I'm hoping that I'm inviting empowerment for each student in the service of the great yoga question, "Who am I?" ~ Annie Carpenter
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Annie Carpenter — a the star on the vibrant Los Angeles yoga scene for over twenty years and now at the center of the Bay Area yoga community — is an extraordinary teacher of tremendous insight, passion and joy. Register now to spend an afternoon doing yoga with one of our most inspiring teachers. All levels welcome.
One recent, crisp fall afternoon, MYoga Director Ann Dyer met with Annie Carpenter on Piedmont Ave to sip hot chocolate and talk yoga. Here's what they had to say:
ANN: I was looking at your website — it's always so interesting reading about somebody else's life! — and it's really apparent that while you did different things in your life, there's a strong through-line of creativity, a very passionate curiosity and desire to help people transform. From the time you started out as a dancer in New York with Martha Graham; then teaching at and attending Butler University where you experimented with different movement therapies earning your degree in Marriage and Family counseling; finding refuge from the intensity of the New York dance scene at Integral yoga with Swami Satchadananda; making your way to L.A. where you became a major force in an |
exploding California yoga scene; studying Iyengar Yoga, and then ashtanga with Pattabha Jois; and then moving here, to the Bay Area, where you are now central figure on the scene with your sold out teacher trainings. And in all of that, developing your own take own yoga, SmartFlow. Pretty darn impressive!
ANNIE: You really read all that? I didn't think anyone read that stuff!
ANN: I read it, and I hung on every word!
ANNIE: Well, I'll tell you that the through-line is really clear looking back, especially as I transitioned from dance to yoga, when I knew I was done performing but I was still teaching dance. The dancers in my advance modern class on Fridays started asking "Can we skip modern dance this afternoon Annie and do yoga instead, because we're tired!" And one of the things that, frankly, I'm embracing more and more in my yoga life and yoga teaching is if we don't rest and integrate and rest again, it's all for naught. So on Friday afternoons, in the advanced modern dance class at Butler University, the students would say, "please can we do yoga?" and I'd send the pianist home and we'd do yoga. That was the segue, and it wasn't an instant it was years. But that's what I was doing at home yoga. I wasn't going to dance class every day. I was doing yoga everyday. It's really hard to teach that which doesn't serve me anymore, right? Dance had been my daily daily daily and yoga was sort of on the side, and then yoga became my daily daily and dance sort of faded, and so it didn't make sense for me to teach dance anymore.
ANN: And I can sense that looking at your history. I'm guessing that all those experiences, and all the knowledge you got from these various sources, came together in the creation of your trademark approach to teaching yoga, SmartFlow.
ANNIE: Absolutely.
ANN: The thing that strikes me SmartFLOW, is that the name sort of implies that perhaps at the time you were putting it together you were seeing a lot of yoga you didn't feel was so smart! What was the "smart" in Smart Flow at the time you were creating it? What were you thinking about at that time?
ANNIE: Well, I think there's three things that have always been really, really interesting to me about movement. And one is the obvious idea of putting things together in a special way, which we call Vinyasa Krama — really having a smart sequence. It's very hard for me to be random. For better or for worse random is not a thing that I do. Well, except when I'm walking in the woods!
ANN: Which I also want to talk about!
ANNIE: Smart sequencing, and really having a sense of an overarching intention for what we're going to be playing with on any given day. What the focus is, and then that carries and hopefully advances the practice in a way you can understand more deeply, more subtly, with more curiosity through a path of exploration. I think this is what I mean by smart.
Also I have been an anatomy geek since in college. I studied pre-med anatomy. I just I love the stuff. I love the body and so I continued to study in order to have an informed understanding of the structure of the body that comes through in my classes. And then, lastly, I just feel like what's really smart is developing an intuitive intelligence about who I am, and who each student is, so that there's not this imposition of "what good yoga is or looks like." What is the intelligence of each individual student? I'm hoping that I'm inviting empowerment for each student to say, "Oh, this is who I am today. And this is the way I need to modify or adapt. So that the EVOLVING intelligence is in the service of the great yoga question, "Who am I?"
ANN: Exactly. So every practice is bringing each individual into more intimacy with self instead of being fracturing. As an anatomy geek, what do you think about this "anti-alignment" trend you mentioned earlier — what's that all about?
ANNIE: Well, I think it may have been brought out by the #me too movement — which I frankly applaud. Also, in the yoga scenes of the older Indian teachers that many of us have studied with and loved— including Pattabhi Jois and Iyengar — there was actual sexual exploitation, or just old-school patriarchy, not just against women being empowered, but like this sense of a paternalistic dynasty. I think that everyone is looking at "what is this tradition? What is this great history of Yoga?", and that IS really helpful. What is the stuff that we can actually throw out now?
I love that we're asking those questions. That said, it's concerning for me that alignment is being tossed out — you know, the baby/bathwater piece — because I think that fewer and fewer teachers are adhering to the idea that everyone should have the same alignment. For example, "second Warrior: the notion everyone should have a right angle in the knee," that's just that's so 1990s! Most of us really have recognized that each person's anatomy is rather unique, that the pelvis has to face slightly differently in the externally rotated poses etc. And if indeed people are stuck in the "everyone should look the same way" mode, then yes, throw it out.
Having a sense of alignment is also a source of inquiry, a way that helps us know when we feel compression, when we feel unstable, when we're no longer feeling good. Can you pay attention to grounding your big toe? Can you pay attention to that, now? I do believe that one of the reasons at my age — and after all these years of practice and pretty strong dance training — that I still have my original hips and other parts, is that I really have concerned myself with alignment. I mean, maybe it's lucky birth also. I think if you want to live well and feel strong and be able to play when you're 60, 70, 80, 90+ then a concern and interest in alignment is healthy.
ANN: I think the yoga world is experiencing a sort of democratization, similar to what's happening in the world at large, where the there is more power for the individual. It feels to me that the early yoga culture in America was oriented toward exclusivity — a focus the exceptional, the isolated siddhi living in the cave....
ANNIE: And only males need apply, and only beautiful bodies need apply, and only exceptional performers need apply!
ANN: That's really turned around.
ANNIE: Thank goodness.
ANN: …and with the shifting toward being more inclusive the alignment question has become less absolute. We recognize there are a range of alignments that may be suitable to any given pelvis, and at the same time, there are principles of alignment — like you're saying — that apply to everyone. It goes back to your original statement of being clear on your intention for your practice. What are we doing here? Are we making shapes or are we doing a practice that opens us to ourselves?
ANNIE: Are we being kind? Does it feel good? And do I have a sense of self?
ANN: Yeah…when you're asserting dominion over your body, you know, 90 minutes of that and you're not going to feel too great!
ANNIE: Especially day in and day out! I also like the idea that getting really specific and well-placed, well-timed alignment queuing keeps us awake in each moment of our practice. It's a way of staying awake. My favorite word for that is presencing. I think otherwise a lot of us will start thinking about lunch instead of trikonasana, even though we're doing trikonasana. It's a really important key to the deeper experience of yoga.
ANN: You have such an amazing physical practice, Annie, but you also have equal knowledge and mastery of the deep yogic practices of meditation and pranayama. You talk about yoga as being a way to "steady one's mind on what is actually happening in the moment in order to be able to discern who we are and what is real." I can’t think of a time when that was more threatened than right now, can you?
ANNIE: I'm reading a book right now that is supposed to help us deal with attention, "The Attention Economy." Because our attention gets stolen in so many ways, that we don't have any for this moment.
ANN: I want to go back for a second to your time in LA when yoga was really exploding, and it was an amazing time...
ANNIE: Yeah, it was an amazing time! I feel very lucky and blessed to have landed in LA in the early 90s and welcomed into that really rarefied world. It was in early days of Yoga Works, and was really great because I had stopped performing and still I had this beast of a body that wanted to do a lot of strong movement. So I sort of replaced the dance with yoga, and it worked perfectly for me to drop into this community of very committed yogi's, most of whom were practicing together. So it was it was like a home that I hadn't had in a long long time, a community, a tribe.
ANN: Was there something about the tone or the nature of the yoga culture that was giving you something that the dance culture didn't?
ANNIE: Absolutely. I'm actually sort of a scaredy-cat — and definitely an introvert — and so I really had to steel myself to deal with the New York dance scene. There were so many talented, hungry young dancers showing up in New York every year, and though I was talented I didn't have the ambition so many did. I feel lucky that I got the opportunities I did. In some yoga circles in L.A. there was a lot of drive, but not the competition. I got to see a lot of people doing amazing things, and I was like, "Whoa, I want to do that too!" We sort of spurred each other on. That was the big difference from the New York scene, there was no goal — no job, no next gig, no Dance Company audition. It was just what we loved to do. So that was really sweet.
What is interesting looking back, is that my I had pretty strong practice at that time, but that wasn't what I taught. Maty's vision —my boss at that time — was to only gave me level 1 classes to teach for my first two years of my teaching full time. Boy, did that trained me how to break poses down! Then after a couple of years she gave me Level1-2, and then after a couple of years she gave me 2-3's, and so on. By the end I as teaching more intermediate classes, but I always kept one beginner class because I knew it was good for me to teach. I think that's why I know how to teach, and why I know how to teach teachers, because of that very disciplined teaching I went through. "We start with this..."
ANN: Since that time both the world at large and yoga world have changed a lot. I'm curious, what observations do you have about how yoga has changed, how your teaching has changed, and how the needs of students have changed over the years?
ANNIE: My view at the end of the day is we're all just looking for a way to accept what is and find meaning in that. I do have more and more older students – when I say older, I mean older than me! — who are really interested in keeping their body strong as they age. I think one of the biggest changes I've seen is more middle-aged and older students wanting to do yoga that's not only gentle yoga. I've nothing against gentle yoga —God knows we need it! — but I am really delighted that more and more people as they age have the sense that staying strong, or that getting strong again, is the way to age gracefully, happily, less painfully... We want to be able to play in our eighties and nineties. We're living a long time, and we need to stay strong.
ANN: It's wonderful to see students who are not only reclaiming strength and dexterity, but often doing things in class for the first time in their life!
ANNIE: It's really great. One of my favorite quotes is “The opposite of aging is being adventurous."
ANN: We have a programming initiative at Mountain Yoga called "BOOMING: Living Large in the Third Third." It grew out some recent studies and writings about middle age pointing out that people of our generation are not going to go quietly into the night — this is a generation of do-ers. Right or wrong, we're going to ride into the sunset with the top down and the wind in our hair --
ANNIE: Yeah, baby! (giggles)
ANN: I think many people may not know what a great sense of humor you have — do you feel like humor has a role in yoga?
ANNIE: I do! I I feel like humor has a role in everything, and in particular anything that we do on a regular basis. We can get really serious about the stuff we do day in and day out, and we can get dull. I think one of the great antidotes to dullness is humor and laughter.
ANN: .... laughing — it’s like a little samadhi. All my most influential teachers were all funny as hell! Any advice for someone stepping into a yoga studio for the first time?
ANNIE: It's tempting to think that you're going to get the results quickly from yoga, and and while you probably will feel good after each class, the real effects of yoga come after months, well, really, years. Also, I think it's important to look at what's serving you, and be OK with letting go of yoga that isn't working for you anymore — the same as in our relationships. Seeing a relationship that's really not serving either person and letting go. So seeing, as I have had to do, that that's what I needed in my twenties, that's that I needed my forties, this is what I need now.. the big picture of finding peace, physically and otherwise, emotionally, mentally, spiritually... that's a big gift that has come over the years.
ANN: Last question. Inspiration is sort of keyword at Mountain Yoga. What inspires you right now?
ANNIE: Well, I do have two new kittens!! Hazel and Jojo. They're all black with big golden eyes, and they are the light of my life. And I'm a bird watcher. There's something about letting the randomness of what bird is going to show up during a walk, and being willing to just stop, be still, to lift the binoculars and watch a bird do what it does for 15 minutes and having no control over the moment. You begin to recognize the differences between birds of the same species, individual variations… all my concerns fade away.
ANNIE: You really read all that? I didn't think anyone read that stuff!
ANN: I read it, and I hung on every word!
ANNIE: Well, I'll tell you that the through-line is really clear looking back, especially as I transitioned from dance to yoga, when I knew I was done performing but I was still teaching dance. The dancers in my advance modern class on Fridays started asking "Can we skip modern dance this afternoon Annie and do yoga instead, because we're tired!" And one of the things that, frankly, I'm embracing more and more in my yoga life and yoga teaching is if we don't rest and integrate and rest again, it's all for naught. So on Friday afternoons, in the advanced modern dance class at Butler University, the students would say, "please can we do yoga?" and I'd send the pianist home and we'd do yoga. That was the segue, and it wasn't an instant it was years. But that's what I was doing at home yoga. I wasn't going to dance class every day. I was doing yoga everyday. It's really hard to teach that which doesn't serve me anymore, right? Dance had been my daily daily daily and yoga was sort of on the side, and then yoga became my daily daily and dance sort of faded, and so it didn't make sense for me to teach dance anymore.
ANN: And I can sense that looking at your history. I'm guessing that all those experiences, and all the knowledge you got from these various sources, came together in the creation of your trademark approach to teaching yoga, SmartFlow.
ANNIE: Absolutely.
ANN: The thing that strikes me SmartFLOW, is that the name sort of implies that perhaps at the time you were putting it together you were seeing a lot of yoga you didn't feel was so smart! What was the "smart" in Smart Flow at the time you were creating it? What were you thinking about at that time?
ANNIE: Well, I think there's three things that have always been really, really interesting to me about movement. And one is the obvious idea of putting things together in a special way, which we call Vinyasa Krama — really having a smart sequence. It's very hard for me to be random. For better or for worse random is not a thing that I do. Well, except when I'm walking in the woods!
ANN: Which I also want to talk about!
ANNIE: Smart sequencing, and really having a sense of an overarching intention for what we're going to be playing with on any given day. What the focus is, and then that carries and hopefully advances the practice in a way you can understand more deeply, more subtly, with more curiosity through a path of exploration. I think this is what I mean by smart.
Also I have been an anatomy geek since in college. I studied pre-med anatomy. I just I love the stuff. I love the body and so I continued to study in order to have an informed understanding of the structure of the body that comes through in my classes. And then, lastly, I just feel like what's really smart is developing an intuitive intelligence about who I am, and who each student is, so that there's not this imposition of "what good yoga is or looks like." What is the intelligence of each individual student? I'm hoping that I'm inviting empowerment for each student to say, "Oh, this is who I am today. And this is the way I need to modify or adapt. So that the EVOLVING intelligence is in the service of the great yoga question, "Who am I?"
ANN: Exactly. So every practice is bringing each individual into more intimacy with self instead of being fracturing. As an anatomy geek, what do you think about this "anti-alignment" trend you mentioned earlier — what's that all about?
ANNIE: Well, I think it may have been brought out by the #me too movement — which I frankly applaud. Also, in the yoga scenes of the older Indian teachers that many of us have studied with and loved— including Pattabhi Jois and Iyengar — there was actual sexual exploitation, or just old-school patriarchy, not just against women being empowered, but like this sense of a paternalistic dynasty. I think that everyone is looking at "what is this tradition? What is this great history of Yoga?", and that IS really helpful. What is the stuff that we can actually throw out now?
I love that we're asking those questions. That said, it's concerning for me that alignment is being tossed out — you know, the baby/bathwater piece — because I think that fewer and fewer teachers are adhering to the idea that everyone should have the same alignment. For example, "second Warrior: the notion everyone should have a right angle in the knee," that's just that's so 1990s! Most of us really have recognized that each person's anatomy is rather unique, that the pelvis has to face slightly differently in the externally rotated poses etc. And if indeed people are stuck in the "everyone should look the same way" mode, then yes, throw it out.
Having a sense of alignment is also a source of inquiry, a way that helps us know when we feel compression, when we feel unstable, when we're no longer feeling good. Can you pay attention to grounding your big toe? Can you pay attention to that, now? I do believe that one of the reasons at my age — and after all these years of practice and pretty strong dance training — that I still have my original hips and other parts, is that I really have concerned myself with alignment. I mean, maybe it's lucky birth also. I think if you want to live well and feel strong and be able to play when you're 60, 70, 80, 90+ then a concern and interest in alignment is healthy.
ANN: I think the yoga world is experiencing a sort of democratization, similar to what's happening in the world at large, where the there is more power for the individual. It feels to me that the early yoga culture in America was oriented toward exclusivity — a focus the exceptional, the isolated siddhi living in the cave....
ANNIE: And only males need apply, and only beautiful bodies need apply, and only exceptional performers need apply!
ANN: That's really turned around.
ANNIE: Thank goodness.
ANN: …and with the shifting toward being more inclusive the alignment question has become less absolute. We recognize there are a range of alignments that may be suitable to any given pelvis, and at the same time, there are principles of alignment — like you're saying — that apply to everyone. It goes back to your original statement of being clear on your intention for your practice. What are we doing here? Are we making shapes or are we doing a practice that opens us to ourselves?
ANNIE: Are we being kind? Does it feel good? And do I have a sense of self?
ANN: Yeah…when you're asserting dominion over your body, you know, 90 minutes of that and you're not going to feel too great!
ANNIE: Especially day in and day out! I also like the idea that getting really specific and well-placed, well-timed alignment queuing keeps us awake in each moment of our practice. It's a way of staying awake. My favorite word for that is presencing. I think otherwise a lot of us will start thinking about lunch instead of trikonasana, even though we're doing trikonasana. It's a really important key to the deeper experience of yoga.
ANN: You have such an amazing physical practice, Annie, but you also have equal knowledge and mastery of the deep yogic practices of meditation and pranayama. You talk about yoga as being a way to "steady one's mind on what is actually happening in the moment in order to be able to discern who we are and what is real." I can’t think of a time when that was more threatened than right now, can you?
ANNIE: I'm reading a book right now that is supposed to help us deal with attention, "The Attention Economy." Because our attention gets stolen in so many ways, that we don't have any for this moment.
ANN: I want to go back for a second to your time in LA when yoga was really exploding, and it was an amazing time...
ANNIE: Yeah, it was an amazing time! I feel very lucky and blessed to have landed in LA in the early 90s and welcomed into that really rarefied world. It was in early days of Yoga Works, and was really great because I had stopped performing and still I had this beast of a body that wanted to do a lot of strong movement. So I sort of replaced the dance with yoga, and it worked perfectly for me to drop into this community of very committed yogi's, most of whom were practicing together. So it was it was like a home that I hadn't had in a long long time, a community, a tribe.
ANN: Was there something about the tone or the nature of the yoga culture that was giving you something that the dance culture didn't?
ANNIE: Absolutely. I'm actually sort of a scaredy-cat — and definitely an introvert — and so I really had to steel myself to deal with the New York dance scene. There were so many talented, hungry young dancers showing up in New York every year, and though I was talented I didn't have the ambition so many did. I feel lucky that I got the opportunities I did. In some yoga circles in L.A. there was a lot of drive, but not the competition. I got to see a lot of people doing amazing things, and I was like, "Whoa, I want to do that too!" We sort of spurred each other on. That was the big difference from the New York scene, there was no goal — no job, no next gig, no Dance Company audition. It was just what we loved to do. So that was really sweet.
What is interesting looking back, is that my I had pretty strong practice at that time, but that wasn't what I taught. Maty's vision —my boss at that time — was to only gave me level 1 classes to teach for my first two years of my teaching full time. Boy, did that trained me how to break poses down! Then after a couple of years she gave me Level1-2, and then after a couple of years she gave me 2-3's, and so on. By the end I as teaching more intermediate classes, but I always kept one beginner class because I knew it was good for me to teach. I think that's why I know how to teach, and why I know how to teach teachers, because of that very disciplined teaching I went through. "We start with this..."
ANN: Since that time both the world at large and yoga world have changed a lot. I'm curious, what observations do you have about how yoga has changed, how your teaching has changed, and how the needs of students have changed over the years?
ANNIE: My view at the end of the day is we're all just looking for a way to accept what is and find meaning in that. I do have more and more older students – when I say older, I mean older than me! — who are really interested in keeping their body strong as they age. I think one of the biggest changes I've seen is more middle-aged and older students wanting to do yoga that's not only gentle yoga. I've nothing against gentle yoga —God knows we need it! — but I am really delighted that more and more people as they age have the sense that staying strong, or that getting strong again, is the way to age gracefully, happily, less painfully... We want to be able to play in our eighties and nineties. We're living a long time, and we need to stay strong.
ANN: It's wonderful to see students who are not only reclaiming strength and dexterity, but often doing things in class for the first time in their life!
ANNIE: It's really great. One of my favorite quotes is “The opposite of aging is being adventurous."
ANN: We have a programming initiative at Mountain Yoga called "BOOMING: Living Large in the Third Third." It grew out some recent studies and writings about middle age pointing out that people of our generation are not going to go quietly into the night — this is a generation of do-ers. Right or wrong, we're going to ride into the sunset with the top down and the wind in our hair --
ANNIE: Yeah, baby! (giggles)
ANN: I think many people may not know what a great sense of humor you have — do you feel like humor has a role in yoga?
ANNIE: I do! I I feel like humor has a role in everything, and in particular anything that we do on a regular basis. We can get really serious about the stuff we do day in and day out, and we can get dull. I think one of the great antidotes to dullness is humor and laughter.
ANN: .... laughing — it’s like a little samadhi. All my most influential teachers were all funny as hell! Any advice for someone stepping into a yoga studio for the first time?
ANNIE: It's tempting to think that you're going to get the results quickly from yoga, and and while you probably will feel good after each class, the real effects of yoga come after months, well, really, years. Also, I think it's important to look at what's serving you, and be OK with letting go of yoga that isn't working for you anymore — the same as in our relationships. Seeing a relationship that's really not serving either person and letting go. So seeing, as I have had to do, that that's what I needed in my twenties, that's that I needed my forties, this is what I need now.. the big picture of finding peace, physically and otherwise, emotionally, mentally, spiritually... that's a big gift that has come over the years.
ANN: Last question. Inspiration is sort of keyword at Mountain Yoga. What inspires you right now?
ANNIE: Well, I do have two new kittens!! Hazel and Jojo. They're all black with big golden eyes, and they are the light of my life. And I'm a bird watcher. There's something about letting the randomness of what bird is going to show up during a walk, and being willing to just stop, be still, to lift the binoculars and watch a bird do what it does for 15 minutes and having no control over the moment. You begin to recognize the differences between birds of the same species, individual variations… all my concerns fade away.