Popular Instructor Says Judaism and Yoga are Complementary

As a yoga instructor, Jackie Gadd really gets around. Every day of the week she teaches somewhere in the county.  On Sundays, she is at the Copley YMCA.  On Mondays, at the Bonita Library; Tuesdays, at the YMCA and at the Serra Mesa Library; Wednesdays, the La Mesa Library; Thursdays, the Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College; Fridays, the Park De La Cruz Recreation Center in City Heights, and on Saturdays, she serves as a personal trainer.

If you think a seven-day-a-week schedule might be too much, consider this: for Gadd, yoga is a way to relax while linking her mind, body, and spirit. Her classes last about an hour, so there is plenty of time throughout the days for other activities with her husband Craig, recently bar mitzvahed son Eli, and with fellow congregants at Tifereth Israel Synagogue.

Gadd first encountered yoga during a difficult period in her life. The marriage to her first husband was going south. She suffered from an auto-immune disease that doctors thought was either lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. She was frequently depressed, prompting her on occasion to turn to alcohol.

When an acquaintance suggested that she try yoga, Gadd was skeptical at first. “How can that help me?” she asked. “Just come and see,” counseled the acquaintance. Moving her body in specific ways, according to the directions of her yoga instructor, “led to clarity of thought,” she said.  Mindfulness helped her “dissipate the stress, the mental shpilkes, something like giving your dog exercise so it can calm down,” Gadd recalled. She found that she left the yoga sessions feeling better. “Deep breathing and so forth can create physiological changes,” she explained.

Fascinated and exultant, Gadd read more and more about yoga, and sampled many different techniques of yoga under a variety of instructors. She said during this period, she had some “Aha” moments.  Even though yoga was developed by practitioners of the Hindu religion, for Gadd yoga “reinforced my being Jewish.”  Yoga, she said, “can be a time when you want to tune into your spiritual side, and is not just a workout.  When I am practicing, everything clicks into place.  I feel a brief moment of connection with the divine.  How wonderful life is.” She studied more and more eventually becoming certified as a yoga instructor.

Her email address reflects her feeling of connection between Judaism and yoga.  It is byomyoga@gmail.  B’yom in Hebrew means “of today,” so her email translates roughly to “yoga of today.”

“For me an ‘aha’ moment was when I was going over the core tenets of yoga, and thinking these sound so familiar,” Gadd said. “Then learning and looking at the Ten Commandments and the yoga tenets and seeing the connections. Yoga is a complement to my lifestyle as a Jew!”

Gadd had grown up in the Chicago area and had a Friday night bat mitzvah at the Skokie Central Traditional Synagogue, where they used Ashkenazic pronunciations of Hebrew rather than Sephardic.  So that ceremony at which she came of age, but was not allowed to touch a Torah, was called a bas mitzvah.  The congregation had an Orthodox minyan downstairs, and a larger sanctuary upstairs where men and women could sit together.

Classes taught to girls included instructions in “how do you light Shabbat candles, and how do you make chicken livers,” Gadd recalled of the days when she was known by her maiden name, Jackie Kurtz.  “My mom was president of the Sisterhood, super-involved, my dad (who had an advertising and graphic design agency) not so much.”

“Judaism is one of the foundations of who I am,” Gadd said.  “I identify outwardly and inwardly as a Jew.  It is one of the first ten things I tell people about me.”

When she married Craig, a non-practicing Catholic, “it was important to me that a child be raised Jewish.”

In addition to her current schedule of classes, Gadd has taught at the St. Madeleine Sophie’s Center in El Cajon (for people with disabilities), the Lawrence Family JCC (family yoga), the Tifereth Israel Synagogue preschool, and at the Community Jewish High School that serves synagogues in the San Carlos and Del Cerro neighborhoods.

She has coached people of different ages, physical abilities, and mental capabilities.

A Jewish teenager who followed Gadd in a guided meditation – “think about your big toe, think about your knee” – later reported that she had never felt so relaxed in her life.  In other instances, Gadd recalled, while having seventh and eighth graders lie down during a yoga session, some would start to cry, not in pain, but in relief. They asked Gadd was it okay for them to feel that way. “Yes,” the instructor responded, “you are letting go of your stress.” At that age, Gadd noted, tweens and teens can feel a lot of stress, but need permission to let it go.

With a senior citizens group, Gadd recalled, someone told her, “I used to have trouble getting out of my chair; now I don’t.”

“The Talmud teaches us to take care of our bodies,” Gadd said.  While personally fulfilling that command, Gadd is happy that she can help others do likewise.

Republished from San Diego Jewish World