Iyengar in Ann Arbor: An American Yoga Story - New Documentary Short

Fri, 12/20/2024 - 7:42am

When: 2024

"Today, yoga is practiced practically everywhere in America, with a wide range of approaches, philosophies, studios, and styles. But in the early 1970s, this endeavor, originally from India, was mostly unknown in our country. B.K.S. Iyengar's visit to Ann Arbor from Pune, India in 1973 changed all that. Sponsored by the Ann Arbor Y and held at the Power Center, the series of public classes were the first the now-famous yoga master taught in North America. People came from across the U.S. for an opportunity to learn from him. The success of his visit sparked a special relationship between Iyengar and Ann Arbor which continued throughout his life." - Filmmakers Donald Harrison & Jeanne Hodesh

Transcript

• [00:00:07] SUE SALANIUK: Iyengar yoga cannot be summed up into common sentences.
• [00:00:12] SALLY RUTZKY: It's yoga as taught by B.K.S. Iyengar.
• [00:00:17] CINDY NEAM: It's more than just an exercise. It's learning about your body. It's creating change in your body.
• [00:00:26] SUE SALANIUK: It's very precise. There's a lot of detail.
• [00:00:33] DAVID UFER: He would never call it Iyengar yoga, he really resisted that. Yoga is yoga.
• [00:00:39] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yoga is a union of the body with the mind, mind with the soul.
• [00:00:53] SALLY RUTZKY: The first thing about him that you noticed was his energy. It's like he glowed. He was so alive.
• [00:01:05] DAVID UFER: 1973, of course, were the first public classes, and they were taught in Ann Arbor and then that was really the gateway to having him teach public classes in Chicago and public classes in San Francisco and Boston. It really came through Ann Arbor in 1973.
• [00:01:21] TONI REESE: I was just a novice. I was only six months along when I first came in contact with Mr. Iyengar in 73. Oh I was just floored. He was so dynamic. I thought that Mr. Iyengar was performing a miracle. It was miraculous.
• [00:01:44] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Balancing the body on our own shoulders. It's very interesting to know that the art of yoga is not only meant to keep oneself healthy, but to have to keep the body light. That's why yogis have given lots of postures to lighten the weight of their bodies.
• [00:02:10] DAVID UFER: Through a gentleman by the name of Yehudi Menuhin who at the time was one of the, if not, the foremost violin players in the world. He had Iyengar come to Europe and teach classes in Europe before Iyengar ever came to the States. Mr. Menuhin had been to Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor a number of times, and it was one of the last visits of Yehudi Menuhin in Ann Arbor when Mary Palmer and Bill Palmer, who were significant figures in the University of Michigan Musical Society, encountered Yehudi Menuhin and Mary was very interested in the practice of yoga. Yehudi Menuhin wrote Mary a personal letter of recommendation and that's what ignited her interest to, at her age, to fly to the other side of the world and begin taking classes with B.K.S. Iyengar.
• [00:03:13] SALLY RUTZKY: When Mary Palmer first started teaching Iyengar yoga, she taught out of his book, Light on Yoga.
• [00:03:19] DAVID UFER: That book, if you took the top ten books on yoga in the world, Light on Yoga has outsold the top other ten books. It's a seminal text on the practice of yoga, asanas and pranayamas.
• [00:03:36] B.K.S. IYENGAR: These asanas are meant to conquer the known so that the known dissolves in the unknown.
• [00:03:45] TOM HUNTZICKER: It was almost entirely two of the Ann Arbor Y yoga teachers. That would be Mary Palmer and Priscilla Neel. I believe that they had already been to India studying under Mr. Iyengar and they decided at some point that he should be coming to United States and specifically to Ann Arbor and sponsored by the Ann Arbor Y.
• [00:04:16] SUE SALANIUK: Yes, they were the grand old dames. They were faculty women in the old sense and very strong personalities and they were a product of their generations.
• [00:04:31] TOM HUNTZICKER: Mary and Priscilla invited me to Mary's house. This is the Palmer house, which is a Frank Lloyd Wright house. They proposed this to me, and they wanted the Ann Arbor Y to sponsor his trip to Ann Arbor for a series of classes and a demonstration, and they wanted this to occur at the Power Center on the U of M campus. They were very persuasive, very insistent, but in the nicest way. I actually knew that I was out of my element when I was with them. I knew that this was going to happen and basically they were just waiting for me to say yes to this.
• [00:05:27] SUE SALANIUK: The Ann Arbor Y was very supportive in sponsoring him to come to the United States, and it just took off from there.
• [00:05:36] TOM HUNTZICKER: There was a great deal of excitement. This was for yoga practitioners, and particularly for Iyengar yoga practitioners, this was a huge deal. This was a huge deal. He was very forceful, very nice person, great smile, very demanding in his classroom setting. Our classes that week were very successful, and there were people coming from all over the United States to study with him. He put on a great demonstration at the Power Center. We had just enough people attending to make sure that financially it worked.
• [00:06:19] SUE SALANIUK: Mr. Iyengar, after that first visit to the United States, he had come to the United States before, but it just didn't click. This was like planting a seed in a fertile ground.
• [00:06:32] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Because when the body and the mind both are released from the tension, there is ultimate freedom.
• [00:06:40] DAVID UFER: In 1976, The Ann Arbor Y developed the opportunity for Mr. Iyengar to do a film. It's an hour long film. It's called Ultimate Freedom, and it was done in one of the University of Michigan audio studios downtown. We heard years later that he really felt that that was one of the, if not the best film that he put together, and it's remarkable.
• [00:07:03] B.K.S. IYENGAR: You all read the title of the film, The Ultimate Freedom. Ultimate freedom means complete freedom in body, in mind, and in the self itself.
• [00:07:25] DAVID UFER: He had a keen sense in Ann Arbor that people were pretty much living in their front brains and had this all figured out. He took it to us. When I say that to this day, Adho Mukha Svanasana the downward-facing dog, after fifty years of practice, I'm still having a real difficult time getting my heel to the floor. He got my heel to the floor.
• [00:07:53] SUE SALANIUK: Oh the first few times when he was here in Ann Arbor, nerve racking because the teachers had built up his persona to this very exacting teacher who would be very verbal if you didn't understand what he was trying to convey or wasn't coming through.
• [00:08:19] SALLY RUTZKY: He was not a perfectionist. That's easy because Iyengar yoga is very much, how is the form? Does it look like the right shape? Is your arm and your elbow extended enough? We can translate that into thinking of it as a perfectionism. But it really isn't. What he wanted us was to do the best we could. Doing the best you can is doable. It's just the best you can in that particular minute and then the next one. That's all it is. Then can you do your best the next minute? But perfectionism is really never doable and self defeating.
• [00:09:00] CINDY NEAM: My overall impression of him, both from what I observed and then stories I heard from my mom, I think he's a very or was a very caring person. I think he had a lot of knowledge to impart and I think that it was his way of getting across the point that he was trying to make. I know a lot of people didn't necessarily take it the right way. I know that people cried, and I think some people weren't comfortable with that. My impression was always that his intention was very good and that he just wanted to share what he knew as deeply as possible.
• [00:09:48] SALLY RUTZKY: He just was so full of wanting to convey what he knew to the rest of us. I remember the feeling of walking out of class where I was going to a business lunch and I was so high, I thought I could fly to the moon. I thought, I don't need fried food, although I still eat it. I don't need alcohol, that I did give up eventually. I could just do yoga, and I feel better than any of them.
• [00:10:20] J. P. MCCARTHY: We welcome yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar to Focus. Welcome, sir.
• [00:10:26] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Thank you very much, sir.
• [00:10:27] J. P. MCCARTHY: Not everyone understands the difference between yoga and yogi. Be kind enough to enlighten us master.
• [00:10:36] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yoga is a science, art, and philosophy of developing the body and mind to the level of the self so that the person is blended very well, both in his head and heart. That is yoga. One who practices that is a yogi.
• [00:11:00] J. P. MCCARTHY: Is a yogi.
• [00:11:01] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yes.
• [00:11:01] DAVID UFER: How can we really delve into who we are without his credo? The Ann Arbor Y program for years and years, we had the same quote of his on the top of the yoga page, and it had everything to do with "From freedom of the body comes freedom of the mind and then ultimate freedom."
• [00:11:21] SUE SALANIUK: Iyengar yoga took off here through serendipity. Yoga was unknown back then. It was just nothing and probably if you mentioned yoga to people, this is that weird hippie stuff. But Ann Arbor has often been a touch point for that sort of activity or that sort of exploration.
• [00:11:45] TOM HUNTZICKER: Well, I think Ann Arbor was probably a perfect match for this. You had teachers who were here, who were really committed to this method, and there are a lot of people in Ann Arbor then, and now, who are open just by the student population that we had at the Y for our classes, we couldn't find space, really, for all the classes that we could have taught at that point in time.
• [00:12:19] CINDY NEAM: The Parker Room, that is the yoga place at the old Ann Arbor Y, brought together a group of people who started experimenting with the knowledge that they were learning. There just seemed to be this group of people that came together and it was like a laboratory of learning. I don't know. It just felt like something was really going on that was drawing people in.
• [00:12:45] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Each and every pores of my skin, each and every part of my body, each and every raise of my intelligence has to work penetrating from the extreme end of my foot to the extreme end of the top of my skull. That is known as ultimate freedom, where there is without any obstruction, my intellect can penetrate.
• [00:13:15] SUE SALANIUK: There has been a Iyengar Yoga Convention in the United States since the early mid 80s. That first one was in San Francisco. They occur every three years to this day. One day, Laurie Blakeney, we were having coffee at a coffee shop downtown and she said, shall we put on the next convention? I said, sure, why not?
• [00:13:43] DAVID UFER: In 1993, Ann Arbor hosted the Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States conference of teachers from all over and that was extremely well received.
• [00:14:00] TONI REESE: People came - from internationally came. The Y wasn't large enough to accommodate. We used a lot of the university buildings. Different sports venues.
• [00:14:13] SUE SALANIUK: We had something like 1,500 students 15, 18, something like that. Ann Arbor is small population wise compared to some place like San Francisco, but it's the atmosphere here in Ann Arbor. It's the university atmosphere and the fact that Iyengar yoga, this was the sprout where it all started to come from. The international community had that connection to Ann Arbor.
• [00:14:45] FEMALE_1: You have been in Ann Arbor for how many days now?
• [00:14:48] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Since four days I'm here.
• [00:14:50] FEMALE_1: Now, are you conducting classes?
• [00:14:52] B.K.S. IYENGAR: I'm helping the teachers here so that they can teach a little better than what they were teaching.
• [00:14:58] FEMALE_1: This is at the Y.
• [00:14:59] B.K.S. IYENGAR: All over America. What I'm doing, not only in Y, but in all other places.
• [00:15:04] FEMALE_1: But usually you stay right in India. Now, is it Pune?
• [00:15:07] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yes, I stay mostly in India.
• [00:15:11] FEMALE_1: Disciples, shall we call them. Could come.
• [00:15:14] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Yes, they come in groups. Every two months, every three months.
• [00:15:19] TONI REESE: I went to the Iyengar Institute three times over the years and took classes from Mr. Iyengar. We called him Mr. Iyengar. Now, he's called Guruji and, I guess, the first two times, he was the sole teacher. The last time I went, Geeta his daughter, Geeta Iyengar was the teacher.
• [00:15:42] SALLY RUTZKY: Mary got us to go to India, and that was another life changing event. It's not the place I would have wanted to go. If you said, go someplace you want to see the scenery, I would have gone to the Galapagos Islands and looked at tortoises. But instead, I went to India and I learned how to stand on my head.
• [00:16:05] SUE SALANIUK: Back then, they did intensives in India, where somebody and in this case, Laurie Blakeney, who is our senior teacher in town, had sponsored, had organized this intensive. The Ann Arbor Y teachers had gone to one other one before, and then I was on this one. I think it was three weeks in India and your group was the main group being taught. And I ended up going, I should say, only twelve times. Many of the senior teachers are still going every year.
• [00:16:38] B.K.S. IYENGAR: This is Yoga Mudrasana here, when the head is bent, the heel compresses the abdominal organs and the compression of the abdominal organs makes the blood to circulate more in those areas. When you come up from that position, that's how those organs are kept healthy. Garbha Pindasana or the fetus in the womb.
• [00:17:04] CINDY NEAM: My mom was Laura Roberts, and I believe, took her first Iyengar yoga class in 1976, and she had been searching for a way to help with her back pain. I think from the very first class that she took, she instantly knew that this was a good thing. She really immersed herself in classes and then began teaching classes. She traveled to India three times to study with Mr. Iyengar and as part of doing the yoga, she created a yoga outfit for herself, which became the leg band yoga shorts and became the company Yogaware. Without her really planning it, she created this clothing and prop company. She went from being the housewife who had activities but basically was a housewife and didn't have something that was really compelling to her to really, I think, within a very short time period, she's riding her bike. She's taking all these classes. She's meeting all these people and, there were yoga potlucks, and yoga camp in the summers, and she had this group of friends that, it always seemed like they were doing something. All of a sudden, she had this whole community. She had a support system in something that was creating health, creating abilities that she didn't have before.
• [00:18:46] B.K.S. IYENGAR: How I am synchronizing the movement with the breath.
• [00:19:07] SUE SALANIUK: The Ann Arbor yoga community has always been a little unique from my observations and experience. We've always been very supportive of each other, I think in part because that all started from that single trunk, the Ann Arbor Y, and the teachers being so close and connected, and connected to Mr. Iyengar and Geeta. Then as it became a nice career choice to spread out, we all still supported each other.
• [00:19:43] CINDY NEAM: One of the wonderful things about Iyengar yoga in Ann Arbor has been the fact that there is a multitude of teachers and studios, and you get all those different perspectives.
• [00:19:53] DAVID UFER: We were just incredibly fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, to be learning from those first generation of teachers, and that was Mary and Priscilla and Susie and Robert Antoszczyk and Barbara Linderman.
• [00:20:08] SUE SALANIUK: When I started my studio, I could fill classes very easily. It was a fun idea to be able to start your own studio and be a little bit more in control of what's happening. Laurie started her studio. Karen and David Ufer started their studio Yoga Focus. Donna Pointer was teaching in various other places. It just began to spread out.
• [00:20:33] B.K.S. IYENGAR: You can see me when I'm doing that each and every portion of my body is extended in various directions keeping contact with myself.
• [00:20:50] SUE SALANIUK: He was always very connected to the Ann Arbor Y, very grateful because of their sponsorship.
• [00:20:56] SALLY RUTZKY: He was very appreciative of Mary Palmer for his whole life. Because she was the one who first brought him here where it did catch on. He had been to other places in the U. S. and given demonstrations, but they didn't develop students, and he wanted students. I actually think of it as Ann Arbor just had this remarkable group of people who were able to think of Iyengar yoga as a way to live your life.
• [00:21:31] DAVID UFER: He quite often would refer to Ann Arbor as his home away from home when it came to yoga in America.
• [00:21:39] B.K.S. IYENGAR: Let this foundation lead you to the highest level of what I say, purity and paternity. Thank you very much.