“Yoga In ‘Storyville,’ Yoga In The Brothel”

Ruminant With A View

“[Jelly Roll] Morton was, along with Tony Jackson, one of the best regarded pianists in the Storyville District early in the 20th century. At the age of 14, he began working as a piano player in a brothel (or as it was referred to then, a sporting house.) While working there, he was living with his religious church-going great-grandmother and had her convinced that he worked in a barrel factory. Morton’s grandmother eventually found out that he was playing jazz in a local brothel, and subsequently kicked him out of her house. ‘When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house. . . . She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall, but I just couldn’t put it behind me.’”

—from Wikipedia

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—5/3/10—One of my Yoga students tells me that Mercury’s in retrograde. I, on the other hand, believe there’s a planet named something akin to “Snit,” and it’s hit the fan. What a whopper of a week—Nay, year! —I’ve had thus far, and it’s only May!

Last Monday, I learned I must soon undergo spinal fusion surgery and, thus, stop teaching Yoga (and taking Level III Iyengar Yoga classes), until well after the procedure (itself, no walk in the park, I assure you). With luck and the care of a pair of fine neurosurgeons (one, a Yogi, himself), I should be back on my Yoga mat by mid-July . . . in some fashion.

Meanwhile, at work—or, rather, at the brothel of a gym where I have taught Yoga for nigh onto three years—things in general have come to an ugly pass, and the Snit [sic] hit the Fan on the selfsame day as my neurosurgeon began scheduling my surgery.

My boss, the gym owner, a man with all the subtlety of approach (and intelligence) of a Cruise Missile, has been sexually harassing me for some six months, despite all my attempts to head him off at the pass without some sort of final confrontation.

It’s above my figurative pay grade, however, to jolly along a man determined to degrade a female employee, I have found. In his mind, sex with me on the Yoga room floor was a win-win proposition, my marriage and ethics be damned. And I compounded the problem by trying to reason with The Boss, when all This Boss would ever understand was power.

Would that I could have, literally, kicked his ass.

I’ve been teaching Yoga in a decrepit, windowless, airless room, with a leaking ceiling and a shattered floor, right between a noisome loo and beneath a combat classroom, supplying my own furniture, Kleenex, space heaters, print-outs, posters and many Yoga props, for years. My pay came in at whimsical intervals, in envelopes where I might be shorted three dollars, or 80, and I often had to resort to lurking at the gym’s front desk, ambushing the owner, and demanding payment for classes taught. I pushed for much else on behalf of my students (and some 200, I estimate, have come through my classes) in vain.

The reality was, and still is, that the gym owner—let’s call him “Dick”—envisions Yoga as just another gym class, like Zumba, Israeli Martial Arts (KAK), or pole-dancing. Often, Yoga classes at the gym are drowned out by several different CD’s of head-exploding music emanating, simultaneously, from the Spin, Martial Arts and whatever’s going on upstairs (Bowling? Log-Hurling? Sumo Wrestling? Dwarf Tossing?) classes.

Shower water from the showers upstairs pours into the Yoga room on occasion. The floors were cleaned only when I could work up the energy or disgust to Swiffer them, myself. And I had to beg for our blankets to be washed by the gym, after years of schlepping them home and washing them in batches of three—all that the family washer could handle.

So . . . why in God’s name did I stay?

This past Wednesday, after teaching my final class, gratis, to 15 devoted and ardent longtime students, I realized that I simply had not been able, till then, to leave them. I’m not the only Iyengar Yoga teacher around. I’m not the last Yoga teacher these students will encounter. But I’ve come to love them all, each and every one; to know them. And I’ve learned most of what I know and teach from them. Oh, sure, I’m in Yoga Teachers’ School (at StudioYoga in Madison, NJ), and will be, God willing, for years and years, but it’s our students who form us and inform us. It’s their bodies, spirits and minds upon which Yoga choreographs its magic.

And, even beneath the killers-in-training in the KAK program, adjacent the pole-dancers writhing under their black light, and with Zumba music blaring full-tilt in the next room . . . we did Yoga together. For years.

I used to tell my students that if theater groups in Sarajevo could perform, on stage, during the bombardment of their city, we could jolly well drift down deep into Savasana (Corpse Pose) in the dank back room of a Teaneck, New Jersey gym.

I was wrong.

As I said today to my mentor, Iyengar Yoga “Master” Teacher, Theresa Rowland: “I no longer believe Yoga can be taught or, rather, experienced fully, in an American gym environment.”

Doesn’t matter if it’s a “fancy” gym with a sane owner, either. A gym is where people go to lift weights, “do cardio,” get their heart rates up, flirt with fellow members on the elliptical or the treadmill, and hang out at the juice bar. A gym may well have lots of good stuff going on within its walls, but it’s the body that’s the focus at a gym. Not the soul.

And Yoga, like Aikido, though it approaches the spirit through the body, is also, is foremost, a spiritual pursuit, and we call it anything less at our peril.

Over the past six months, as my lumbar spine deteriorated, and performing asana brought me more and more pain, I was also trying lamely to deal with the predatory advances of my boss.

In retrospect, I didn’t handle it at all well: first, because I was so surprised by these attentions (at my age, and given my marital status—“Dick” has known my husband longer than he’s known me—it was all unexpected, and I was stunned, like a deer in headlights). I reacted first with humor (my usual first defense); then, with rational demurring, with “counter suggestions,” with distractions. I reacted as though the sexual harassment of workers were something one could deal with head-on, peer to peer, like equals, like “friends.”

It is not. It is a crime. And because it is an abuse of power, an abuse of someone “one-down” by someone “one-up,” it has been deemed an egregious, prosecutable offense in the workplace.

Once I refused his advances, “Dick” cooled towards me, payment became more difficult to procure, I was no longer a favored employee. But, still, the propositions went on till almost the bitter end. Quotably, at last, “Dick” asked me: “Well, if you’re definitely not interested, what about that student of yours? The one who rides the motorcycle.”

After warning “the one who rides the motorcycle,” I realized it was time for me to move on, despite my love for my students.

And so, as I await surgery in late May, I ponder the realities of women of any age working in America, in the 21^st century, and conclude, sadly, that not much has changed, really, over the course of my lifetime.

I was denied funding for medical school, though accepted, because, as the Dean told me, I’d just “get married to one of my fellow male classmates, drop out, and take two scholarship students down simultaneously.” That was in 1971.

It’s 2010, and “Dick” still feels he can accost a woman some eight years his senior, a Yoga teacher with a spiritual calling, in the street (where no one else would hear us), and tell her what he’d like to do to her, repeatedly, on her own Yoga room floor.

If I imagined this to be an isolated incident, I’d be more hopeful about our culture but, just week before last, in a StudioYoga seminar, we discussed the Yoga code of ethics as described in the California Yoga Teachers Association “Code of Professional Standards.” Reading through and discussing with the class the list of “Principles,” “Professional Practices,” “Student Relationships,” “Confidentiality,” etc., etc. “codified” in this document revealed to me, quite clearly, that, in California, teachers and students had got into trouble through straying from Yoga’s ethical “rules.”

And, as California goes, so goes the nation.

For Yoga teachers, the ethical bar is set high, and I, myself, have sometimes been guilty of failing to clear that bar.

But what is not covered by The Board of Directors of the CYTA is how we, as Yoga teachers, and Yoga students, are to teach and study in the less-than-ideal, real-life conditions of Yoga-as-it-currently-exists—in gyms, in YMCA’s, in unaccredited storefront “studios”—all over America.

Yoga in the Storyville District, so to speak. Yoga in the brothel . . . .

In my humble opinion, I, we, all deserve better. We deserve a safe place to study and teach Yoga. And I mean to open my own studio once my back heals, with the help of an ethical and upright Aikido Sensei who has offered me an appropriate, peaceful and “Dick”-less space.

May I grow, over the next few months, to better deserve the trust Yoga students place in their teachers.

Perhaps God, with this surgery, has given me a time-out to ponder my duties and responsibilities. And the Aikido Sensei may, too, teach me how to throw the next “Dick” I encounter into the next county . . . .

PS Life is so much stranger than art! I got a call from “Dick” on my cell-phone yesterday—which my husband, by chance, answered (a nice touch)—asking me to meet him and air my grievances, face to face, in a public place of my choosing. I thought about it a moment, and decided I really did want to give him hell, in person. So, today, we met. Not only did he apologize, and sit still for a horrific verbal beating (regular readers may well imagine I’m quite good at delivering horrific verbal beatings), but he acceded to all my many demands on behalf of the gym’s Yoga program, and the gym’s precious Yoga students, not to speak of their teacher. I asked that my own Iyengar teacher sub for me in my absence, and that every last thing promised me be accomplished and in place (our rope wall, our teaching platform, insulation for the room’s walls, weekly disinfectant of the repaired floor, weekly payment in full to staff for classes taught, no more lying, no more shenanigans on the part of management, etc., etc., etc.) before I put one bare toe back on the Yoga room floor later this summer. Dear Reader, “Dick” agreed to it all. Watch this space to see if the miracles actually come to pass. I’m reserving judgment till I see results. Can a brothel morph into an ashram? Stay tuned . . . .