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Spaulding in various yoga poses. Ashtanga combines poses with measured breathing and movement. Matthews, which she'd been wanting to do for years — and she wasn't happy with how much she was letting things get to her. Face it, stuf was going to happen, she told herself, like the wall-length mirror at the new Wiltshire Avenue studio falling of and shattering into a million shards. "When problems or challenges come along, you have to say it's a problem or challenge, deal with it and then let it go," she says with a faint Tennessee drawl. She rolled up her sleeves and hammered out an amenable deal that included much-needed renovations at the Holiday Manor studio. Te old carpeted foor has become a swanky cork foor, and a drop ceiling is fnally in place. Previously, inexplicably, the sprinklers had been above where the ceiling panels should have gone, leaving students to stare up into a strange gray void. "When it came to crunch time and closing Holiday Manor, I felt it was too much of a retreat, like giving up," says Spaulding. "I decided to gird my loins and jump back into the fght and make it better." S paulding was exposed to yoga early in life. Her mother dabbled, and one day mentioned that a man at their church 36 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.13 could stand on his head in the middle of a cofee table. "I had no idea what yoga was," Spaulding says, "but whatever it was, I wanted to do that." She did learn to do a headstand, then the lotus position (sitting cross-legged with feet on opposing thighs), but yoga had not reached her south-central Tennessee hometown of Tullahoma by the early 1960s — it's George Dickel and Jack Daniel's country, after all. When she was 15, her mom handed her a magazine story about a New York City woman who'd had polio but now walked without braces because an Indian neighbor had taught her yoga. Te article contained diagrams for some basic poses, and Spaulding's repertoire grew slightly. Te family eventually moved about 25 miles away to Sewanee, where Spaulding enrolled at the town's University of the South in January 1970. After earning a fne-arts degree in painting, she followed her nowseparated mother to Washington D.C. and worked at an art-supply house for the next 14 years. Around 1980, a friend introduced her to Victor Davenport of Louisville, and they hit it of. Tey decided to get married in 1986, but frst she needed to take care of something. Watching her father die at 57 from cancer left an impression on Spaulding and convinced her to act on her wilder dreams while she could. She planned a three-month trip to India, where she'd never been before. She went alone, terrifed but "reasonably confdent they had hotels there," although, she says,"my husband-to-be thought I was insane." Her friends asked if she was going there to fnd a guru, an idea she found impossibly remote and even presumptuous. She did her own yoga practice during the trip but declined several ofers of teacher introductions. "It just didn't seem like the right thing to do," she says. Contrary to popular assumption, yoga as we know it (the part that takes place on a mat) was not ubiquitous in India, due in part to wandering yogis' disreputable status among the educated class. Spaulding spent her days visiting sites she knew of or read about in the Lonely Planet travel guide to India. She got robbed by two women, which upset the New Delhi police unimaginably, and spent a lot of time visiting sacred temples, which yielded the photographs for her post-trip slide show "Tennessee Spaulding and the Temples of Doom." It was the Indiana Jones era, after all. In the end, the excursion lasted only one month, not three. "It was a great trip and an awful one, all in one," she says, "and in a way, the awfulness was great, too. One thing I learned about myself is that I'm stronger and more resilient than I thought I was, and better able to handle diferent situations than I thought I might be. Tere's something about India that is really transformative. It puts you out of your comfort zone. Te culture is very diferent. (Teaching colleague) Tim Miller says it pushes all your buttons, and I think that's a good experience for a lot of people. I was way out of my comfort zone." Te experience would come in handy years later when she returned to India. V ictor Davenport's father ran a solo law practice in Louisville, and no one in the immediate family was interested in taking over his business. So Spaulding took the LSAT, scored insanely high and got into Georgetown law school (to the couple's amazement, it fell together nearly that easily). She was granted permission to complete her fnal year at the University of Louisville law school, and she and Davenport moved here in 1989. She was still a curious yoga student when she opened the Louisville Yellow Pages and