Chris Yonker doesn’t teach yoga with music. “Anybody can be a DJ,” she said. “Anybody can put on Michael Jackson and then do yoga to it.”
She said some of the yoga offered today is traditional, but some is more modern.
“So that’s where it’s gone astray,” Yonker said. People have taken it as their own and added what they project on it, out of aerobics, or Jane Fonda Workout or whatever they’ve been doing, so the waters have been muddied.”
Yonker teaches a more traditional, Hatha Yoga, at her Richmond Heights studio, St. Louis Yoga Source, at 1500 S. Big Bend. An approximately 20 additional teachers also teach hot yoga and other forms, from beginning to advanced.
She described yoga as a centering, “It’s a direction to the breath, and then movement to warm the body. You go up to an arc, where you’re doing stronger poses, then you come back down, then you end up in relaxation, which is the beginning of meditation for most people.”
She said yoga began as a form of meditation.
“Back in those days (when people first started doing yoga), it was an agrarian society, everyone worked their ass off, so they didn’t need to exercise,” she said. “They just needed to have quiet meditation time. But now people sit in chairs, we do all the things we do, and so we need some skillful ways of moving out of habit that get stuck in our body in the form of tension. So that is what yoga has become today.”
Yonker took her first yoga class in 1971 when she was taking dance at Wash U. “I was a modern dancer, and I had a teacher say, ‘you need to take yoga, you need to relax.’ I had been trained as a classical ballet dancer. I didn’t know how to relax.” She learned how to teach yoga in Lenox, MA, in 1992 and opened her studio in 1993.
She said yoga is meant to balance body, mind and spirit. “It’s a way of living. It’s a way of thinking. It’s a way of being in the world. It’s also a way of exercising your body to release tensions that your habitual daily life created.”