Washington College, The Yoga Cave — Go in the front door of the Life Fitness Center, take a right, go downstairs, take a left, go straight back, and there you will find the lair of Lex, a.k.a, the yoga cave.
It’s a spacious room decorated with yoga posters, in the middle of which sits Lex, a super fit blonde with glacially clear blue eyes, behind which about a million watts of energy seems to be surging pretty much full time. No kidding. If Chestertown ever suffers a major blackout, all we need do is wire Lex as a human generator, and I’m sure she could heat and light the entire town with voltage to spare.
Her teacher is Beryl Bender Birch, author of Power Yoga. Lex teaches Ashtanga yoga, where the idea is to heat up the body and sweat. (Not to be confused with hot yoga, where people throw up and pass out.)
I caught up with Lex in the toasty yoga cave earlier this week, and asked her to expound on yoga.
SPY: What is your personal approach to teaching yoga?
LEX: People come to yoga for a myriad of reasons, and they get a myriad of benefits. But sometimes we take it all so seriously that we start to drown in it. We really inhibit ourselves as adults, so I try to bring humor and lightness to the class so that my students can do it almost as an experiment.
My job here is to facilitate change, and I have no idea what that change will be—nor do I need to know. I may never even see it on the outside, although typically I do.
Recently, a student asked me, “what’s the trick?” She had finally nailed one posture and figured there was some magic way to nail them all.
“The trick,” I said, “is to give up looking for the trick.”
I love teaching yoga to performance athletes. They’re used to doing a repetitive action to produce a piece of skilled performance in some arena. In yoga, you don’t get that kind of instant return, so for them it can be frustrating. Lance Armstrong is one of my Facebook friends, and he’s been doing yoga to prepare for the Tour de France next year. Last week he posted: “Just came back from another yoga class. Damn it.”
SPY: Is expecting an instant return a particularly western attitude?
LEX: It really is. To get results in yoga, you have to make an investment over time, and we’re not used to putting in that kind of sustained effort.
Years ago I was in Tibet and Bhutan on a mountaineering expedition trek, and the mountain Buddhists would find us so humorous. The western approach is one of expectation: what am I going to get out of this? It’s looking for something out there to provide us with the experience we want. The eastern approach is one of intention: what am I going to do right now to make this (intention) happen?
SPY: (with a slightly confused look on her face) Umm . . .
LEX: For example: a student wants to do a backbend. Her expectation is, “will I get a backbend out of this semester?” She’s looking out there for the backbend to come to her. Compare that approach to setting an intention, which might be, “I’m going to practice x,y,z, everyday to increase my flexibility.” Expectation and intention are separate things.
SPY: You have a broad spectrum in your classes, from Washington College students to various people in the community. How does that work?
LEX: When I started doing yoga, it was disconcerting at first to be in a class where the ages could range from 16 to 70. But everyone’s body is different, and we are all on our own path. In teacher training with Beryl Bender Birch, we would sit around in a circle and share every ache and pain until it sounded like we’re all at the edge of total collapse, and then Beryl would say, “okay, it doesn’t matter. This is all impermanent. Let’s do yoga.”
SPY: You’re also teaching meditation. What’s that like?
LEX: I’m having so much fun teaching this really short meditation class. The group is finally at a point where it doesn’t matter! They’ve reached that place where they can step outside of it all. Truly, not judging yourself is the hardest thing you will ever do.
It’s such and honor watching people work and evolve.
SPY: You’ve studied with several internationally known teachers: Beryl Bender Birch, David Swenson, David Williams, Barbara Benagh, and Rod Stryker.
LEX: And part of my job is sharing the understanding that those of us who teach yoga are just students walking the path. We are all paying homage to the teachers who came before us.
Yoga is a 5,000 year-old tradition of great depth. Yoga means: yoking the mind to the body and the breath, and ultimately to the spirit. We’ve created some confusion in the west about yoga, combining asanas with push-ups, etc. That’s not yoga, that’s exercising. As Beryl would tell her yoga students at the New York Road Runners Club in Manhattan, “this is not a stretch class.”
I’ve always loved learning, and you learn the most from the elders because they’ve done life. It’s simple: the longer you’ve lived, the more experiences you’ve had, and the more you know.
With that Lex stood up and pulled on a yellow sweater. The blond hair, the dewy skin, the sparkling blue eyes: I thought she was like a walking light switch, or like the glo stick app on my iSpyPhone™. She was on her way to teach a private lesson, with [sigh] energy to spare.
ALEXA “LEX” FRY, M.Ed, holds the E-RYT 500 level certification with the National Yoga Alliance. She is a graduate of The Hard and The Soft Yoga Institute. She directs Missing Link Yoga and Pilates. For information about local classes, email Lex at, [email protected]
Joanne Ghio says
When I moved to Chestertown from Baltimore, I was worried about how I would continue my yoga practice. After my first class with Lex, I knew that was not a problem. She is a wonderful teacher who inspires and encourages her students. Not only do I learn from her “on the mat,” but also take that learning into my daily life. We are very fortunate to have Lex in our community.
Judy Crow says
Two years ago my friends were going to yoga with Lex, and suggested that I should join them. I had been to yoga in years past, and found it too slow for me and I thought not nearly as athletic as running or tennis. Well, tennis and running have become a past time and I am working hard to be present with yoga. Just when I thought that I was of an age to have everything figured out I found yoga and realized work had only begun. My life is transforming in and out of her class.