Ann Arbor District Library Interview

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.