the habit of being

Amazingly, only a year ago, the studio where I work still rented a reception room at the Church of the Holy City - a beautiful room with big open windows on three sides and dark creaky wood floors. On Sundays, we’d have to kick old Mexican women having tea in their stockings and hats out of there so we could start class on time. Sometimes at night there were loud revivals with live music, the Gospel in Spanish blaring over a microphone out of the sactuary with its stained glass and impossibly high ceiling, into the yoga room, drowning out our pseudo-Indian Krishna Das and Deva Premal CDs.

Couples came in wanting to know how much it cost to rent the chapel for their wedding, and I’d have to explain that I didn’t actually work for the church, but since there was no other authority figure there, I’d show them around. The windows. The spiral staircases. Sometimes drunk homeless men came in looking for the minister. One such fellow walked past me at the desk and right into the middle of a yoga class, asking for coffee. Then there was “the stroker,” who liked to reveal himself outside the windows for all the lovely yoginis to see. And the kids who just threw rocks, leaving shards of glass to pepper our sticky mats.

The “boutique” was a rolling rack of logo tee shirts and yoga pants that always collapsed halfway between the closet where it was stored and the office, which was a library of old misogynist religous texts with a large desk. We kept a “change owed” log for clients when we ran out of small bills, and we kept people’s class histories on a rolodex. Sometimes in the winter the heat wouldn’t come on and we’d practice in 40 degree weather, and in summer we had bug spray available at the front desk. We made tea using water from the bathroom sink. We had to work the class times around the church schedule, but at maximum it was about twenty a week, and they were almost all packed.

I became the Assistant to the Director just as we signed the lease on what we then called the New Space - a permanent home with two studios, a tea lounge, a real office and boutique. The plan had been to move in January first, 2003. It took until June.

Getting a Certificate of Occupancy in the District of Columbia is not an easy thing. We had electrical inspections, plumbing inspections, fire inspections. They made us build new walls, install new doors, new toilets, a new “mop sink.” We had to clean, paint, build, decorate, transfer years of files into our new computer database, a program called OmSoft (straight out of California and especially for yoga studios, it’s as flakey and unreliable as you could possibly imagine). There were massive trips to Target, Linens and Things, Walmart, hundreds of dollars spent. It was a time of constant transit between the church, where we were still operating business, the owner’s home, and the New Space, where we were setting up everything as fast as we could, only to run into more and more problems with the building that needed to be addressed.

My boss and I broke down in tears together. I hauled bottled water from the New Space to the Church in my old hitch-hiking backpack, covered with signatures from around the country, and they’d fall out and roll down the street. She called me at all hours of the day; insisted I have a cell phone. I was making eight bucks an hour and could barely pay my rent. We held teacher training and workshops at the Space on the sly. It was so long between our “Open House” party and the time we were actually cleared to open for business, we had to have another one. But, somehow, with our gay male yogis trying to be manly and build us shoe racks, me with my pink hair even pinker from all the pastel paint going up on the walls, Kimberly holding back tears while talking to the DC government on the phone, it all worked out. Though in many ways things only got more stressful from there.

Now there are over 40 classes a week, many more students, programs and teams and managers and policies too numerous to count. We were mentioned in Lucky magazine last month. Students keep bar codes on their key chains, which we zap with scanners to sign them in. Teachers are starting to plug their iPods into our stereo systems to use favorite playlists during class. Things have changed so much, and though I’ve had a role to play in the studio’s success, it just makes me sad sometimes to see it become so obviously a business.

Yoga is supposed to be a “union with the divine,” not a commodity surrounded by promotional materials and overpriced clothes. I thought working for a yoga studio would take me just about as far from a corporate or capitalist environment as possible (while still earning me a paycheck), and to a large degree that is still true and always will be. All this time, my work day has begun with brewing herbal tea. I’m not allowed to wear shoes in my office. We’ve donated to countless charitable causes. Everyone who comes in knows my name. At the same time, one can’t escape the reality that we’re playing the same game as every other company out there. The game just seems lot more ironic in the yoga business.