As anyone who spent five minutes with me knows, I am in love with Emmy. This is a tribute I wrote about her for the yearbook. Pedantic fellow that I am, it was too long to be used there.
(Two passages taken from AMERICAN YOGA by Carrie
Schneider and Andy Ryan)
Two weeks before our training began, I started practicing at
the main headquarters on La Cienega to try to get used to the heat. One day as I
entered the ‘airplane hanger’, as I like to call our yoga room, I noticed an
older woman, early 60’s maybe, in a black leotard, at the back of the studio.
‘How nice,’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s great to see the elderly in class,
keeping fit.’ 90 minutes later, I lay on the floor, gasping for breath, trying
to remember my name. Such is the force that is Emmy.
Born in Latvia, Emmy
Cleaves came to America as a WWII refugee. She was separated from her own family
at the concentration camp Danzig, where “the food was 75% sawdust, mixed with
25% flour. My stomach stopped functioning, it was all jammed with sawdust.” She
was sponsored by a family in Michigan, which enabled her to come to the USA.
It was 1950 when she took her first Yoga class. She had been pestering
her jazz instructor for more of the slow stretching exercises he taught as
warm-ups, so he told her to do Yoga, the first time she heard the word. “I was
like a dry sponge, suddenly filled with water, soaking it up.” When I mentioned
I felt a similar sensation the first time I took a Bikram class, she nodded.
“Yes, because your body instinctively identifies something that’s good for it,
something within its design template. I used to take jazz, I used to play
tennis; but most athletics are not compatible with your body or yoga. They are
counterproductive. There is a dark, damaging side to most athletics. There is a
protective side to Yoga...There is a process to be observed, of course. If you
are a beginner and go into a class where the teacher tells you to stand on your
head, RUN. First you need to learn to stand on your feet.”
She does do
headstands, by the way. In fact, as teacher of the advanced class, she must both
examine/ teach her own body as well as the others in the class. “I’m standing on
my own head, thinking about my body, how it feels and what I need to do, while I
bark out orders to the others in the class.” When asked her about how Yoga
affects her daily life, she said, “It’s on par with breathing. Look, it’s like
taking a bath, it’s basically hygiene. The days I don’t do Yoga, I can tell, my
body can tell.”
In 1973, after more than 20 years of exploring various
kinds of Yoga, Emmy went to a demonstration given by a 26 year old Yogi named
Bikram Choudhury. ‘I was fascinated by the energy and precision of his
demonstration.’ Bikram began reteaching Emmy everything she had learned. ‘We
argued, we really argued. I had done Yoga for a long time, none of it the way he
demanded it be done…’The posture is not the object,’ he would say, ‘your
body is the object.’ I began to get very frustrated. And that heat! I said,
‘Bikram, if you’d turn down the stupid heat, this room would be much more full.’
He said, ‘An empty barn is better than a barn full of naughty cows.’” After
visiting India and discovering that many medical research centers there did the
postures Bikram’s way, she returned to Beverly Hills and immersed herself in
Bikram’s logic of his 26 specifically designed postures, intended to tone the
endocrine, lymphatic and digestive systems, increase blood flow, expand the
lungs and produce a strong and limber musculoskeletal system. To attain the
benefits of this series, the sequence of the postures is paramount, which is why
Emmy defends Bikram’s controversial decision to copyright his method. ‘If you
take the formula for penicillin and leave out one of the ingredients, you no
longer have penicillin.’
As for her inimitable teaching style? “I believe
in giving physiological instruction in the class as well as physical
instruction. It helps the body learn. Bikram and I argue constantly about my
style. He wants me to teach more like him. He yells at me, I yell at him. But
Bikram himself used to give a lot of that information and it is important... I
never do advance planning. The bodies give me the information I need to teach
the class; I simply react to what I see. This occurs on both a physical and a
mental level; each class has its own physical and spiritual energy. I teach to
what I see. Sometimes people come up to me afterwards and ask, ‘How did you know
I needed to hear that?’ The bodies tell me.”
I think my favorite memory
of Emmy will be the first class she taught our group. You all remember…it was
the first class where the side doors didn’t open, even after they carried out
that poor girl who fainted. I could sense all of us thinking, ‘Emmy has to open
the doors now!’ Emmy, however, just asked for her to be carried out (“Oh, for
God's sake, somebody hold her head up”) and the class continued. And the doors
stayed closed. Remember the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan? I
don’t know what it was like in the women’s locker room, but the men’s locker
room looked like the surviving cast after that Normandy Invasion. There was none
of the usual joking and laughing that goes on. Heads drooped, guys stumbled
around, there was just a lot of grumbling and near silent muttering. But I think
it is more than safe to say she has earned our intense respect and
admiration.
The beauty of Bikram Yoga is made continually apparent to
Emmy, through the many therapeutic miracles she has witnessed in the 30 years
she has taught it, with remediation of Type 2 diabetes among them. Emmy herself
has witnessed it in her body, from recovery from a devastating brain hemorrhage,
similar to the one who killed her father, to being able to eliminate various
types of medication she was told she would have to take for the rest of her
life, including thyroid medication. “What gives me such pleasure is that I am
able to share this potential to better people’s lives and to heal whatever is
not working for them,’ she says. ‘That is the ultimate accomplishment of my life
and will be to the end of it.’
Emmy, by the way, is not in her early
60’s, as I thought when I first saw her. Word is she is 81. She finally found
her mother in the 1960’s, whom she was then able to bring to the USA. Her mother
lived to be over 100. Let’s hope Emmy is around at least that
long.