By Diane Majeske • Photos by Mary Bortmas
Crazy Wisdom Journal asked a number of leaders in southeastern Michigan’s conscious living community to reflect upon times in their lives that they’ve left their comfort zones to venture out in new ways. In the distant past or much more recently, we asked, what did you do, what inspired you, did it change you, inside or outside, big or little? Did you attend a new class, take an adventurous trip, go skydiving, stretch beyond a long entrenched boundary, start a new relationship or end an old one, take a leap, retire, join the Peace Corps, go on a night trek in the wilderness, or just do something way out of your ordinary?
We received quite a variety of interesting and sometimes illuminating answers. Some of them went deep, looking back upon the journey of life and how it unfolded. Others selected examples from everyday life of stepping gingerly out to try something new. Rather than publish them all at once, we’ll be sharing two or three per issue. In this issue, we start off with essays by Sandy Finkel and Dennis Chernin.
Sandy Finkel: Leaving Comfort to Find the Music Inside
Sandra Finkel is a founding board member of the Michigan Collaborative for Mindfulness in Education. She leads stress management workshops and classes and is an Ann Arbor business owner.
This past spring, I took my first guitar lesson ever. I love to sing and wanted to be able to accompany myself, but I’d never played a musical instrument before, don’t know how to read music, and had so many excuses for not attempting to learn—everything from my short fingers to being too old… I’m 63.
I was arranging guitar lessons for my husband as a holiday gift this winter and his teacher, Ann Doyle, mentioned that she especially liked to teach adult beginners. That sparked the possibility for me. It took me awhile to get my nerve up, build up callouses, and learn a few chords to start. Then I found some songs with chords I could play (D, Em, A, G, C), had my first lesson with Ann, and then it was all about practicing.
I discovered to my surprise, that I have really enjoyed the whole process. I actually like to practice and do so most days. I started with sufficiently low expectations so I didn’t get frustrated with the lag time between chord changes or the coordination and rhythm needed to keep a strumming pattern. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to play chords, strum, and sing. Each time I think I’ve got a song down, Ann throws a new challenge at me, so I’m continually stretching and growing. I have learned quite a few songs, several strumming patterns, two different finger picking patterns, and many more chords. I didn’t even think I’d learn to finger pick in the first year!
This experience has enriched my life and opened me up to new possibilities. I wonder what other hidden talent I might nurture next? This past June I had an opportunity to perform a song on guitar to an audience at an adult camp I attended. I’d been playing for less than three months, but I wanted to inspire others who always wanted to play an instrument. It’s not too hard, and never too late, to learn!
Dr. Dennis Chernin: Taking a Big Risk—Seeing a Lifelong Payoff
Dennis K. Chernin received his M.D. and M.P.H. from the U of M, and is board certified in preventive medicine. He currently practices holistic and family medicine using nutrition, yoga, meditation therapies and homeopathy, and is also the medical director of two county public health departments.
Dr. Chernin is a certified yoga teacher, teaches and studies Chinese martial arts, and is a lead singer, harmonium player and co-founder of a kirtan group, Ann Arbor Kirtan.
He is the author of several books including The Complete Homeopathic Resource for Common Illnesses, How to Meditate Using Chakras, Mantras and Breath and the soon-to-be-published My Path: From Yoga and Meditation to Holistic Medicine.
In the heat of the summer of 1976, I moved to the Himalayan institute, a yoga ashram, on the outskirts of metropolitan Chicago. It was a decision that would lead me to step well out of my comfort zone and radically impact my life’s journey.
I was a young physician at the time, freshly out of medical residency and eager to study the ancient wisdom inherent in India’s meditative traditions as well as the healing arts of homeopathy and Ayurveda. During this four and a half-year sojourn at the ashram, I immersed myself in the study of esoteric yogic practices, explored the science of nutrition and vegetarianism, and delved deeply into the art of homeopathic medicine. It was a most interesting and exciting time, setting the stage for who I am today.
To move to an organization that had an Indian yogi and homeopathic physician, Swami Rama, as its spiritual head, was a huge decision. I had read articles about Swami Rama and finally met him in 1976. He had shown that he could control involuntary body functions and brain wave patterns. This included voluntarily putting his heart in ventricular tachycardia (a type of abnormal heart rhythm), changing the temperature by ten degrees on opposite sides of the same palm, and maintaining active awareness in the delta EEG wave pattern, the brain wave pattern associated with deep sleep. In my quest to understand his amazing abilities and explore different states of consciousness, I was delighted to have the opportunity to closely study with him.
When I moved to the ashram, my mother was aghast. How could her accomplished son, with so much potential to be an admired physician, throw it all away? She was concerned that I was being brain-washed by a nefarious cult. My father and sister were a bit more curious but also wished I would practice Western medicine.
So, the obvious question is why I took such a risk of censure from family, and possibly community as well, in making the decision to practice homeopathic medicine and add yoga and meditation into the mix. In general, I have never been a great risk-taker. I have never wanted to parachute out of planes or climb dangerous rock faces and was not an intrepid world explorer. But I did choose, with some preliminary hesitation, an unconventional career as a physician combining Eastern transcendental and Western scientific approaches to medicine, which some would have considered to be risky from a professional perspective.
It is with some irony that I made this decision as I do love modern Western-based medicine! From a personal health perspective, if not for excellent surgical intervention, I might have died at age seven from a ruptured appendix. I would have lived my entire adult life completely blind if not for bilateral cataract surgery at age 25.
To understand why this decision was so transformative as well as challenging, some contextual backdrop is important. I was an ordinary middle-class Jewish kid from Cleveland, minding my own business but also a bit of a know-it-all. I spent quite a bit of time in my youth dealing with the sadness and confusion from my parent’s breakup and studying hard so that I could get into a good college and eventually go to medical school. I also spent lots of time enjoying being a jock—playing high school basketball and baseball.
When I was a little kid, I knew that I wanted to be a doctor. Along with this inner drive to become a physician, for as long as I can remember, I also had a deep desire to fathom the unknown. I had close friends throughout junior high and high school, and we would often talk about the infinite nature of the cosmos and whether we believed in God as a person or something more expansive. Those were fun discussions, and I guess I’m still asking the same questions today. As a pre-med student I majored in cultural anthropology at Northwestern University. I was fascinated to discover that people from different cultures looked at their lives in vastly different ways, especially in indigenous societies. Their approach to healthcare and disease treatment varied widely.
I was fairly strait-laced in college. I worked diligently so that I could get the grades necessary to get into a good medical school. I seldom drank alcohol and didn’t touch pot while at Northwestern. It was the late 60s, so this seems surprising in retrospect. It was the Vietnam era, and I did my share of campus protesting.
I went to the University of Michigan Medical School where I let my hair down, so to speak, but I still played it pretty safe. I did, however, grow my hair very long, so that by the time I graduated it was down to the middle of my back, while my bushy beard was down to the middle of my chest. In fact, when I did my surgery rotation, the attending surgeons made me wear three surgical masks, one over my mouth and nose and two over my beard. I was quite a sight!
My journey into the world of spirit, meditation, and healing actually began without conscious awareness, years before meeting Swami Rama. As a young child I had terrible dizzy spells, especially at school. These spells were frequent when my parents were going through their divorce. Then one night, I discovered that by slowing down and smoothing out my breath, I was able to stop the dizziness. When many years later, I was reading about breathing exercises in yoga, I was surprised and delighted to find out that I had spontaneously started practicing breathing exercises
