First Lady of Yoga
Yoga is many things to many people: a workout, a spiritual discipline, a mental and physical challenge and – for some – a legacy. No one has been teaching yoga in northern Michigan, or perhaps even the entire state, for as long as Sandra Carden. The 68-year-old yoga instructor opened Traverse City’s first yoga studio, Union Yoga, in 1989 and, since then, the profusion of yoga studios, workshops and culture in the area has been no coincidence. The majority of the instructors teaching and practicing in northern Michigan trained with Carden and the cumulative positive effects of her work can be seen across the region. The Express sat down to talk with this pioneer while what she believes will be her last masters level class winds down.
Express: How many teachers have you trained who work in northern Michigan right now?
Carden: Work? I would probably guess about"¦I think we’ve graduated maybe 150, so – they’ve been small classes, no larger than 15, 16 people – I would guess that there probably are maybe 50 or 60 currently teaching. Some have retired; some took the teacher training not to teach at all, just to get a better, higher education.
Express: How did you transition from running a yoga studio to being a teacher of yoga teachers?
Carden: In the mid "˜90s, I was teaching 18 classes a week. I was still the only studio in town and I really needed some other teachers in the studio so that I wouldn’t have to teach all of the classes. So I kind of mulled that over and some of my students said, "˜Well, why don’t you train us to teach?’ The first class, I think I had maybe eight people and that was in 1997, and so I’ve been doing that ever since.
Northern Express: Your interest in yoga goes back quite a ways, doesn’t it?
Sandra Carden: I first heard about yoga in probably 1966 and started practicing in about 1970.
Express: You’ve seen yoga go from obscure to the mainstream.
Carden: The only way to learn back then was from a book. There were no yoga workshops. The first time I heard that term, my husband and I were living in British Columbia and I was invited to a yoga workshop. That was ’72, probably. I was practicing from a book and a friend of mine invited me to a workshop with the person who became my teacher and my husband’s teacher. That was a weekend workshop. His name is Joel Kramer and, as it happened when we moved to Traverse City, Joel Kramer had already been here several times and taught workshops here.
Express: What brought you from Vancouver, B.C., to northern Michigan?
Carden: My husband, Field, and I grew up in Detroit. We were away from Michigan, living in British Columbia, Washington and Colorado for almost 10 years. We came back for a visit to Glen Arbor, where my mother was living. We have been back for a long time, ever since ’78.
Express: What was the state of yoga in northern Michigan back then?
Carden: Well, Joel Kramer had been here, I think since ’74, returning annually for workshops. I had no idea. My mother was here. We came for a visit with our two little kids and my mother was showing us around Traverse City and Leelanau County. She took us to NMC and there, in the main lobby, was a poster for a workshop with Joel Kramer. So you ask me about the state of the yoga community here? There were 25 people at that workshop for 2 weeks. It was alive and well then.
When the Cardens, who met in high school, moved to Leelanau County, she was a graphic designer and her husband, Field, worked in construction. Field Carden eventually became a certified public accountant.
Express: How did you become a professional yoga instructor?
Carden: I was working at an agency here in Traverse City and I decided to freelance, so I rented a place on Front Street that was big enough for me to do freelance graphic de sign and teach yoga. I was able to do both for about a year until I transitioned out of graphic design. It was 1989 when I went off on my own and opened the studio, Union Yoga. As far as I know, it was the first dedicated yoga studio anywhere in the state. Prior to that I was teaching in libraries, gyms, fitness centers, bookstores, schools, at the college. I taught at the college for a long time.
Express: What did it take to start a yoga studio, lots of equipment?
Carden: None. There was no barrier to entry. The floor – that’s all you needed. The sticky mats had not been invented.
Express: How has yoga evolved since then?
Carden: It’s changed a lot. My training was in philosophy, as well as asana and pranayama. Asana meaning posture and pranayama meaning regulation of your breath. Over the past 40 years, yoga has become exercise. It’s been watered down. The philosophy’s been watered out of it, but the practice has become more and more intensified, like a workout. The more intense the better, for some people. So what I see is people come into the practice wanting a workout and they have never been challenged to change the patterns of their postures, to execute their practice with integrity. Instead, it’s reinforcing their same postural habits that they’ve always had. Yoga should manage to identify and change your misalignment habits.
Express: What's important about the philosophy?
Carden: Nonviolence, mainly. Anytime I've hurt myself in yoga, it's because I was greedy, because I was being violent with my body. It should never hurt you. When I first was covered by insurance as a yoga teacher, that insurance was really, really inexpensive because there were never any claims. And over the years that coverage gets higher and higher because there are more and more claims because people aren't practicing with integrity. The philosophy behind yoga is that you are given this unit, this body, and through controlling your habits, both postural and behavioral, you trigger energy centers in the body. You activate energy centers in the body to clear out toxins and to purify. So the process of yoga aligns you with your highest expression of what this unit can do and it's very exact, but it's different for every person because every person's got a different body.
Express: What originally attracted you to yoga?
Carden: I picked up a book in a bookstore, a used bookstore, for a dime. It was called "Yoga Youth and Reincarnation:' The title intrigued me. It was in the early '70s. My sister had been practicing yoga in Ann Arbor and she gave me a book. So I had these two books and I started practicing because I was intrigued with some of the medical stuff that was related in the books. I was intrigued that I could have control and power over my health and my sense of wellbeing. It was complemented by the fact that I had a thyroid imbalance and I was on meds and I would need to be on the meds for the rest of my life. I was told that. In the book "Yoga Youth and Reincarnation," the instructor in the book gave prescriptions for postures to do for certain conditions or imbalances, so I kind of stumbled upon thyroid and thought, `here's a couple postures I could do: I think shoulder stand was recommended for, like, 10 minutes. I could do maybe 10 seconds. [Laughs] But, I would do them every day and, within three months, I corrected it. I corrected it forever. It's never been a problem since. That was incredibly, incredibly empowering.
Express: Do you view yoga as something like a religion?
Carden: It's not a religion. Yoga is a philosophy and its philosophy is embraced by many religions: primarily nonviolence and respect. I think most people come in because of their bodies; you know, their bodies are out of shape or they want to feel better. For some reason, their body brings them to the floor, to the mat, but somewhere along the line, within, I would say, about three months of practice, something really kicks in where you realize, 'You know, I'm calmer, I'm sharper, I'm feeling better, I'm sleeping better. I'm more alert. My life is better in every way and what's changed?' So then, after the body gets turned on by it, the emotions get turned on by it. Your emotions are under control. You are more like a witness to your life than always being hooked by your life. Layer by layer, your self becomes more in line with it until you just can't not do it.
Yoga Alliance, a national governing board that determines the criteria for becoming a yoga instructor and registers certified teachers determines the criteria and minimum number of hours of training required in different categories for yoga teachers. Carden was first certified by Master Yoga Academy in La Jolla, Cal. In the 1990s and 2000s, yoga was an industry inventing itself in the United States. Then the state of Michigan intervened, using a decades-old law, and determined that places that trained yoga instructors needed to be regulated like trade schools.
Express: What was it like when Michigan decided to license yoga teachers?
Carden: I think it was about 2009. I got a letter from the state of Michigan. I am sure they're looking for streams of revenue and they went to the Yoga Alliance website, found the teachers that were in Michigan who had schools to certify teachers. They went to that list and sent all those people a cease and desist order and said, 'if you don't cease operations, your prosecuting attorney will be arresting you: They gave me two weeks to comply and pay the state fee. I was baffled. I thought it might be a joke. [Laughs] So they were going to inspect my curriculum, which they did. I was fascinated by that. I said, 'Who is going to judge my curriculum?'
Express: The state yoga expert?
Carden: [Laughs] Yeah, the state yoga expert, apparently. Which was so funny because I had probably been teaching longer than anyone I knew in the state.
Express: So, despite your experience, you weren't asked to help develop state standards?
Carden: Not only that, my building in Lake Leelanau had to be inspected, but there was no inspector in the county who was qualified to inspect a proprietary school. So it was a little Catch 22 I found myself in. I paid the money and got inspected. I had to pay for an inspector from another county, pay for his travel, pay for his time. I didn't have the fight in me to go to Lansing and hire a lawyer and protest it. If I had been 30, maybe I would have done that.
Carden sold her building in Lake Leelanau in 2013. It's been reopened by a new owner under the name Yoga4. Carden still conducts classes there, but she plans to retire from training yoga instructors when her current class is completed. She said she's trained a flock of yoga teachers that will be able to train other yoga instructors in northern Michigan. Carden and her husband have also arranged group trips for yoga retreats, they have taken journeys to India and Peru and are putting together a three-week tour of Vietnam and Cambodia, which departs in late February.
Express: So what is your legacy? How are you leaving the state of yoga in the region?
Carden: This is a yoga-friendly area. I mean, there is so much going on and it's because of my students. I'm ready to pass the baton. I feel like I've done what I was meant to do here. I've done it a long time and have had a really good career. I think yoga's got a great future here; it's got a great foundation, some real deep roots. A lot of people have been practicing here for a long time. I think the future for yoga in this area will include a yoga retreat center. There are retreat centers out west, there are retreat centers out east and, you know, this is the 45th parallel; it's sacred in so many ways. It would be an ideal place for a full-scale retreat center. This is just a healing environment. It will happen someday.
