga workshop at the Avalon Art and Yoga Studio in Palo Alto, blind, visually impaired and fully sighted people practiced yoga side-by-side. The class, sponsored by the Peninsula Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, drew more than a dozen people to six weekly sessions. After driving past the Peninsula Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired last fall, assistant yoga instructor Antonia Kao started wondering if yoga could help people with little or no sight. She got in touch with Bonnie Rupel, the community relations coordinator for the center, who is visually impaired and had been practicing yoga for three years. The two then contacted Krassi Davis, a teacher whose clear descriptions of movement had made yoga accessible to her. The idea of bringing yoga to the visually impaired community made sense, Rupel said: Not only were her clients looking for recreational activities, but many also needed a way to deal with the emotional fallout from vision loss. "Being visually impaired, there's a lot going on mentally and emotionally as well as physically,'' Rupel said. "With yoga, it's very focused. It's very mental, it can be very emotional and it's physical. It was addressing all the issues that blind people have.'' The Peninsula Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired had some money set aside for recreational programs, and Rupel used $950 of that to set up the class, which was offered free to the public. She is seeking funding for another session. Blind and visually impaired students said the class was a safe environment to focus on what their bodies can do. Sighted participants, who had the option of wearing blindfolds, experienced the feeling of moving in a world without vision. "We wanted to use this as kind of a tool to educate sighted people who haven't been around those who are visually impaired,'' Rupel said. "If you have the visually impaired and the blind people next to sighted individuals with the sleep shades on, everybody was on the same page.'' Davis' Inner Sight class is slower-paced than other yoga classes might be, she said, to give students time to find the correct positions. The exercises are similar to those in other classes, with some small differences. For example, when Davis has her students relax their facial muscles, she asks them to place the palms of their hands over their closed eyes and feel their eyes move up, then down, then side to side. At a recent session, sighted participants helped those who were visually impaired get settled in class. Davis tried to keep her eyes closed while calling out instructions, which she said helped her describe poses for those who could not see to mimic her. An assistant wandered around the room, correcting participants when they missed an instruction or moved out of position. Guy Tiphane, a sighted participant who wore a blindfold during class, said balancing and pivoting were the toughest parts of the exercise. But Tiphane, who has been practicing yoga for about a year, said that wearing a blindfold helped him focus on his movements. "It helped me first to listen better,'' said Tiphane, who also volunteers at the Peninsula Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired. "At the same time, it helped me to feel more in contact with my own body.'' Many of the visually impaired participants could see shapes or shadows. Some who had lost their sight recently said they could still imagine how different movements should look. "They would tell you to put your left leg out and turn your ankle right so you could actually visualize what you were supposed to do,'' said Bill Tipton, who lost his sight suddenly after an illness five years ago. "You can picture the person's body moving.'' When Bonnie Rupel first tried yoga three years ago, she needed a few classes to remember the feeling of being in different poses. But now, she believes she experiences yoga the same way as someone with perfect sight. "Once you know the poses, you're not focused outward anyway,'' Bonnie Rupel said. "You're focused inward. You don't need vision for that.''
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