Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Tom and Susan Wilkens, of Forest Park, credit yoga to helping them recover from open heart surgery, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Now they run a local studio out of their home on Madison Street.
Tom and Susan Wilkens of Forest Park are living proof of the benefits of yoga. They run the Dancing Cranes Yoga & Massage studio on Madison Street and have been longtime instructors at other places in the area. And doing yoga has helped save their lives. In June 2011, Tom underwent emergency open heart surgery for an aortic dissection at Loyola Hospital. The doctors didn't think he would survive it, but Tom recovered rather rapidly. "The doctors said it was because he was in such great shape from all the yoga he was doing," Susan said. "They said he had the heart of a 20-year-old." Doctors never determined the cause, but said it could have been an undetected genetic problem or a virus. Susan and Tom had plans to open their own yoga …
Monday, January 14, 2013
Beloved Oak Parker and yoga teacher Christine Cipra is expected to make a full recovery after suffering a stroke in November last year. Friends and students of Cipra will come together in January to raise funds to help out as she recovers.
Members of Oak Park's close-knit yoga community are rallying this week to raise funds for a yoga instructor who recently suffered a stroke. Christine Cipra, a teacher at Ahimsa Yoga and a longtime Oak Park resident, said she was sitting at home on the Tuesday evening before Thanksgiving when she felt a headache come on that was unlike any she had experienced before. "I'd had some increased headaches over the last year," Cipra said looking back. "But this was different. It felt like a mushroom cloud in my head. I could feel it burst." Cipra and her husband quickly drove over to Rush Oak Park Hospital, where doctors determined she'd suffered a stroke and quickly sent her to surgery. "It was scary, but I feel very lucky that we were able to …
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Here's what you need to know and where you can go in Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park to get your local yoga fix.
Breast cancer patients and survivors know the standard treatments can be rough—surgery, chemo and radiation therapies not only take a toll on your body, the leave long-lasting side effects. Fatigue is one, disruption of sleep is another, but depression, anxiety and weight loss also are common. Few treatments are available, but there are options, according to Elaine Gavalas, an author; natural health expert, and blogger for the Huffington Post. With few treatments available—antidepressants and sleep meds can have their own side effects—Gavalas notes that studies show that cancer patients can benefit from such therapies as stress reduction and exercise classes. Yoga, she writes, can improve the quality of life for women undergoing breast …
Monday, October 24, 2011
Oak Park octogenarian Mary Louise Stefanic has been doing yoga for 45 years. Over that time, she says, yoga has "changed the face of America."
Today Oak Park has a wealth of options for students of yoga. But it wasn't always so. Just ask Mary Louise Stefanic, the 80-year-old yoga instructor who teaches twice a week at Loyola University Chicago. Stefanic says when she first took a yoga class at the West Cook YMCA in 1966, “People were so suspicious.” Back then, yoga was strange. But the class changed the south Oak Parker's life. Stefanic lost twenty pounds in three months, and says she found “peace and tranquility.” She began teaching yoga out of her living room, and when her class grew too big she moved to Dominican University (then-Rosary College), the Euclid Avenue United Methodist Church and Ascension Catholic Church. In 2001 she moved to the Loyola Center for Fitness, where …
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Christine
9:29 pm on Monday, January 14, 2013
Thanks for the well wishes Bob ! more ›