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and ftness coach, Kosko also trained under Spaulding and teaches at several studios around town. "She is very ... passionate is not the word I'm looking for," Kosko says. "It's really hard for me to do. She is probably the most knowledgeable individual in this town when it comes to yoga. She won't say that." Kara Price, the teacher who really sank the yoga hook for me, says Spaulding "can come across a little stern, but that's not who she is. She can just be matter-of-fact, and maybe that can come across in not the most polite sense." Price recalls when she moved here from New York, where she'd danced in the Rockettes ensemble and trained as a yoga and Pilates teacher. "In the beginning there was an intimidation factor," she says. "I recall people telling me she's hot or cold; it depends on the day or the stars. I don't feel that. Tat was given to me at the beginning, and I believed it, but when I call her, I don't get that. "When you have a business, especially a nonproft, you have to have another type of brain. She has to be artistic in teaching, but also reasonable and practical, and look at it from a place where they don't go under (fnancially). She has such a good business sense. I think that intimidates people." Spaulding fnds such talk rather amusing and says it "proves (some people) don't really know me." She guesses part of it is because she has defnite ideas of how yoga should be taught, and perhaps from her refusal to coddle students. Tell her about a lower-back issue, and she's likely to tell you to welcome the challenge. But she also cautions against going too far, which has been a criticism of ashtanga. "At Yoga East," she says, setting up the payof like a punch line, "we say, 'No pain . . . no pain.'" Yoga students often want the teacher to provide the answers, she adds, but that's not how it works. Which can also be frustrating. "When you're in this kind of exalted position of being a yoga master, which I've never claimed to be (she prefers Jois' description that everyone is a student), people see you that way and they have expectations of all this stuf they can get from you," Spaulding says. "But the teaching of yoga is that you have to get it for yourself. It's not supposed to be easy." Tat's not to say everyone is expected to perform at the same level. Her attitude is quite the opposite, which Spaulding says carries over from Trigg's tenure. "In some other yoga schools and traditions, you can be intensely criticized for the way you're doing a posture," she says. "Tat's not just not the way we do it. Almost everyone feels they'll come in and be the only one who can't do the pose. Everyone feels they'll be stared at. We emphasize in teacher training that it's not about doing the pose; it's about coming in and getting on your mat and doing your practice, such as it is in that moment, with your body the www.atasteofy.com www.keeplouisvilleweird.com 7.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 39