Yoga In ‘Storyville,’ Yoga In The Brothel

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Note: This fall, due to reader-request, I am running all my Yoga columns in sequence.

“[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

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—9/19/11—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 CDs 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 are 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-style 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 Studio Yoga 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 YMCAs, 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 year. 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 . . . .

Just Do It Because I Say So

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—9/19/11—If I remember correctly, the poem comprised 61 lines.
I was 12 years old, and there was no way one could “get out of” the eighth grade at the Francis W. Parker School of Chicago without memorizing and reciting the poem. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment,” to be precise.
Just thinking about the poem today (and I am 58 and 5’7” in my stockinged feet), makes me break out in a cold sweat. A light one, to be sure, but a cold one. Still.
Thinking back (and I obviously do that a lot), I’m stunned that, even at 12, I didn’t at least ask: “Why? Why do we have to memorize this poem to graduate from the eighth grade? Why do we have to memorize 61 lines of some 18th-century opium-smoker’s verse? AND, what does memorizing it have to do with passing the eighth grade?”

I believe my home-room teacher back then in Chicago was Mrs. Johnson. I had just returned from three years in Greece, and was trying to adjust to America again, Chicago, a new school, and much, much else, at 12. I was also, as ever, on full scholarship: those on full scholarship do not fail to pass; do not ask “Why?” often, and unhesitatingly defer to those at the head of the classroom.
And, true, I’d been an all-but-straight-A, scholarship student, from Nursery School on through post-graduate work. I was compliant, much, much of the time. I did my homework. I showed up for tests. I even studied logarithms and Flatland under Mr. Barr McCutcheon (and went home and threw up afterwards).
And, when my time came to recite “Kubla Khan,” I stood, held on to the edge of my formica-topped desk, and intoned: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree:/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea. . .” And there I stopped, full-stop.
On the stairs between the first and second floors of our Chicago brownstone, where my mother and I habitually sat, books in hand, while I memorized things (“The Messiah,” daily lists of Latin vocabulary words, anatomical parts, etc., etc.), I had at long last got to the point where I could rip straight through Coleridge’s completely (well, almost completely) unintelligible rant, without missing a word. I no longer needed cueing. I had it down.
But the stairs on Belden Avenue were not the classroom at F.W. Parker; and my mother was, patently, not the small sea of eighth-graders with whom I parried and thrusted and rubbed elbows every weekday. And when I stood before them, and their faces turned to me, expectantly, “So twice five miles of fertile ground/With walls and towers were girdled round:/And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,/Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree. . .” and everything thereafter went slap out of my head.
Mrs. Johnson cueing me, I limped through the rest of the poem, line by line, my face blazing, but I was a marked woman from there on out: give me anything at all to memorize (the lead in “Love’s Labours Lost,” “South Pacific,” the phone book) and, with my mother’s help, I could do it . . . on our stairs at home. But performance anxiety, or stage fright, or just simple why-do-I-have-to-do-this?-cussedness would short-circuit me if ever I had to perform anything solo in front of a group. I spent quite some (required) time “on the boards” at F.W. Parker, in plays and in skits, but I was always, always, always as uncomfortable on stage as I was in Mr. McCutcheon’s math classes; always just a breath away from throwing up.
Moving forward now, like the Ghost of Xmas Future, I ask you to envision me last week, in my Iyengar Yoga Teachers’ Class in Madison, NJ. I am a fairly sane middle-aged woman now, and I have been studying Iyengar Yoga, steadily and fruitfully, for some six years. I’ve been compelled to memorize quite a number of Sanskrit terms, and I have participated in chanting Sanskrit prayers and invocations en masse. I also, regularly, get up in front of groups of Yoga students and teach—on a daily basis, actually.
So, you’d think that when my teacher, the Director of Studio Yoga, asked me to lead the “Invocation to Patanjali,” a prayer honoring the founding-sage of Yoga and Ayurveda, a chant consisting of some eight, just eight lines of poetry, I could rise to the occasion. (The audience would be made up of about six to ten of my fellow-students; people I’ve known for over a year, and not a snotty eighth-grader among them.)

Reader, will it surprise you to learn that I can make it through “Yogena cittasya padena vacam  .  .  .” but no further?
I took up “the issue” this past week with both my psychoanalyst (oh, don’t ask!) and with my best friend, who happens to be an Aikido Sensei.
The former’s response ran something like this: “WHY IS IT THAT PEOPLE IN POSITIONS OF AUTHORITY FEEL COMPELLED TO MAKE THOSE BENEATH THEM IN A HIERARCHY NEEDLESSLY SUFFER????!!!!” (Emphasis totally Dr. B’s.)
Jerry, my friend the Sensei’s response was: “Why don’t you just stand up and sing, ‘I’m an old cowhand, from the Rio Grande . . .’???”
Well, I can answer Dr. B’s question: as student-teachers of Iyengar Yoga, we’re asked to memorize just this one chant, as the Sanskrit sounds themselves are believed to be part and parcel of the prayer: the medium is, largely, the message (just as “Aum,” or “Om,” which we also chant, would also lose most of its oomph, its mystery, its incantatory weight, in any sort of “translation”).
And I can’t sing, “I’m an old cowhand,” either, as I’d have the same problem with that, or “The Twelve Days of Xmas”: I’d freeze, just as surely, singing an old standard in front of my class as chanting the “Yogena . . . ”
So, I’ve done an end-run around my predicament. My teacher, Theresa, will not, I believe, wholeheartedly “approve” (some requirements are just that: required), but it’s the best I can do. Girl and woman, I am unable to sing something memorized before an audience.
So, I’m tearing a page from my uber-Guru’s book, my uber-Guru being B.K.S. Iyengar, himself. And what Iyengar teaches us is that some asana, some Yoga postures, may be beyond our bodies’ abilities to assume, for the time being. Thus, I may never, in this particular body of mine, be able to perform one of Iyengar’s trademark poses, Natarajasana, or The King Of The Dance. But, given some “props”—a ballet bar, a belt, a few years—I may yet get to a reasonable facsimile thereof.
But Iyengar’s like that: if a student’s body won’t quite assume the asana, well, bring a prop to the rescue. BLESS YOU, B.K.S.!
So, by tomorrow, I will not have “The Invocation to Patanjali” down, in Sanskrit, for my class. And I will never, now, I believe, make it from, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan” all the way down to “And close your eyes with holy dread,/For he on honey-dew hath fed,/And drunk the milk of Paradise.” Nor do I really want to.
I do do what I can, though, and so I have written an English translation, my own version, of the “Invocation,” which I plan to read to Theresa and my class, for the first time, tomorrow afternoon at about two o’clock. Wish me, and that eighth-grader I still am on some level, luck.

“Prayer to Patanjali”
—transl. by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, October 2009

Om . . .
Yoga, for stilling disturbances of mind;
Grammar, for bringing us unity through sound;
Healing, for banishing frailty and fear:
He who bestows all these benisons and gifts
Patanjali, brightest of all the souls I know,
Before thee, I bow here, in reverence and grace;
Oh spirit, incarnate, among us once as man;
With conch, wheel, and discus, and great two-bladed sword,
A symbol of victory, eventual but sure,

With wisdom, awakening, knowing what is real.
Ananta, your avatar, while among us here:
The serpent that, turning, makes everything appear.
Aum, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, Om . . . .