Conscious Choice: Yoga Helps Those Living with HIV

March 2007 | Yoga Chat

Yoga Helps Those Living with HIV

By Cara Jepsen

Local author Michael McColly has been practicing yoga and meditation since he was a high school student in Marion, Indiana. But his practice took on new meaning when he discovered he was HIV-positive in 2006. “Yoga wasn’t abstract anymore—it wasn’t this idea,” says McColly, 49. “Suddenly, some of the things yoga teachers had said and the things I had read changed in the sense that they were real. I really was trying to listen to my body in order to heal myself.

“I realized I needed it to help me during very dark periods of doubt and anxiety and fear of dying. I could engage with it and feel like I was doing something for my heath—and also for my mind.”

McColly’s new memoir The After Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism begins with his 2000 trip to the International AIDS Conference in South Africa, where he taught yoga to other HIV-positive activists and shared his mantra: “Yoga can’t cure me, but it helps me learn how to live with this disease.”

After diagnosis he found support among the ashtangis who studied with Suddha Weixler at the NU Yoga Center (now the Chicago Yoga Center). “I was scared about what was happening,” says McColly, whose current yoga practice is eclectic. “But when I went to Suddha all of that left me.”

“The students were very warm. Their spirit was very hopeful at the time when I didn’t know if I had a future.”

A year later, they convinced him to go to India. Against the advice of his doctors, he packed up 700 antiretroviral pills and spent six weeks with ashtanga guru Sri K. Pattabhi Jois in India. “I was really afraid to go,” he recalls. “At that time [HIV positive] people weren’t traveling.”

After attending the 2000 AIDS conference, “I felt like I needed to do something,” he says.

So he sold his car and took a leave of absence from his jobs teaching writing at Northwestern University and a yoga and writing class at Columbia College.

He spent the next year traveling—with his antiretrovirals and yoga mat—and interviewing AIDS activists in Thailand, India, Vietnam and Senegal.

He calls their work spiritual activism.

“It’s in the Bhagavad Gita—the fact that we’re put here on earth to act without being concerned about the results,” he says. “That can be applied to just about anything we do.

“Some people have taken that as a foundation of their lives on a very deep level, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I just think it’s people who have a deep spiritual foundation to their life—whether it’s Christian or Muslim or Hindu or whatever. They see their work every day as a manifestation of their spiritual life. They’re not concerned about how people see what they do—they just do it.”

He also wrote a chapter about activist African American preachers in Chicago. “There are yoga teachers and activists here doing incredible things,” he says. “We just don’t hear about them.”

His graphic descriptions of the world AIDS pandemic—and of his own weaknesses and addictions—are brutally honest.

“The people I spoke to were really honest with me, and I felt I had to be really honest about myself—and particularly because of the AIDS situation,” he explains.

“Taboos of sexuality are so strong here and in other parts of the world, if we don’t get out of this ‘Let me hide behind something’ mentality, how are we going to learn about how sexuality works, how connected it is to emotions and fears? I felt like I owed it to the reader to be honest.”

He says he’d jump at the opportunity to return to the places he visited. “I would love to be able to go back and be with people or do a yoga workshop. I feel like my connection to AIDS and activism will never end.”

McColly will read from his book at Shimer College on March 2, at the Heketon Institute on March 15 and at the University of Chicago Divinity on March 28. For details, visit mccolly.ecorp.net.

Cara Jepsen is a Chicago-based writer and yoga instructor. Visit carajepsen.com.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: