It’s the most critical part of a yoga class–savasana–and 20 weary bodies are stretched out on the floor like corpses. The room is supposed to be quiet and comforting as heavy bones sink into the spongy mats; savasana is when fledgling yogis recover from vigorous contortions or poses.
But this is health-club yoga, where students often wander in late and leave early, and uncontrollable distractions abound. Not only is the room at Lakeshore Athletic Club in Lincoln Park unpleasantly cold, but a woman waiting for the next class–Power Pump–impatiently barges in before yoga has ended, shattering the stillness.
“It was one of the rudest things I have ever experienced,” recalls teacher Nicole Ohme, who, at the time, inhaled deeply before telling the woman off. “That’s the thing about health clubs. People are so focused on themselves.” But, Ohme admits, health-club yoga is better than no yoga at all. “I know how good yoga is for people–for their organs, their mental state,” she says. “I keep thinking maybe, eventually, I will reach someone.”
More than a century after a penniless monk from India brought yoga to Hyde Park–and America–the ancient practice is finally booming in the heartland. At least six new yoga studios have opened in the Chicago area in the last several months, while others are expanding to keep up with demand. Classes can be found wherever space allows, from the Chicago Botanic Garden and the lakefront to churches, corporations, dance centers, high schools, hospitals, libraries and chiropractic centers.
Yoga, a 5,000-year-old discipline, is practiced by more than 7 million Americans, though some estimates put the number as high as 20 million. With so many new converts, yoga schools are flourishing and sales of yoga products such as mats, books, videos and eye pillows are at record high levels. L.L. Bean is now selling yoga clothes that can be worn on yoga vacations, while yoga items have become the No. 1 seller at Transitions in Chicago, which specializes in personal growth products. Gaiam, the nation’s leading distributor and producer of yoga videos, CDs, DVDs and accessories, saw its business increase 500 percent between 1999 and 2001.
“Conscious people who have been into yoga, not as a trend but a lifestyle, understand this is America and there is a market for things that are trendy,” says longtime yoga guru Gabriel Halpern, who helped found Chicago’s Yoga Circle in 1985 and takes a philosophical approach to yoga’s frenetic growth. “Hip-hop is not Mozart, but the same urge that inspired people is not lost, even if the outward reflection looks so garish and so different. It’s all about action, ultimately.”
For the most part, health clubs have become a welcoming front door for the masses. Many, such as the Chicago Sweat Shop, Lehmann Sports Club and the Evanston Athletic Club, take yoga seriously and offer classes with experienced teachers that rival private studios. Health clubs not only offer teachers steady income but also demystify yoga and deliver it to those who otherwise might not try it.
Inevitably, as yoga has hit the mainstream, it has been altered and adapted so there is a yoga class for everyone, from hyperactive children to handicapped adults. Yoga Without Tree Hugging is described as “simple yoga that relieves stress and avoids those embarrassing New Age moments.” Yogalates or Paloga is a combination of Pilates and yoga. There’s power yoga, partner yoga, bikram yoga–practiced in rooms of searing 105-degree heat–and the burgeoning “yoga for fitness” genre for those who don’t want it to change their lives–just their bodies.
“We’re yoga without the ‘om’–there’s no chanting,” says Eda Davidman, 36, an Ironman triathlete and former bankruptcy attorney who opened Yogabound in Bucktown in March. “We’re much more into the fitness aspect of it. We want to have people understand how the body is working. Yoga is a huge complement to any sport.”
Many yogis say these new incarnations of yoga can be positive. After all, as the saying goes, while there may be many paths up the mountain, they all eventually lead to the top. “Different schools of yoga emphasize different parts of the practice and appeal to different populations,” says David Lipschutz, director of the Temple of Kriya Yoga, which started in Chicago in 1968 and today has some of the most comprehensive teacher training programs. “Some are physical and demanding, others more introspective.”
As yoga becomes increasingly diverse, however, some say it’s being stripped of its essential emotional and spiritual aspects. Yoga is a vast, complicated system, divided into eight limbs, or areas, of practice. In classic yoga, known in the West as hatha, the physical postures–asanas–and the breathing techniques–pranayama–are just two of the eight limbs. Moral living, concentration and meditation are other important elements.
“The physical practice is a driving force in the evolution of yoga in America,” says instructor Paul Weitz, who teaches at Moksha Yoga and Priya Yoga in Chicago and the Evanston Athletic Club. “It’s a good one-eighth to start with, but it’s not the primary force. When people practice yoga, they get a physical benefit, but they also get something else, and that is wholeness. That’s what yoga is: a movement to wholeness.”
But in health clubs, fitness comes first and the spiritual aspects are often ignored. Many classes are large, making it difficult for the instructor to correct the alignment of each student. Instead of working within their limits, many newcomers twist themselves into complicated poses before they are ready, risking injury.
In addition, anyone can teach yoga, including aerobics instructors whose training may consist of a weekend yoga retreat. Though some groups such as the Yoga Alliance are working to establish national yoga teaching standards–before they are developed by outsiders–the system is still fragmented and lacks quality control.
“We do see teachers who are not connected with the spirituality of it, only the health and fitness,” says Daren Friesen, owner of Moksha Yoga, a studio that brings nationally recognized yoga teachers such as Richard Miller, Ana Forrest and Rod Stryker in for workshops. “But the body is not just a biomechanical machine. It’s also a subtle energy system. If you’re just turning it into a fitness routine, you miss an enormous part of what yoga has to offer.”
Named for a Sanskrit word that means “union,” yoga is one of six orthodox systems of Indian philosophy. It is not, as many believe, rooted in Hinduism, and it is practiced by people of all faiths, according to the American Yoga Association.
Classes vary by an instructor’s personality, but all generally involve breathing, exercise and meditation. Some studios use music, incense, props and chanting; others do not. All focus on inner awareness and consciousness, the core of the yoga philosophy.
While health clubs are externally focused and many offer television to distract the brain during exercise, yoga tries to do the opposite. It “yokes” body and mind together through breathing. Patanjali, an Indian scholar and author of the Yoga Sutras, defines yoga as the “complete cessation of thought waves.” When the mind is not cluttered by thoughts and distractions, he says, one can eventually reach a state of oneness with all things, called samadhi.
In America, the process commonly starts with physical changes. An all-around body strengthener and toner, yoga also increases flexibility and agility. After a yoga class, which ends with a rejuvenating meditation, many people discover a connection with the rest of the body and a keen awareness of core muscles that have been dormant for years. “One of the most profound effects of yoga is that people start getting comfortable with the body they’ve been given,” rather than wanting to change it, says yoga instructor Rodney Yee, featured in more than 26 yoga videos and author of “Yoga: The Poetry of the Body” (Thomas Dunne).
Studies have also shown that yoga can help with chronic pain, insomnia, high blood pressure, migraines and eating disorders. Dr. Dean Ornish’s heart-disease-reversal program centers on yoga and a low-fat vegetarian diet. A study in the British Medical Journal even found that yoga mantras had a positive effect on cardiovascular rhythms.
But yoga works on many other levels. Chad Satlow, owner of Yogawerks in Barrington, says he practices yoga to keep his bipolar disorder in check. For Chicago’s Lisa Hill, yoga was a way to face her fears. “It gave me a reason to live,” says Hill, 36, who trained under N.U. Yoga’s Suddha Weixler, a mentor for many of the city’s top teachers.
Now Hill uses yoga to help others who might be struggling physically or emotionally. During one class, when she found out a student had an illness in the family, she incorporated several gentle back and chest opening poses. “The back poses can bring joy and the chest poses open the heart a little,” Hill says. “It’s no miracle but I can see it in their eyes when they come out of savasana,” she says. “They’re like newborns. It’s such a powerful force.”
Throughout its history, the art and science of yoga have been passed down through generations, from gurus to their students. Even today, many Westerners who want to learn ashtanga yoga travel to Mysore, in southern India, to train under the 85-year-old Pattabhi Jois. “He’s like having a grandpa, a father and a teacher in one,” says Satlow, one of a few Jois-certified instructors in the area. “But it’s tough to be a yogi in the real world. I’m trying to live up to the true teachings, but people don’t want that. They want the quick fix.”
Though yoga is anything but quick–it’s a process that must be absorbed–many say it’s not surprising that people are turning to it. “They say yoga reappears over time when society needs it most,” during times of great searching and struggle, says Friesen of Moksha. Though Swami Vivekananda introduced yoga at the Parliament of Religions in Hyde Park in 1893, it wasn’t until the turbulent 1960s that the Temple of Kriya Yoga and the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center opened in the Fine Arts Building.
In the 1970s, Susan Witz, now a full-time nutritionist and yoga teacher at the Heartland Spa, opened her studio, the Yoga Retreat. The Himalayan Institute, now in Evanston and Glenview, was founded in Barrington by Swami Rama, who was participating in a research project involving the autonomic nervous system, control of the heartbeat and biofeedback, according to Sharon Steffensen, founder of Yoga Chicago.
By the 1980s, however, those who dabbled in yoga were swept away by the popularity of aerobics and running, while those who considered yoga a lifestyle explored other styles of yoga and opened new centers, including The Yoga Circle and N.U. Yoga, still two of the more popular no-frills yoga studios in Chicago.
In the last decade, aging Baby Boomers and rising stress levels have contributed to yoga’s popularity. Moksha, which recently opened a second location in Lake View, and Priya Yoga, in the old Yoga Retreat studio space in the Gold Coast, both opened in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, yoga has been increasingly woven into overall wellness programs.
Steve Nakon helped bring yoga to the lifestyle programs at the Botanic Garden and started classes in the Museum of Contemporary Art. He calls it “yoga for wellness” rather than “yoga for fitness.”
“In today’s world, yoga is much more pertinent,” says Nakon, who directs Northwest Yoga in Des Plaines and teaches at several other locations, including Eight Limbs in Chicago. “It’s very stressful to live in today’s world bombarded constantly with noise pollution, information pollution. Yoga is a refuge. It allows a deep, still, silent place we can access through movement and breath.”
Chicago’s Becky Love, 85, learned yoga’s secrets 40 years ago, when she heard Goswami Kriyananda speak and attended his lectures years before he opened the Temple of Kriya Yoga. “People said, ‘What are you doing? Yogurt?’ ” she says. Today, Love teaches all over the city, including at the New City YMCA, Harold Washington College and Michael Reese Hospital. Some of her students are new; others have been with her for 25 years. She plans to retire at age 100.
At Moksha’s cozy River North studio, a 6:45 a.m. yoga class begins the minute students slip off their shoes at the front door. For an hour and a half, with the sun gradually rising and then streaming in through the windows, three women and a man twist, bend and breathe while instructor Lourdes Paredes, 32, gently guides the practice. Her theme for the class is a limb of yoga that is rarely, if ever, addressed in a health club: non-violence.
“Non-violence doesn’t just mean avoiding a fight with others or a war; some people exhibit violence in their own bodies. That’s what I wanted people to think about,” Paredes says.
At the end of class, the room still smells of incense. A Krishna Das chant plays on a CD while the students lie in corpse pose, or savasana. When they roll to their right and groggily sit up into cross-legged positions, Paredes leads three melodic “oms” that last as long as a breath.
“Each time, make it new,” she says.
