I started practicing yoga in 1995, in the health club across the street from the apartment complex where I lived. A free membership to the health club was included with our rental and, given that I’m not really a weight-lifting type of person, but still wanted to take advantage of a free membership, I opted to try out the yoga classes offered. Long story short, even though the soundtrack to our classes included heavy weights being dropped and random basketballs being hit against walls somewhere in the surrounding vicinity, I still fell in love with yoga.
My Early Yoga Career
Fast forward a few years when I decided to make a life transition away from the corporate (automotive industry) world but wasn’t quite sure what my next step should be. I headed off to work at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in New York where I immersed myself in the world of yoga, meditation, mindfulness and all things holistic for 8 glorious months. I loved it so much that I went back the following year for another month to do my (first) Yoga Teacher Training. I then headed back home to Michigan and began my new career as a yoga instructor. This was 1998, right as yoga exploded in popularity. Mind you, there were still very few yoga studios at that point, and all the classes I taught were either in high school gyms or dance studios, but they were popular. (I was the only yoga teacher in my small town at the time.) My classes were Hatha style–slow, mindful and peaceful. I played relaxing music in the background, and everyone showed up in sweatpants and t-shirts.
Yoga Gets Faster, Harder, Hotter and Louder
In 2000 I moved to Ann Arbor. While every single yoga studio in town taught Iyengar yoga at that time, I was being introduced through yoga teacher friends to a new style of yoga popular in the Metro Detroit area: Vinyasa. It was faster, harder, hotter and louder. Lots of Sun Salutations, quick sequences, blaring pop music and sweaty bodies wearing the latest yoga fashions, piled into a 90+ degree heated room like a can of sardines. For a while it was a fun diversion, and I even did a second Yoga Teacher Training in this style, but I eventually realized that the way I felt after classes–exhausted and ‘jangly-nerved’–was not suiting me. I took my own style of Vinyasa yoga back to Ann Arbor (I was the very first yoga instructor to teach Vinyasa in Ann Arbor–really!): a more mellow, mindful version in a warm– not hot–space. That’s when I opened The Yoga Room, my own private yoga studio in the basement of my first house, which now is in its second location in a beautiful cottage-like setting behind my current house.
A Return to Old-School Yoga
In the past 25 years, my classes have returned to a more mellow and mindful style, and while I do still teach my own, more-balanced, Vinyasa style to some of my private yoga clients, I mostly teach Hatha yoga again. In my online Zoom courses and private sessions, we focus on muscle and bone-strengthening, flexibility and mobility and, perhaps most importantly, calming our nervous systems and minds. While there are a plethora of yoga studios out there still teaching the faster, harder, hotter and louder styles of yoga, I just don’t think that’s what people really need in this day and age. We already get our butts kicked enough by the world. We are over-stimulated, over-worked, and over-stressed. What we need in a yoga class is a place to shut out external stimuli, turn our focus inward, and nourish our bodies and minds. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if more people practiced old-school yoga, the world would be a better place. Do you agree? Send me a note and let me know!
If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also enjoy my blog post Why Being an HSP Makes Me a Pretty Awesome Yoga Teacher.
My Favorite *New* Plant-Based Recipes for Veganuary 2025