Louisville Magazine

JUL 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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found one listing, for Yoga East, run by Maja Trigg. Spaulding quickly became a devotee of the yoga master. After working for a fabric company, Trigg had escaped the New York City fashion scene and landed in Louisville, where her sister had moved, and she was pleasantly surprised to fnd escalating interest in yoga in Louisville. Soon she was teaching hundreds of students at the YMCA, YWCA and Jewish Community Center, and she eventually started a business — taught out of her sister's Lyndon home — she named Yoga East. In 1977, it gained 501(c)(3) status based on its educational mission. Trigg wasn't fully absorbed by yoga teaching and would take of for months, even years, at a time, skiing in Colorado or living in an Indian ashram, leaving others in charge in her stead. But the great Louisville snowstorm of 1994, when the city got more than 20 inches over two days, told her it was time to go for good. By April she was headed for Charleston, S.C., after asking three of her more accomplished students, including Spaulding, to take over. Her board of directors approved the plan. "I thought, 'Oh my God, what am I gonna and, in 1999, returned to Columbus for a workshop by Tim Miller, the frst American to be certifed by Jois. When she asked if Miller recommended visiting Jois, whom his followers called "guruji," Miller told her, "Yes, you must go. You have to stay for three months." She left in the spring of 1999 to study with Jois. Six days a week, visiting students would crowd into a room in his house, waiting in line for an open spot, and then work on their own practice while Jois observed and made adjustments. In the afternoon, they'd gather for a 90-minute "conference," a casual gathering where students could ask questions. Spaulding studied with Jois every year thereafter — two times in the U.S., the other times in India — until his death in 2009 at age 93. She says the experience of studying with him transformed her own practice and how she teaches. "I thought he would be distant and reserved, but he wasn't," she says. "It was like taking classes with your grandfather. To sit around and talk with him — when I went, I couldn't imagine we'd be able to do that. It was like 'hobnobbing with the guru,' very casual and intimate. He taught "I thought he would be distant and reserved, but he wasn't," Spaulding says about Indian yogi Shri Pattabhi Jois. "It was like taking classes with your grandfather." do?'" Spaulding recalls. First thing, the new leaders had to fnd a location. Tey moved into the old Tropus Engineering ofce on Grinstead Drive, near Collegiate School and Burger's Market. Spaulding continued working with her father-in-law and even stepped out of Yoga East for a year. But the pull was strong, and she eventually sat down with her husband and discussed what it would take to teach yoga full time. "We calculated how many students I'd need, and we said, 'It can't be done,'" she remembers. "A few months later, I said I don't care if it can be done or not, I have to get out of law. It's too overwhelming and stressful." In the meantime, she had heard about ashtanga vinyasa yoga, a vigorous system that links breath and movement (as opposed to hatha yoga, which emphasizes alignment and holding poses), and she set out to learn more. Te quest began around 1998 in Columbus, Ohio, where ashtanga teacher David Swenson was conducting a weekend workshop. Swenson and his brother Doug had studied under ashtanga founder Pattabhi Jois in Mysore, India. Spaulding then went to a David Swenson seminar in Lake Tahoe 38 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.13 using more than just words. He taught with his whole being. When you were with him, you'd see how he is with people, and that's what you picked up." Spaulding was present for the last class Jois taught, and traveled back to see him before he died. She continues a relationship with his daughter Saraswathi and grandson Sharath, who oversee the Shri K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore. Spaulding says the ongoing connection with the school, where several Yoga East teachers have also gone to study, has come to defne Yoga East today. O ne of Victor Davenport's passions is computers, and he's good at it. So he used to play practical jokes on his wife, rigging her PC so it would display messages while booting up, things like "water detected on Drive A" or something about "spin and dry" cycles. Asked if he'd ever consider other sorts of practical jokes — say something involving crackers in her workout clothes, for example — he laughs and tells me he's 6-foot-1, or about as high as his wife can swing her leg. "I don't want to get smacked in the head," he says. Not that she would. Davenport notes that she didn't even fght back when the women robbed her during her frst India trip. "One of them had a baby," Spaulding says, laughing. "How can you hit a woman with a baby?" She and Davenport are the odd couple, he says. He's more outgoing; she's an introvert. He plays racquetball; she does yoga. He likes to talk; she's more taciturn. She's on Facebook; he detests it. Davenport is especially impressed by his wife's dedication. She is usually in bed by 7:30 every night and arrives around 4:30 or 5 in the morning at the Kentucky Street studio, where she does her own 90-minute practice six days a week. She's currently up to the eighth or ninth pose in the second of ashtanga's six series, and her current personal challenge is to get into karandavasana. Tat's Himalayan goose pose to you and I, where you ultimately end up face down in lotus pose with your forearms on the mat and your knees on the backs of your arms before drawing back up into chaturanga, which resembles a pushup except your shoulders are much farther forward than your hands. Te doors open at 5:45 a.m., when students can start coming in for Mysore classes, sonamed for the city where Jois worked, in which they practice on their own while Spaulding works the room to ofer individual instruction. Tat's over at 8, and then she goes about coordinating class schedules, or teaching (she also leads about 15 classes a week), or going over the books, or thinking about buildingmaintenance issues. "Sometimes," she says with the sort of understated bemusement that punctuates her sense of humor, as her Tennessee voice slips in ever so slightly, "I sit back and think of how many toilets and furnaces I'm responsible for." For the record, that's eight and seven, respectively. But these days she has help from her baby sister, Perrie Spaulding-Allen, who's lived in Louisville for a few years and now manages Holiday Manor and the new studio on Wiltshire Avenue. Tough they don't have yoga in common (little sis went once and found it too intimidating), Spaulding fnds her presence helpful. As she might say, yoga doesn't protect you from real life; it only helps you deal with it. She's had to fre people for stealing. She's booted teachers for stalking students, and vice versa. Family, she can trust. D ivining the "Laura aura" is not so easy. Te word "enigma" comes to mind. Maybe it's the combination of a law background with intense yoga discipline, but she's clearly a formidable presence. I ask Anne Kosko, the studio's longesttenured teacher, to describe Spaulding's personality. A retired corporate health

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