Month: February 2025

Fri, 12/20/2024 – 7:42am

“Today, yoga is practiced practically everywhere in America, with a wide range of approaches, philosophies, studios, and styles. But in the early 1970s, this endeavor, originally from India, was mostly unknown in our country. B.K.S. Iyengar’s visit to Ann Arbor from Pune, India in 1973 changed all that. Sponsored by the Ann Arbor Y and held at the Power Center, the series of public classes were the first the now-famous yoga master taught in North America. People came from across the U.S. for an opportunity to learn from him. The success of his visit sparked a special relationship between Iyengar and Ann Arbor which continued throughout his life.” – Filmmakers Donald Harrison & Jeanne Hodesh

Transcript

• [00:00:07] SUE SALANIUK: Iyengar yoga cannot be summed up into common sentences.
• [00:00:12] SALLY RUTZKY: It’s yoga as taught by B.K.S. Iyengar.
• [00:00:17] CINDY NEAM: It’s more than just an exercise. It’s learning about your body. It’s creating change in your body.
• [00:00:26] SUE SALANIUK: It’s very precise. There’s a lot of detail.
• [00:00:33] DAVID UFER: He would never call it Iyengar yoga, he really resisted that. Yoga is yoga.
• [00:00:39] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yoga is a union of the body with the mind, mind with the soul.
• [00:00:53] SALLY RUTZKY: The first thing about him that you noticed was his energy. It’s like he glowed. He was so alive.
• [00:01:05] DAVID UFER: 1973, of course, were the first public classes, and they were taught in Ann Arbor and then that was really the gateway to having him teach public classes in Chicago and public classes in San Francisco and Boston. It really came through Ann Arbor in 1973.
• [00:01:21] TONI REESE: I was just a novice. I was only six months along when I first came in contact with Mr. Iyengar in 73. Oh I was just floored. He was so dynamic. I thought that Mr. Iyengar was performing a miracle. It was miraculous.
• [00:01:44] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Balancing the body on our own shoulders. It’s very interesting to know that the art of yoga is not only meant to keep oneself healthy, but to have to keep the body light. That’s why yogis have given lots of postures to lighten the weight of their bodies.
• [00:02:10] DAVID UFER: Through a gentleman by the name of Yehudi Menuhin who at the time was one of the, if not, the foremost violin players in the world. He had Iyengar come to Europe and teach classes in Europe before Iyengar ever came to the States. Mr. Menuhin had been to Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor a number of times, and it was one of the last visits of Yehudi Menuhin in Ann Arbor when Mary Palmer and Bill Palmer, who were significant figures in the University of Michigan Musical Society, encountered Yehudi Menuhin and Mary was very interested in the practice of yoga. Yehudi Menuhin wrote Mary a personal letter of recommendation and that’s what ignited her interest to, at her age, to fly to the other side of the world and begin taking classes with B.K.S. Iyengar.
• [00:03:13] SALLY RUTZKY: When Mary Palmer first started teaching Iyengar yoga, she taught out of his book, Light on Yoga.
• [00:03:19] DAVID UFER: That book, if you took the top ten books on yoga in the world, Light on Yoga has outsold the top other ten books. It’s a seminal text on the practice of yoga, asanas and pranayamas.
• [00:03:36] B.K.S. IYENGAR: These asanas are meant to conquer the known so that the known dissolves in the unknown.
• [00:03:45] TOM HUNTZICKER: It was almost entirely two of the Ann Arbor Y yoga teachers. That would be Mary Palmer and Priscilla Neel. I believe that they had already been to India studying under Mr. Iyengar and they decided at some point that he should be coming to United States and specifically to Ann Arbor and sponsored by the Ann Arbor Y.
• [00:04:16] SUE SALANIUK: Yes, they were the grand old dames. They were faculty women in the old sense and very strong personalities and they were a product of their generations.
• [00:04:31] TOM HUNTZICKER: Mary and Priscilla invited me to Mary’s house. This is the Palmer house, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright house. They proposed this to me, and they wanted the Ann Arbor Y to sponsor his trip to Ann Arbor for a series of classes and a demonstration, and they wanted this to occur at the Power Center on the U of M campus. They were very persuasive, very insistent, but in the nicest way. I actually knew that I was out of my element when I was with them. I knew that this was going to happen and basically they were just waiting for me to say yes to this.
• [00:05:27] SUE SALANIUK: The Ann Arbor Y was very supportive in sponsoring him to come to the United States, and it just took off from there.
• [00:05:36] TOM HUNTZICKER: There was a great deal of excitement. This was for yoga practitioners, and particularly for Iyengar yoga practitioners, this was a huge deal. This was a huge deal. He was very forceful, very nice person, great smile, very demanding in his classroom setting. Our classes that week were very successful, and there were people coming from all over the United States to study with him. He put on a great demonstration at the Power Center. We had just enough people attending to make sure that financially it worked.
• [00:06:19] SUE SALANIUK: Mr. Iyengar, after that first visit to the United States, he had come to the United States before, but it just didn’t click. This was like planting a seed in a fertile ground.
• [00:06:32] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Because when the body and the mind both are released from the tension, there is ultimate freedom.
• [00:06:40] DAVID UFER: In 1976, The Ann Arbor Y developed the opportunity for Mr. Iyengar to do a film. It’s an hour long film. It’s called Ultimate Freedom, and it was done in one of the University of Michigan audio studios downtown. We heard years later that he really felt that that was one of the, if not the best film that he put together, and it’s remarkable.
• [00:07:03] B.K.S. IYENGAR: You all read the title of the film, The Ultimate Freedom. Ultimate freedom means complete freedom in body, in mind, and in the self itself.
• [00:07:25] DAVID UFER: He had a keen sense in Ann Arbor that people were pretty much living in their front brains and had this all figured out. He took it to us. When I say that to this day, Adho Mukha Svanasana the downward-facing dog, after fifty years of practice, I’m still having a real difficult time getting my heel to the floor. He got my heel to the floor.
• [00:07:53] SUE SALANIUK: Oh the first few times when he was here in Ann Arbor, nerve racking because the teachers had built up his persona to this very exacting teacher who would be very verbal if you didn’t understand what he was trying to convey or wasn’t coming through.
• [00:08:19] SALLY RUTZKY: He was not a perfectionist. That’s easy because Iyengar yoga is very much, how is the form? Does it look like the right shape? Is your arm and your elbow extended enough? We can translate that into thinking of it as a perfectionism. But it really isn’t. What he wanted us was to do the best we could. Doing the best you can is doable. It’s just the best you can in that particular minute and then the next one. That’s all it is. Then can you do your best the next minute? But perfectionism is really never doable and self defeating.
• [00:09:00] CINDY NEAM: My overall impression of him, both from what I observed and then stories I heard from my mom, I think he’s a very or was a very caring person. I think he had a lot of knowledge to impart and I think that it was his way of getting across the point that he was trying to make. I know a lot of people didn’t necessarily take it the right way. I know that people cried, and I think some people weren’t comfortable with that. My impression was always that his intention was very good and that he just wanted to share what he knew as deeply as possible.
• [00:09:48] SALLY RUTZKY: He just was so full of wanting to convey what he knew to the rest of us. I remember the feeling of walking out of class where I was going to a business lunch and I was so high, I thought I could fly to the moon. I thought, I don’t need fried food, although I still eat it. I don’t need alcohol, that I did give up eventually. I could just do yoga, and I feel better than any of them.
• [00:10:20] J. P. MCCARTHY: We welcome yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar to Focus. Welcome, sir.
• [00:10:26] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Thank you very much, sir.
• [00:10:27] J. P. MCCARTHY: Not everyone understands the difference between yoga and yogi. Be kind enough to enlighten us master.
• [00:10:36] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yoga is a science, art, and philosophy of developing the body and mind to the level of the self so that the person is blended very well, both in his head and heart. That is yoga. One who practices that is a yogi.
• [00:11:00] J. P. MCCARTHY: Is a yogi.
• [00:11:01] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yes.
• [00:11:01] DAVID UFER: How can we really delve into who we are without his credo? The Ann Arbor Y program for years and years, we had the same quote of his on the top of the yoga page, and it had everything to do with “From freedom of the body comes freedom of the mind and then ultimate freedom.”
• [00:11:21] SUE SALANIUK: Iyengar yoga took off here through serendipity. Yoga was unknown back then. It was just nothing and probably if you mentioned yoga to people, this is that weird hippie stuff. But Ann Arbor has often been a touch point for that sort of activity or that sort of exploration.
• [00:11:45] TOM HUNTZICKER: Well, I think Ann Arbor was probably a perfect match for this. You had teachers who were here, who were really committed to this method, and there are a lot of people in Ann Arbor then, and now, who are open just by the student population that we had at the Y for our classes, we couldn’t find space, really, for all the classes that we could have taught at that point in time.
• [00:12:19] CINDY NEAM: The Parker Room, that is the yoga place at the old Ann Arbor Y, brought together a group of people who started experimenting with the knowledge that they were learning. There just seemed to be this group of people that came together and it was like a laboratory of learning. I don’t know. It just felt like something was really going on that was drawing people in.
• [00:12:45] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Each and every pores of my skin, each and every part of my body, each and every raise of my intelligence has to work penetrating from the extreme end of my foot to the extreme end of the top of my skull. That is known as ultimate freedom, where there is without any obstruction, my intellect can penetrate.
• [00:13:15] SUE SALANIUK: There has been a Iyengar Yoga Convention in the United States since the early mid 80s. That first one was in San Francisco. They occur every three years to this day. One day, Laurie Blakeney, we were having coffee at a coffee shop downtown and she said, shall we put on the next convention? I said, sure, why not?
• [00:13:43] DAVID UFER: In 1993, Ann Arbor hosted the Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States conference of teachers from all over and that was extremely well received.
• [00:14:00] TONI REESE: People came – from internationally came. The Y wasn’t large enough to accommodate. We used a lot of the university buildings. Different sports venues.
• [00:14:13] SUE SALANIUK: We had something like 1,500 students 15, 18, something like that. Ann Arbor is small population wise compared to some place like San Francisco, but it’s the atmosphere here in Ann Arbor. It’s the university atmosphere and the fact that Iyengar yoga, this was the sprout where it all started to come from. The international community had that connection to Ann Arbor.
• [00:14:45] FEMALE_1: You have been in Ann Arbor for how many days now?
• [00:14:48] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Since four days I’m here.
• [00:14:50] FEMALE_1: Now, are you conducting classes?
• [00:14:52] B.K.S. IYENGAR: I’m helping the teachers here so that they can teach a little better than what they were teaching.
• [00:14:58] FEMALE_1: This is at the Y.
• [00:14:59] B.K.S. IYENGAR: All over America. What I’m doing, not only in Y, but in all other places.
• [00:15:04] FEMALE_1: But usually you stay right in India. Now, is it Pune?
• [00:15:07] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yes, I stay mostly in India.
• [00:15:11] FEMALE_1: Disciples, shall we call them. Could come.
• [00:15:14] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yes, they come in groups. Every two months, every three months.
• [00:15:19] TONI REESE: I went to the Iyengar Institute three times over the years and took classes from Mr. Iyengar. We called him Mr. Iyengar. Now, he’s called Guruji and, I guess, the first two times, he was the sole teacher. The last time I went, Geeta his daughter, Geeta Iyengar was the teacher.
• [00:15:42] SALLY RUTZKY: Mary got us to go to India, and that was another life changing event. It’s not the place I would have wanted to go. If you said, go someplace you want to see the scenery, I would have gone to the Galapagos Islands and looked at tortoises. But instead, I went to India and I learned how to stand on my head.
• [00:16:05] SUE SALANIUK: Back then, they did intensives in India, where somebody and in this case, Laurie Blakeney, who is our senior teacher in town, had sponsored, had organized this intensive. The Ann Arbor Y teachers had gone to one other one before, and then I was on this one. I think it was three weeks in India and your group was the main group being taught. And I ended up going, I should say, only twelve times. Many of the senior teachers are still going every year.
• [00:16:38] B.K.S. IYENGAR: This is Yoga Mudrasana here, when the head is bent, the heel compresses the abdominal organs and the compression of the abdominal organs makes the blood to circulate more in those areas. When you come up from that position, that’s how those organs are kept healthy. Garbha Pindasana or the fetus in the womb.
• [00:17:04] CINDY NEAM: My mom was Laura Roberts, and I believe, took her first Iyengar yoga class in 1976, and she had been searching for a way to help with her back pain. I think from the very first class that she took, she instantly knew that this was a good thing. She really immersed herself in classes and then began teaching classes. She traveled to India three times to study with Mr. Iyengar and as part of doing the yoga, she created a yoga outfit for herself, which became the leg band yoga shorts and became the company Yogaware. Without her really planning it, she created this clothing and prop company. She went from being the housewife who had activities but basically was a housewife and didn’t have something that was really compelling to her to really, I think, within a very short time period, she’s riding her bike. She’s taking all these classes. She’s meeting all these people and, there were yoga potlucks, and yoga camp in the summers, and she had this group of friends that, it always seemed like they were doing something. All of a sudden, she had this whole community. She had a support system in something that was creating health, creating abilities that she didn’t have before.
• [00:18:46] B.K.S. IYENGAR: How I am synchronizing the movement with the breath.
• [00:19:07] SUE SALANIUK: The Ann Arbor yoga community has always been a little unique from my observations and experience. We’ve always been very supportive of each other, I think in part because that all started from that single trunk, the Ann Arbor Y, and the teachers being so close and connected, and connected to Mr. Iyengar and Geeta. Then as it became a nice career choice to spread out, we all still supported each other.
• [00:19:43] CINDY NEAM: One of the wonderful things about Iyengar yoga in Ann Arbor has been the fact that there is a multitude of teachers and studios, and you get all those different perspectives.
• [00:19:53] DAVID UFER: We were just incredibly fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, to be learning from those first generation of teachers, and that was Mary and Priscilla and Susie and Robert Antoszczyk and Barbara Linderman.
• [00:20:08] SUE SALANIUK: When I started my studio, I could fill classes very easily. It was a fun idea to be able to start your own studio and be a little bit more in control of what’s happening. Laurie started her studio. Karen and David Ufer started their studio Yoga Focus. Donna Pointer was teaching in various other places. It just began to spread out.
• [00:20:33] B.K.S. IYENGAR: You can see me when I’m doing that each and every portion of my body is extended in various directions keeping contact with myself.
• [00:20:50] SUE SALANIUK: He was always very connected to the Ann Arbor Y, very grateful because of their sponsorship.
• [00:20:56] SALLY RUTZKY: He was very appreciative of Mary Palmer for his whole life. Because she was the one who first brought him here where it did catch on. He had been to other places in the U. S. and given demonstrations, but they didn’t develop students, and he wanted students. I actually think of it as Ann Arbor just had this remarkable group of people who were able to think of Iyengar yoga as a way to live your life.
• [00:21:31] DAVID UFER: He quite often would refer to Ann Arbor as his home away from home when it came to yoga in America.
• [00:21:39] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Let this foundation lead you to the highest level of what I say, purity and paternity. Thank you very much.

Who: Laurie Blekeney

When: November 6, 2023

Transcript

• ELIZABETH SMITH: Hi. This is Elizabeth and Amy and in this episode AADL Talks to Laurie Blakeney, founder of the Ann Arbor School of Yoga. Laurie came to Ann Arbor in 1971 to study at the University of Michigan. Intent on running her own business, she was a piano technician and tuner for 25 years and during that period she also studied and taught yoga. Laurie has studied with B.K.S. Iyengar and has brought the Iyengar method to thousands of students over the years. Thank you so much for coming, Laurie.
• LAURIE BLAKENEY: You’re welcome.
• ES: We usually like to just ask right off the bat, what brought you to Ann Arbor?
• LB: I came to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan Residential College in 1971. Having been born in Pontiac, MI, it wasn’t much of a trip to come to Ann Arbor.
• ES: What did you study at the Residential College?
• LB: In the 70s, so we studied a lot of stuff at the College. [LAUGHTER]
• AMY CANTU: I was there in the 80s, so I understand what you mean.
• ES: You were doing piano tuning then, is that correct?
• LB: No, what happened was after my first year at the Residential College. I didn’t know what I wanted to major-in ,and all of that. I just stopped going to the College, and I stayed in Ann Arbor. At first, I waited tables for seven years.
• AC: Oh, where?
• LB: The Gandy Dancer.
• AC: Oh, ok. Good tips!
• LB: It was at the time the biggest fanciest restaurant in town. I eventually decided I wanted to be my own boss. I had already started taking yoga classes. Since I had always played piano as a kid, I thought maybe I could be a piano technician and run my own business, run my own schedule. I enrolled in a piano technology course in Cleveland, Ohio, and then came back when finished.
• ES: How long did you work as a piano tuner?
• LB: 25 or 30 years. It was a long time.
• AC: You were doing it simultaneous with…
• LB: At first. I was tuning pianos and also working on them. I had a rebuilding shop, so I would collect old pianos, tear them down, refurbish them, and sell them. There was a place on Washington called 16 Hands. I was in there with that collective of craftsmen.
• AC: Really? Did you have a shop in there then or…?
• LB: I had a workshop in there.
• AC: I remember 16 Hands.
• LB: They had a storefront, but before that, they had a collective of just workspaces that people used.
• AC: You did that for, you say 25 years. What was it like having your own business at that time in Ann Arbor?
• LB: There were a lot of pianos. They need tuning once, or twice a year, and there were not that many piano tuners in Ann Arbor at the time. And certainly there were no women. It wasn’t big money, but I had a skill that I could market, and control of my own schedule.
• AC: Eventually, you were attracted to studying yoga. Can you tell us how you became involved with yoga?
• LB: When I came back to Ann Arbor, after my freshman year — I probably went home for the summer. I don’t really remember what I did that summer — all my friends were in school still. I had lots of free time during the day because I worked nights. I happened to live a couple blocks from the Ann Arbor Y, and looked over their class offerings. The Y were just starting the Iyengar yoga program in the early 70s. I just took classes two, three times a week during the day.
• AC: Tell us a little bit about the history of Iyengar yoga in Ann Arbor. Can you talk about B.K.S. Iyengar’s visit and how you became acquainted with it?
• LB: Well, there was yoga teacher at the Y who was planning to move, or retire,… She decided that two of her students, these mature ladies who were professor wives, should take over the yoga program. And said, “By the way, here’s a new book. It’s called ‘Light on Yoga.’ You should just teach from this book.” They were 15-20 years older than me. I wasn’t too involved in the initial invitation and all of that. As requested the two women started teaching out of ‘Light on Yoga’, and one of them — a very famous lady, Mary Palmer; lived in the Frank Lloyd Wright house. She commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to do her house.
• AC: We don’t all get to do that.
• LB: People don’t all get to do that. So Mary Palmer decided to write the guy who wrote this book she was teaching from, and ask him if she could become his student. He said, “Well, I’m going to be teaching in the UK. If you want to come over and meet me then, you can do that.” She had the resources to do so. This part is hearsay — I was around, but I wasn’t privy. She went and then came back. The report was that he liked her as a student. She had asked him, “Can you come teach our group?” The first couple of times — he came like three or four times before he started going everywhere else — the first couple of times I wasn’t included because I was just the small hippie who was a college dropout. One of the times he taught a bunch of classes at the VFW hall, in the basement of what used to be Seva, and now is Jerusalem Garden. I was part of that group of students. They group started to accept me because I kept coming. It worked out great. Then, Mr. Iyengar became world famous. There were big conventions, and I started going to India in 1983 to study with him.
• AC: You first met him in, what would you say roughly, what would be the year?
• LB: Maybe ’72 or ’73.
• AC: Were you immediately taken with him? What was he like?
• LB: The reason I was interested in yoga was I had read ‘Siddhartha’ in high school. And read ‘The Autobiography of a Yogi’. And John Lennon did yoga, and so did George Harrison, my favorite. So I thought, OK, I’ll try yoga. Mr. Iyengar was very energetic, very charismatic, pretty proper, formal gentleman, and very articulate in his teaching. Really precise, even though English was his fourth language, not his native tongue at all. But he was really invested in getting people interested in yoga. He was full of fire.
• ES: When did you begin to teach? What was the transition like from student to teacher for you?
• LB: There was another woman who was part of that initial group. There were about four of them at the Ann Arbor Y, and this woman’s name was Barbara Linderman*. She taught her own small program in the basement of the Friends Center, on Hill Street. I was her student, but also a student at the Y. I just went wherever I could afford. Later, someone at the Ann Arbor Continuing Ed program wanted a yoga teacher, and they called Barbara. Barbara said, I have a student I think would be good. When she asked me, I said to her, “I can’t do that. I’m not a teacher. I don’t want to do that.” She responded, “Well if you don’t do it, somebody with less talent will.”
• AC: Ok. That’s motivation.
• LB: I said, “Will you help me?” She responded, “Whatever you need.” For a long time, I just did taught Continuing Ed classes at Clague Junior High for six, seven years, a couple of nights a week.
• AC: Did you take to it right away?
• LB: Well, people kept coming, so…
• AC: You knew you were doing something right.
• LB: I believe that it’s a very mechanical, and precise, subject. If you understand the technicalities, and have good communication skills, you would — I don’t know why they kept coming. I don’t know. [LAUGHTER]
• AC: Just to be clear did you practice a different type of yoga before Iyengar, or was your introduction to yoga right at the same time? I wasn’t entirely clear on that.
• LB: I never really had much of a practice in another method, but because I didn’t have much money, I did look around for whatever was available. Once I did take some classes — you know where a Big City, Small World bakery is? Is that how it is?
• AC: Yeah.
• LB: Or is it a Big World, Small City?
• AC: It’s Big City, Small World.
• LB: There was a yoga school there, and it was not Iyengar Yoga. I went once or twice and thought, “No, thank you. I like what they do with at the Y. I’m going to stick with that.” It was pretty immediate. It was luck, just chance.
• AC: Right place at the right time.
• ES: Did you feel like there was a cultural movement in Ann Arbor towards yoga, or was it a new thing? Was it everywhere? What was the mindset like at the time?
• LB: Well, I don’t know that I had a good pulse on the city. I was pretty young, and I was jin my own age group. But I don’t think that it was hugely popular. I think that it was the beginning of Mr. Iyengar coming to the US, and being credited for popularizing yoga. Again, this brilliant woman was Priscilla Neel and her friend Mary Palmer who hooked up with B. K. S. Iyengar because they just wrote him and asked, “Can we become your students?”
• AC: That’s really something. It’s interesting, too that you’ve mentioned a couple of times you were the hippie girl, and you were in the Residential College. Ann Arbor had that reputation at the time.
• LB: That was definitely there — it was definitely an alternative… I mean, I came from a factory city. I wasn’t even going to college and still wanted to live here.
• AC: That says something, but Mary Palmer was not part of that particular culture.
• LB: No. She was the professor’s wife, a sophisticated lady. There was a lot to that that I probably didn’t know much about.
• ES: When did you get your own yoga studio?
• LB: It was a long time comming. The same woman, Barbara Linderman, who recruited me for the Parks and Rec or Continuing Ed program, was about to take a Sabbatical. She had her own program at the Friends Center and said,” Will you cover me while I’m gone?” I responded, “It’s a lot of work and time. She then said, “Yeah, and you get paid per student, instead of per hour.” At the time I was probably making eight dollars an hour or so. She said, “I’m quite sure you could use the pay.” She was quite convincing, and kept pushing me through. So when she returned home, she asked, “What are you going to do now?” I answered, “I don’t know what I’ll do.” She then asked, “Well why don’t you look around for a school, or a church basement, to rent and run your own program?” That was early ’80s, maybe late ’70s.
• AC: At that time were you still tuning pianos?
• LB: Primarily.
• AC: Did you tune all day long?
• LB: All day long and as many appointments as I could get.
• AC: Then did you teach mostly at night?
• LB: Always late, late afternoon and night.
• AC: Only at night.
• LB: Then after Barbara returned home and took back her program, I began teaching at the Rudolf Steiner School, on Newport Road and was there for a decade. Tuesday and Thursday nights, and one Saturday a month they rented me their gym.
• ES: How did your approach to teaching change throughout your time teaching, and how did it evolve?
• LB: Well, I evolved. As I grew and , it meaning different things to me. Making more sense. I can’t say any big thing happened. However, there was an Indian teacher from California who was also in the group in the UK. His name was Ramanand Patel and he came to Ann Arbor frequently to teach us. We became friends, and he helped push me along,. Then I began traveling to India to study at the Institute, and that’s when things really changed. I have ben traveling there once a year ever since ’83 ’till COVID.
• ES: Has it resumed at all, since COVID or is it still on pause?
• LB: No, it resumed last year. It changed. Teaching yoga over Zoom is what COVID brought to us all.
• AC: How’s it working? How do you like that?
• LB: Well, I’m really grateful for all the students who are not in town, and still want to take class on Zoom with me. But I prefer having actual bodies in the room with me. It’s easier to see what they’re doing. It’s easier to read what they’re receiving. You can see their eyes, and hear their breath. On Zoom, they’re a inside postage stamp on my laptop.
• AC: That’d be hard.
• LB: It’s harder.
• AC: So I have a question for you. I’m curious about how Iyengar yoga has changed over the years. Is it your perspective that you have continued to refine basic principles or do you feel that it has evolved and you’ve been able to bring your own perspective to it? How do you view that?
• LB: I think there are hundreds of people around the world,thousands teaching Iyengar Yoga. We have a standardized method. The use of props, and the use of precision, and some other things that are recognizable. But they’re all individual people teaching their students. What is particular to me, is the use of metaphor. I use a lot of imagery. I finally did go back to college, and received a degree in comparative religion. The spiritual aspect of it started to evolve more and more for me, but it started from “Siddhartha”, in high school. Not everybody has quite that same bent. Some people are much more interested in the therapy aspects of it, and some people are much more athletic than I. But we all age and keep growing. It feels to me that Ann Arbor, as a whole, was always interested in the philosophy of yoga. Before Mr. Iyengar wrote any of his books on philosophy, he had taught us here in Ann Arbor, and recommended yoga philosophy books for us to study. We then formed a group in order to study beyond just doing postures. We did that at the Y. Sat in a little conference room at the Y, and we read philosophy books and discussed them with each other. Don’t believe that was there in the beginning at some other communities around the country.
• AC: You’ve actually helped students become teachers, and you’ve seen a lot of teachers over the course of your career. What would you say is something that you bring specifically to the practice? Do you bring music? Does the piano factor in?
• LB: I don’t bring a piano into the school [LAUGHTER], but I do think about rhythm and I do think about harmony, and I do think about people trying to have a melodic flow with themselves, and not be too jerky.
• LB: You have to practice. I’m an amateur classical piano player, and you got to play your scales, and you got to practice your technique before you have much music. There’s a lot of opportunity to draw parallels between the practice of any art form. I consider yoga an art form more than a physical activity.
• ES: Can you talk a little bit about the different locations where your studio was over the years?
• LB: I taught in the basement of the Friends Center ,when Barbara was on Sabbatical. Then I taught in the gym of the Rudolf Steiner School for a long time. They then had a change and they wanted their gym back.So I rented a place for another decade or so on Fourth Avenue. Then I rented my place on West Huron. But I also taught other places. I taught at Wayne State University driving over to Detroit 2-3 days a week. I had other classes, as well, at the Gross Pointe War Memorial.and the Senior Citizens home in downtown Detroit. There’s been a bunch of places.
• AC: How many students do you believe you’ve had over the course of your career?
• LB: When I was on Fourth Avenue other types of yoga hadn’t quite arrived in Ann Arbor. So I had a lot of students. There were seven Iyengar studios in town then, but people had a lot of students. Then when other styles of yoga became equally popular, the Iyengar studios lost new people. Because people would land somewhere else and like where they landed. I think still now I’m probably seeing 100 people a week. Earlier, it might have been more 150 or 175 people a week.
• AC: Wow!
• LB: Most weeks of the year.
• ES: You’ve had two businesses? How has owning a business in Ann Arbor changed over the years?
• LB: Well, I miss the Ann Arbor News. That was always a way to connect with the community. I’ve always found advertising to be weird. I’m not much for social media, but that is where advertising has fallen. I tend to rely on word of mouth. I also have a website. If folks Google yoga, they’re going to find me. But it used to be that you could advertise yourself, and people would learn about you that way. I don’t think it’s just Ann Arbor. I believe everybody gets business off their website.
• AC: You have a couple of other teachers that work with you. Do you have help in the studio with social media, and some other forms of communication?
• LB: Well, I have a guy who helps me with the website occasionally, but he hasn’t done much for a long time. The school is not on social media at all. Because I don’t want to bother with it.
• AC: Don’t want to deal with it?
• LB: The other two teachers I have are both certified. There’s a national certification, or global certification process in Iyengar yoga. The two people who also teach at my school are certified. But I do all the gardening, the cleaning, the accounting, and all the website stuff. It’s all me.
• AC: Can you talk a little bit about the national conventions?
• LB: Well, there was one — in ’93, I’m pretty sure — and I was instrumental in it being held in Ann Arbor… We had a really good team of people organize it. Most of the classes were held at the athletic campus, the near one. Where Fingerle’s used to be. Then we did a wonderful performance at the Power Center, called “Warrior in the Moon.” Also a local storyteller tell mythology, a group of Indian dancers – – beautiful girls with their gestures, their dresses, and all. And a group of yogis who were doing choreographic demonstrations. It was really quite a beautiful program. Mr. Iyengar sat in the front row, and he got up on stage afterwards, then said, “You should take it on the road!”
• LB: So we had a great time hosting him There were probably 1,000 people attending the convention.
• AC: Wow! This was in the 90s?
• LB: ’93, I think.
• ES: Ann Arbor has changed a lot in the past 50 years. Architecture, politics, social changes. Does anything stand out to you?
• LB: It’s way more chi-chi then when I first moved here. Then, it was the funky place to go, and that’s not true anymore.
• AC: How do you feel about that? It’s hard to afford to live here for one thing.
• LB: It’s horrible that people can’t afford to live here. I live near downtown. I rented a house for a long time, and then bought it from my landlords, and paid it off in the early 90s. So I’m really lucky. But that’s sad to me that people who don’t have extreme means can’t really afford to be residents in our city.
• AC: What are you most proud of?
• LB: I’m most proud of facilitating people having yoga in their life. It’s a thing that’s important to people. So whenever I get a little tired, or start thinking it’s close to retirement, I see these people really enjoy coming to their yoga school. I’m proud of that. I believe it’s an important thing to have in your life, and I’ve introduced it to a lot of people.
• AC: You don’t plan to retire anytime soon, do you?
• LB: I turned 70, this year, so I should think about it. [LAUGHTER] It’s expensive to run my school, the lease is very high, although I have a great landlord who is very responsible. I don’t have any complaints about that. But he’s a businessman, and it’s a prime piece of real estate. Currently, it’s not really a money-maker.
• AC: It’s for the love of it.
• LB: I enjoy my job, and I’ve spent a lot of effort creating it. I’ve always wanted to be my own boss. I always have been my own boss. If I continue tol want to work, I want to work there. It’s beautiful. It’s really a lovely yoga school.
• AC: It’s a really nice studio.
• LB: It feels as though we’re doing something spiritual in that room. We’re doing something necessary for ourselves. We’re exploring who we are, and there’s a community of people doing it. Now I’m offering all the classes on Zoom, so people can see the recordings. I’m still in the classroom, but people are out in the hallway chatting up each other, enjoying each other’s company, and that’s nice. It’s the fellowship of any spiritual activity. People enjoy it with other people. Although you’re supposed to practice a lot on your own, I wish they did so, and I think many do. But it’s so fun to do it with a teacher, with other people, and recognize you’re not alone in it.
• ES: Thank you, Laurie.
• LB: You’re welcome.
• AC: Thank you very much for coming in.
• LB: My pleasure. [MUSIC]
• AC: AADL Talks two is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.

* Barbara Linderman was my first yoga instructor. Laurie then became my instructor while Barbara was on sabbatical.