AADL Talks To: Laurie Blakeney, Founder, Ann Arbor School of Yoga
When: November 6, 2023

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 tuned pianos for 25 years. During that period she also studied and taught the Iyengar method of yoga. She had the good fortune to study with B.K.S. Iyengar and has taught the Iyengar method to thousands of students.
Transcript
- [00:00:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: Hi. This is Elizabeth and this is 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.
- [00:00:39] LAURIE BLAKENEY: You're welcome.
- [00:00:41] ELIZABETH SMITH: We usually like to just ask right off the bat, what brought you to Ann Arbor?
- [00:00:46] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I came to Ann Arbor to go to college in 1971. I was born in Pontiac. It wasn't much of a trip to come to Ann Arbor.
- [00:00:55] ELIZABETH SMITH: What did you study when you first came?
- [00:00:57] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I was in the Residential College in the 70s, so we studied a lot of stuff. [LAUGHTER]
- [00:01:02] AMY CANTU: I was there in the 80s, so I know.
- [00:01:06] ELIZABETH SMITH: You were into piano tuning, is that correct?
- [00:01:10] LAURIE BLAKENEY: No, what happened was after my first year at the Residential College, I didn't know what I wanted to do major-wise and all of that. I just stopped going to college, and I stayed in Ann Arbor. Then I waited tables for seven years.
- [00:01:24] AMY CANTU: Oh, where?
- [00:01:25] LAURIE BLAKENEY: The Gandy Dancer.
- [00:01:26] AMY CANTU: Oh, ok. Good tips!
- [00:01:29] LAURIE BLAKENEY: It was at the time the biggest fanciest place in town. Then I decided I wanted to be my own boss. I had already started to study yoga just as a student. I had always played piano as a kid. I thought maybe I could be a piano technician and run my own business and run my own schedule. I went to Cleveland, Ohio to a piano technology course, and I came back.
- [00:01:56] ELIZABETH SMITH: How long were you working during the piano tuning?
- [00:02:00] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 25 or 30 years. I was doing it a long time.
- [00:02:03] AMY CANTU: You were doing it simultaneous with...
- [00:02:05] LAURIE BLAKENEY: At first. I was tuning pianos and working on them. I had a rebuilding shop, so I would collect old pianos and tear them down and refurbish them and sell them. There was a place on Washington called 16 Hands. I was in there with that collective of craftsmen.
- [00:02:24] AMY CANTU: Really? Did you have a shop in there then or...?
- [00:02:26] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I had a workshop in there.
- [00:02:28] AMY CANTU: I remember 16 Hands.
- [00:02:30] LAURIE BLAKENEY: They had a storefront, but they also before that, they had a collective of just workspaces that people used.
- [00:02:38] AMY CANTU: You did that for, you say 25 years. What was it like having your own business at that time in Ann Arbor?
- [00:02:47] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 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 there were no women. It wasn't big money, but I had a skill that I could market, and I had control of my own schedule.
- [00:03:10] AMY CANTU: Eventually, you were attracted to studying yoga. Can you tell us how you became involved with yoga?
- [00:03:18] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 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, and I happened to live a couple blocks from the Ann Arbor Y. I looked over there and said, What's going on here? They were just starting to teach Iyengar yoga in the early 70s. I just took classes a couple times a week, two, three times a week during the day.
- [00:03:50] AMY CANTU: 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?
- [00:04:03] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Well, there was somebody teaching yoga at the Y and she was going to move or retire or do something. She decided that two of her students who were these mature ladies who were professor wives. She said to these two women, You two should teach the yoga program now, and 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 just wasn't too involved in the initial inviting him and all of that. They started teaching out of "Light on Yoga" and one of them -- very famous lady, Mary Palmer; Mary Palmer, she lived in the Frank Lloyd Wright house. She commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to do her house.
- [00:04:47] AMY CANTU: We don't all get to do that.
- [00:04:49] LAURIE BLAKENEY: People don't all get to do that. So she said, Ok, I'm going to write this guy who wrote this book and ask him if I can be his student. She did that. 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. This is hearsay -- I was around, but I wasn't privy. She went and she came back and he liked her. She said, 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 weird little hippie girl who was a college dropout. They had him and then one time he came and he did 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 and then they started to accept me because I just wasn't going away. It worked out great. Then he became world famous. There were big conventions and I started going there in 1983 to India to study with him.
- [00:06:14] AMY CANTU: You first met him, what would you say roughly, what would be the year?
- [00:06:18] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Maybe '72 or '73.
- [00:06:22] AMY CANTU: Were you immediately taken with him? What was he like?
- [00:06:25] LAURIE BLAKENEY: The reason I was interested in yoga was I had read "Siddhartha" in high school. I had read the autobiography of a Yogi and John Lennon did yoga and so did George Harrison, my favorite. I thought, OK, I'll try yoga. Mr. Iyengar was very energetic, very charismatic, pretty proper, formal gentleman and really articulate in 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.
- [00:07:12] ELIZABETH SMITH: When did you begin to teach? What was the transition like from student to teacher for you?
- [00:07:20] LAURIE BLAKENEY: There was another woman who was part of that initial group. There were about four of them at the Ann Arbor Y and her name was Barbara Linderman. She taught her own little program in the basement of the Friends Center on Hill Street. I was her student plus a student at the Y. I just went wherever all the time. Someone at the Ann Arbor Continuing Ed program wanted a yoga teacher and they called Barbara and Barbara said, I have a student I think would be good. I told Barbara, I can't do that. I'm not a teacher. I don't want to do that. She said, Well if you don't do it, somebody with less talent will.
- [00:08:01] AMY CANTU: Ok. That's motivation.
- [00:08:02] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I said, Will you help me? She said, Whatever you need. For a long time, I just did continuing Ed classes at Clague Junior High for six, seven years. A couple of nights a week I was the continuing Ed yoga teacher at Clague Junior High School.
- [00:08:17] AMY CANTU: Did you take to it right away?
- [00:08:21] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Well, people kept coming, so...
- [00:08:24] AMY CANTU: You knew you were doing something right.
- [00:08:27] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I think that it's a pretty mechanical and precise thing to teach. If you understand the technicalities and you have good enough communication skills, you could -- I don't know why they kept coming. I don't know. [LAUGHTER]
- [00:08:44] AMY CANTU: Just to be clear, though, 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.
- [00:08:56] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 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?
- [00:09:11] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
- [00:09:11] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Or is a Big World, Small City, I don't know.
- [00:09:13] AMY CANTU: It's Big City, Small World.
- [00:09:16] LAURIE BLAKENEY: There was a yoga school there, and it was not Iyengar Yoga and I went once or twice. I was like, No, thank you. I like what they do with at the Y. I'm going to stick with that. It was pretty immediate. I was lucky. It was just chance.
- [00:09:29] AMY CANTU: Right place at the right time.
- [00:09:31] ELIZABETH SMITH: 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?
- [00:09:40] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Well, I don't know that I had a good pulse on the city. I was pretty young, and I was just in 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 he's credited for popularizing yoga now. 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 said, Can we come be your student?
- [00:10:11] AMY CANTU: 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 has that reputation at the time.
- [00:10:23] LAURIE BLAKENEY: That was definitely there. I definitely think that Ann Arbor -- 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.
- [00:10:34] AMY CANTU: That says something, but Mary Palmer was not part of that particular culture.
- [00:10:38] LAURIE BLAKENEY: No. She was the professor's wife, a sophisticated lady. There was a lot of that that I probably didn't know much about.
- [00:10:48] ELIZABETH SMITH: When did you get your own yoga studio?
- [00:10:51] LAURIE BLAKENEY: It was a long time. The same woman, Barbara Linderman, who recruited me for the Parks and Rec or Continuing Ed program, she was going to go away for a Sabbatical. She had her own pretty big program at the front center and she said, Will you cover me while I'm gone? I said, it's a lot of work and time and she said, Yeah, and you get paid per student, instead of per hour, which I was probably making eight an hour or something at Continuing Ed. She said I'm quite sure you could use the pay. She was pretty convincing. She just kept pushing me through and so when she came home, she said, What are you going to do now? I said, I don't know what I'll do. She said, Well why don't you look around for a school or a church basement or something to rent and run your own program? That was early '80s, maybe late '70s.
- [00:11:47] AMY CANTU: At the time were you still tuning pianos?
- [00:11:49] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Primarily.
- [00:11:50] AMY CANTU: You would tune all day long.
- [00:11:53] LAURIE BLAKENEY: All day long and as many appointments as I could get.
- [00:11:55] AMY CANTU: Then did you teach mostly at night?
- [00:11:57] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Always at night.
- [00:11:58] AMY CANTU: Only at night.
- [00:11:59] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Then after Barbara came home and took back her program, it was at the Rudolf Steiner School on Newport Road and I was there for a decade. I had Tuesday and Thursday nights and one Saturday a month they rented me their gym.
- [00:12:12] ELIZABETH SMITH: How did your approach to teaching change throughout your time teaching and how did it evolve?
- [00:12:20] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Well, I evolved. I mean, I grew up and it started meaning different things to me. It started making more sense. I can't say any big thing happened. 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. He became friends with me and he helped push me along, and then I started going to India and that's when things really changed. It was when I started going to India to study at the Iyengar Institute. I went once a year every year since '83 till COVID.
- [00:13:03] ELIZABETH SMITH: Has it resumed at all since COVID or is it still on pause?
- [00:13:06] LAURIE BLAKENEY: No, it resumed last year. It changed. Teaching yoga over Zoom is what COVID brought.
- [00:13:16] AMY CANTU: How's it working? How do you like that?
- [00:13:19] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Well, I'm really grateful of all the students who are not in town and still want to take class on Zoom with me, but I prefer having actual people 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 little postage stamp on my laptop.
- [00:13:43] AMY CANTU: That'd be hard.
- [00:13:43] LAURIE BLAKENEY: It's harder.
- [00:13:45] AMY CANTU: 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?
- [00:14:08] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I think there are hundreds of people around the world, thousands of people teaching Iyengar Yoga. We have a standardized method. You can recognize the use of props and the use of precision and some things that are recognizable. But they're all individual people teaching their students. I think what happened to me, I use a lot of metaphor. I use a lot of imagery. I finally did go back to college and got 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. I don't think 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 am, although I was more so when I was younger. But you age and you keep growing. I think that Ann Arbor was always interested in the philosophy of yoga. Before Mr. Iyengar wrote any of his books on philosophy, he had come to teach us here in Ann Arbor and recommended yoga philosophy books for us to study as a group above and beyond just doing postures. We did that at the Y. We sat in a little conference room at the Y and we read philosophy books and discussed things with each other. I don't think that was definitely in the beginning at some other communities around the country.
- [00:15:40] AMY CANTU: 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?
- [00:15:56] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 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.
- [00:16:10] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 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.
- [00:16:31] ELIZABETH SMITH: Can you talk a little bit about the different locations where your studio was over the years?
- [00:16:37] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I had the basement of the Friends Center when Barbara was on Sabbatical. Then I had the gym of the Rudolf Steiner School in Newport for a long time. Then they had a change and they wanted their gym back. I rented a place for another decade or so on Fourth Avenue. Then I got my place on West Huron. But I also taught other places. I taught at Wayne State University. I drove down to Detroit 2-3 days a week. I had other teaching classes and I taught at the Gross Pointe War Memorial. I taught at the Senior Citizens home in downtown Detroit. There's been a bunch of places.
- [00:17:25] AMY CANTU: How many students do you think you've had over the course of your career?
- [00:17:30] LAURIE BLAKENEY: When I was on Fourth Avenue other types of yoga hadn't quite hit Ann Arbor. So I had a lot of students. There were seven Iyengar studios in town, 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.
- [00:18:12] AMY CANTU: Wow.
- [00:18:14] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Most weeks of the year.
- [00:18:17] LAURIE BLAKENEY: You've had two businesses? How has owning a business in Ann Arbor changed over the years?
- [00:18:24] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Well, I miss the Ann Arbor News. That was always a way to connect up with the community. So advertising is weird. I'm not much for social media, but that is where advertising has fallen. I can rely on word of mouth. I have a website and people, if they're going Google yoga, they're going to find me. But it used to be that you could go out and advertise yourself and people would learn about you that way. I don't think it's just Ann Arbor. I think everybody gets business off their website.
- [00:19:00] AMY CANTU: 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?
- [00:19:12] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 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.
- [00:19:22] AMY CANTU: Don't want to deal with it.
- [00:19:24] LAURIE BLAKENEY: The other two teachers I have are both certified. There's a national certification or global certification process on Iyengar yoga. The two people who also teach at my school are certified. But I do all the gardening and all the cleaning and all the accounting and all the website stuff. It's all me.
- [00:19:46] AMY CANTU: Can you talk a little bit about the national conventions?
- [00:19:50] LAURIE BLAKENEY: Well, there was one -- it was 90 or 93, I'm pretty sure -- and I was instrumental in being... We had a really good team of people. We held most of the classes down 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" and we had a local storyteller tell mythology and we had a group of Indian dancers and beautiful girls with their gestures and their dresses and all. We had a group of yogis who were doing choreographic demonstrations. It was really a beautiful program.Mr. Iyengar loved it. He sat in the front row, and he got up on stage afterwards. He said, "You should take it on the road!"
- [00:20:41] LAURIE BLAKENEY: So we had a great time having him, and there was probably 1,000 people attending the convention.
- [00:20:51] AMY CANTU: Wow. This was in the 90s?
- [00:20:54] LAURIE BLAKENEY: 93, I think.
- [00:20:56] ELIZABETH SMITH: Ann Arbor has changed a lot in the past 50 years. Architecture, politics, social changes. Does anything stand out for you?
- [00:21:04] LAURIE BLAKENEY: It's way more chi-chi then when I first moved here. I mean, it was the funky place to go and that's not true anymore.
- [00:21:13] AMY CANTU: How do you feel about that? It's hard to afford to live here for one thing.
- [00:21:18] LAURIE BLAKENEY: It's horrible that people can't afford to live here. I live right near downtown. I rented a house for a long time and then bought it from my landlords and then paid it off probably 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.
- [00:21:41] AMY CANTU: What are you most proud of?
- [00:21:43] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I think that 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 thinking it's close to retirement, I'm like, these people really like to come to their yoga school. I'm proud of that. I think it's a nice thing to have in your life, and I've introduced it to a lot of people.
- [00:22:08] AMY CANTU: You don't plan to retire anytime soon, do you?
- [00:22:10] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I turned 70. I should think about it. [LAUGHTER] It's expensive to run my school, the lease is very high and I have a great landlord, he's very responsible, and I don't have any complaints about that. But he's a businessman and it's a prime piece of real estate. It's not a money-maker.
- [00:22:33] AMY CANTU: It's for the love of it.
- [00:22:35] LAURIE BLAKENEY: I like my job and I've spent a lot of effort creating I've always wanted to be my own boss. I always have been my own boss. If I still want to work, I want to work there. It's beautiful. It's really a lovely yoga school.
- [00:22:53] AMY CANTU: It's a really nice studio.
- [00:22:54] LAURIE BLAKENEY: In the room, you feel we're doing something spiritual. We're doing something nice for ourselves. We're exploring who we are and there's a community of people. Now, I'm uploading all the classes because of Zoom, people can see the recordings. I'm still in the classroom, but people are out in the hallway chatting up each other and 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 and I wish they did 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.
- [00:23:39] AMY CANTU: Thank you, Laurie.
- [00:23:39] LAURIE BLAKENEY: You're welcome.
- [00:23:40] AMY CANTU: Thank you very much for coming in.
- [00:23:42] LAURIE BLAKENEY: My pleasure. [MUSIC]
- [00:23:47] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks two is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.

Media
November 6, 2023
Length: 00:24:00
Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library
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Subjects
Interview
Ann Arbor School of Yoga
Yoga
Teaching
Classes & Instruction
University of Michigan Residential College
Entrepreneurs
Piano Tuners
Yoga Studios
16 Hands Gallery
University of Michigan - Students
Iyengar Method of Yoga
Education
Health & Wellness
Local Business
Local History
Music
AADL Talks To
Laurie Blakeney
Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar
Mary Palmer
Barbara Linderman
Ramanand Patel
Priscilla Neel
B. K. S. Iyengar
Ann Arbor 200