Month: May 2019

by mtkolar
MLive.com, November 1, 2007

When Laurie Blakeney was 19, living in Ann Arbor, she attended her first Iyengar yoga class at the YMCA. “I fell in love with it,” Blakeney said. “It’s really an intelligent form of exercising. What drew me was how analytical, artistic, and disciplined it is.” Blakeney has continued to practice yoga since that day in 1971.

Iyengar yoga, she said, is a traditional form of yoga based on alignment not only of the body, but also the psyche. It focuses on developing strength, stamina, balance and flexibility. It strives to unite the body, mind, and spirit, for well-being. This form also utilizes several items such as blocks, ropes, and blankets.

Iyengar is one of the most popular forms of yoga in Ann Arbor. In the 1970s, B.K.S. Iyengar, creator of Iyengar yoga, visited Ann Arbor’s YMCA and instructed teachers there. Blakeney said she believes it is popular in Ann Arbor because it came to the city before other forms of yoga were introduced. Blakeney, who each year travels to the Iyengar Institute in Pune, India, was recruited by one of her yoga instructors to become a teacher. She began teaching in 1977 and taught at institutions such as Wayne State University, University of Michigan, and from 1988 to 1998 she rented the Rudolf Steiner School Gym to run her own yoga program.

In 1998 she moved to a commercial building on 4th Avenue in downtown Ann Arbor, where she had a room of 1,400 square feet. She taught there until she decided the business had outgrown the space. Blakeney found a 4,500-square-foot vacant building at 420 W. Huron St., formerly the men’s homeless shelter.

Blakeney said she and the landlord, Ann Arbor developer Ed Shaffran, worked to transform the building into a school. A library, laundry room and restrooms were added, and the old oak floors and high ceilings were retained. The business opened in April 2006.

Although business had increased since the 1970s, Blakeney said, in the past couple of years it has stabilized. “There are many yoga studios opening, many more than five years ago, with not that many new people in the area.” She has a weekly enrollment of 270 people in the 18 classes offered this fall.

She said classes at the AASY differ from other exercise classes where the teacher is in front practicing along with the class. “Iyengar yoga classes teach people to understand the poses when in class,” Blakeney said. “They are taught the how and why… so that these can be practiced well outside of class.”

The center offers 10-week-long courses at $130 for Ann Arbor School of Yoga (AASY) members and $160 for nonmembers. The center also provides an occasional free trial class to the public. “It gives me a chance to explain to people what we do before they pay the $130 or $160 so they can make an educated choice if they want to take the class.”

Blakeney works with the nonprofit group AASY Action, which gives free classes to people staying at the Delounis Center Homeless Shelter. For AASY Action, a separate entity of AASY, she works with five other teachers. AASY Action, Blakeney said, is talking with some local agencies in hopes of serving other members of the community such as troubled youth, victims of domestic violence, and youths with learning disabilities.

She also offers special and out-of-town workshops, Teaching Training Intensive Weekends, and plans to take a group to Mexico in February for an annual workshop. She will return to Pune, India, in December to learn under the Iyengar family. “It is important for me to remain a student and learn,” Blakeney said.

BACKGROUND
Education: BA, Religious Studies, University of Michigan
Advanced Level Teaching Certificate granted by B.K.S. Iyengar, and studied annually in Pune, India, at the Iyengar Institute since 1983
Family: Son, 26
Residence: Ann Arbor
Experience: YNAUS Board, Chair of the Certification Committee
Curriculum Co-chair of 4 National Conventions, among other Committee service
Past the Board President of the IYAMW
Conference Chair for “From the Heartland Regional Conference”, in Chicago, Sept. 2011

INSIGHTS
Guiding principle: Best to work from personal experience, and try to learn, and then improve
Best way to keep competitive edge: Do the best that I can, based on my knowledge and experience
Mentor: B.K.S lyengar himself, his daughter and his son are my main teachers, and the institute in India is my mentorship
How do you motivate people: Share my enthusiasm
Goal yet to be achieved: Continue doing what I’m doing and have people benefit from it
Greatest passions: Continue to be intrigued with Iyengar yoga

TREASURES
Favorite cause: Art
Favorite book: The latest one was “The Time Traveler’s Wife”, I like fiction
Favorite movie: “My Brilliant Career”
Favorite restaurant: Zanzibar
Favorite vacation spot: Anywhere along the Great Lakes
Favorite way to spend free time: Reading
Vehicle: 1997 Audi A4

JUDGMENT CALLS
Best business decision: To start my own classes, rather than work at other programs in town
Worst business decision: Recently ordered way too many T-shirts, (for AASY)
Biggest missed opportunity: Don’t have one
Words that best describes you: Optimistic, but I’m also pragmatic
Advice you’d give yourself 10 years ago: Start saving more for retirement, since I’m self-employed

CONFESSIONS
What keeps you up at night: Nothing, really
Pet peeve: Don’t really have one
What did you eat for breakfast: A bagel with feta cheese and tomato, plus a cappuccino
Guilty pleasure: I can’t think of any, I don’t feel guilty about pleasure; maybe coffee
Person most interested in meeting: George Harrison
First choice for a new career: I won’t mind managing a nonprofit arts organization

by Jane Myers (Ann Arbor News, Friday May 21, 1976)

They came from Beaverton, Oregon. Elm Grove, Illinois. Hendersonville, North Carolina. Chicago. Indianapolis. Washington, D.C.

Men and women from small towns and big cities across the U.S. came to Ann Arbor last week for the privilege of standing on their heads in the basement of the VFW Hall on East Liberty. Could they not, you might wonder, have stood on their respective heads back home in Beaverton and Hendersonville?

Of course they could have. But here it was better. Here, while they were twisting and turning, and stretching their bodies, they could be told by a trim, gray-haired, 58-year old man from Poona, India, that they weren’t trying hard enough, that they were wasting his time, and that they were all “masters of confusion.”

B. K. S. Iyengar is a teacher of yoga. But not just any teacher of yoga. His number of years of experience as a yoga teacher, – 40 – put him in a class by himself.
So does the notability [of some] of his followers. He has given yoga demonstrations for Queen Elizabeth II and her family. For Pope Paul. One of his most devoted students is violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who calls Iyengar “the best violin teacher I ever had.”

Iyengar has made three visits to the U.S. in the past four years, all of them under the sponsorship of the Ann Arbor ‘Y’. How a yoga teacher from Poona, India, happens to be associated with the Ann Arbor ‘Y’ is not really too complicated a story. Mary Palmer, who is wife of William B. Palmer, a U-M professor of economics, began taking yoga lessons at the ‘Y’ in the late 60s to see if the exercises would help reduce pain in her knee joints.

They did, and Mary has been a devoted student and teacher of yoga ever since. When she and her husband were on sabbatical leave in India in the winter of 1969, she traveled to Poona to meet Mr. Iyengar and take lessons at his school there. Out of that experience, a close friendship developed between the Palmers and Iyengar. Mary convinced the ‘Y’ to sponsor his first visit to Ann Arbor in April, 1973, when he gave a lecture demonstration at the Power Center.

His visit this year included a one-week workshop for teachers of yoga, and another week of classes for both students and teachers. (The classes were conducted in the basement of the VFW Hall, where all ‘Y’ classes are held.) After his Ann Arbor stay, he flew to San Francisco for more classes and demonstrations, after which he planned to head for London for more of the same.

Participating in a class under Iyengar’s direction is not for the uncourageous. In fact, it looks downright scary. As he himself explains it, “I go like a tiger”.

Yoga, you see, is not just a body thing. It is a mind thing as well. If you try to talk to Iyengar about the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’ as separate entities, he simply looks you straight in the eye and asks, “How can you separate them? Where does the body stop? Where does the mind begin?” Iyengar is very convincing. The mind and body, of course, cannot be separated.

The trick, as Iyengar explains it, is to keep the body, mind, and soul “harmoniously functioning.” The problem is the following: there is a “human weakness” that stands in the way of this harmoniousness. What is the human weakness?

When you hear Iyengar describe it, you quiver at the horrible thought of ever catching it… he makes it sound like a dread disease that you certainly wouldn’t wish on your best friend, or your worst enemy either.

It’s called “inflated brain” otherwise known as “intoxicated intelligence” or “inflated intelligence”. Nobody leaves one of Iyengar’s classes with “inflated brain”.

“You people don’t want to try… you’re not following me… why should I waste my energy here?… you should have been in the beginner’s class, I don’t know how you choose… look at him, he thinks he is doing it, he thinks he is Superman… you are all masters of confusion! Follow?”

Nobody winces noticeably. When he tells them that “the head and the tailbone should not be shaken,” they try valiantly not to shake the head and tailbone. When he yells out that the “skin of the left back leg should become sharp,” they try to sharpen the skin of the left back leg.

And when he tells them to “feel the inner ankle and outer ankle parallel, from left to right,” and “to move the outer skin of the right hip up and the inner skin of the right hip down,” they try, they really try to move that skin up and down.

Move the skin?
If B. K. S. Iyengar says it’s possible, it’s possible. And he proves it by doing it. If he seems a bit merciless, it’s because he means to. “An inflated intelligence is like an abscess,” he says with conviction.

When he shows a young woman, a beginning student, how to put her hands together behind her back in a position she thought she was not yet advanced enough to attempt, he draws oohs and aahs of amazement from his observers. “How did you do it?,” they ask. “I put her brain in her pocket,” he says with dramatic simplicity.

The atmosphere in an Iyengar class verges on the reverential. It’s all respectful silence, tiptoeing, whispers. And now and then, a low chorus of groans when he gives permission to end a difficult position.

What is it all about?
“The practice of yoga makes the mind free from the shackles of the body,” Iyengar explains. “What is the use of intelligence in an unhealthy body?” “You can release your mind to think of a higher life. You can open the gate of your own soul.” “Through yoga you can know what the self is.” At 58, Iyengar has no plans to sit in the shade in Poona, and sip tea.

“The more I work, the more I feel the energy pouring in,” he says with a smile. “I want to practice yoga until my last consciousness.“