Alison Arthur stretches your yoga skills, offers healing, community
By Madeline Hill Vedel
Sun contributor
It’s a cold, blustery Monday night. Holiday feasts are past. The season of high darkness and penetrating cold is here, and I am far from alone in wishing I could again spend 90 minutes in a room heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and lose myself in the meditative movements calmly and insistently guided—or more accurately encouraged—by certified Bikram instructor Alison Arthur.
I discovered Alison’s classes my first winter in Leelanau County. I was living up in Northport, devoting 90 percent of my waking hours to building a goat farm. But winter is a moment of relative calm in the livestock farming cycle, and with the goats quietly gestating for spring deliveries and milk flow dried up for the season, I could take time for myself. This was also my first winter in decades, and the first of two successive polar vortexes, which just added to the mix.
I believe it was Rose Hollander of Suttons Bay who first told me of Alison, or I might have Googled a local yoga class, but soon every Monday evening I would make the trek down to Body Balance in Suttons Bay, leaving my school age kids with a simple dinner they could eat and clean up themselves, braving the weather-slicked roads, to strip down to the least clothing possible and spend 90 minutes (often a bit more) rediscovering my body. I would emerge wrung out, at peace, and ready to continue forward.
This year, of course, none of this is possible. What once nourished and healed is now out of the question during this COVID-dominated time, when we all live with strictures we never dreamed of experiencing in our lifetimes.
But thankfully, though not currently teaching in-person classes, Alison has not gone away, but is biding her time ensconced in her home in Northport and out hiking and skiing in the surrounding wilderness.
Alison shut down her studio classes immediately in March 2020. “I am grieving the loss of this wonderful yoga community experience I had,” said Joe Cook, Alison’s student and retired family doctor in Traverse City. “I tried to do some with YouTube, a little on my own, with recordings. Alison calls me once in a while and sends me towards different names on YouTube. It’s been very hard. Obviously, people have lost worse things during this pandemic. I lost this wonderful thing that was a part of my life.”
In the 20 or so years that Alison has resided in Leelanau County, she has connected, encouraged, and supported, sharing her experiences in the ancient practice of yoga. “Alison is an exceptionally accepting soul, patient, and encouraging,” Rose Hollander tells me. “She is also a community builder. Each class began with her moment of reflection for us, which might be a comment about a student needing some supportive thoughts, a movie or opera we might enjoy, a local play or symphony to attend. She remembered everyone’s birthday, asking us to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ at the beginning of class and making handmade cards for us to sign beforehand to send to the birthday recipient.” If not in class, the recipient gets a personal rendition of “Happy Birthday” by phone.
“I met her when she first moved to Leelanau County, but didn’t attend her yoga classes until I was going through a stressful time caring for my mother in law who had Alzheimer’s. The class was the perfect respite for an active person like me. An intense yoga practice that forces fierce concentration on the moment and the pose, and strips away the rest of the world,” says Rose.
Alison has taught in a number of places—in Traverse City, at the Interlochen Academy, in Lake Leelanau, and in Northport—but Body Balance in Suttons Bay is where she taught the longest. There she rented from owner Kevin Pryor the 20 by 40-foot studio within a studio three times a week, Monday and Wednesday evenings, and Saturday morning. She neatly managed her private business transactions with each of us, keeping track of sums paid in a notebook she maintained, pencil in hand, welcoming in old and new students of every age. Even if it had been [8] two years since your last visit, she would know how many classes you still had on your card.
Alongside the ubiquitous women in colorful yoga gear were high school athletes working on their flexibility, and heavy-set men post heart-attacks. “We called ourselves the Clydesdales in black shorts,” Joe Cook tells me. He met Alison 16 years ago, having wandered into one of her classes. “I tried the class and it was instantly wonderful. And it was honestly not just the class but Alison—calm and welcoming, she instantly integrates someone brand fresh, new, green, into the class, even when she has people in there who have years and years of experience.”
“Yoga is for anybody,” Alison affirms. “It’s a beginning class. My oldest student ever was over 80 when he started. Start where you are. The beauty for me of this sequence, is addressing your entire body in 90 minutes. It still challenges me. Simple but not easy.” And if the teacher who has been practicing for decades finds it difficult, imagine how arduous for the average body. And yet many discovered they could return to yoga soon after injury or surgery.
“I had knee surgery, carpal tunnel, a broken wrist, sprained ankle, and bunion surgery in addition to back surgery,” Rose shares “With each subsequent injury or surgery, I learned I could go back sooner than I might think, and just practice the poses to the ability I had at the moment. Lying on the mat in savasana, dead body or corpse pose, is always an option, as Alison would remind us, and when I remembered that, I went.”
Alison lived a life of many chapters before ending up in Leelanau. Born in Jackson, Michigan, she was raised partly in Massachusetts and, after her father died and her mother remarried, in Houston. For college she chose Boulder, Colorado, beginning a degree in Mathematics before switching to Art History, which led to learning abroad in Vienna. There she leapt at the opportunity to co-lead biking and Volkswagon bus tours in Europe—from England to Greece— for three summers for American teens. She has taught skiing on a carpeted deck, worked in the travel industry, then hired and trained at IBM which led to a career spanning 12 years and at least seven moves in five different states. But the corporate world, though well-paying, didn’t fill her need to educate and give back. She took a leave of absence and spent three months in New Zealand and Australia finally resigning from IBM in order to pursue her interests in healing, well-being, and experiential education.
Concurrently, she survived and partially healed from a bike accident in 1975 which caused damage to her neck and back. Other sports related injuries compounded this. “I began exploring a variety of modalities to heal my injured body, including Yoga, acupuncture, massage, Rolfing. I was beginning the journey to put my body back together,” said Alison. “After trying many different flavors, I ended up in a class with a woman who had spent time with Bikram. That got my attention. I never felt better. In a parallel effort, I wanted to learn Spanish, to add to my practical use of French and German. I studied Spanish in Mexico for two months, practicing the Bikram series daily in my little room.” Upon returning to the States she enrolled in the training. “I had never done it in a hot room. It felt great.” During the training she connected with a like-minded soul, an older woman from Belgrade who introduced her to the macrobiotic diet. “Inspired, I moved to the Kushi Institute to train and work for nine months.”
One thing led to another, and Alison was lured back to Houston to create a healing arts program for the Child Trauma Clinic at Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry. There she put together many modalities as a complementary intervention for maltreated kids, including: Feldenkrais, Yoga, music, dance, and reflexology. This was cutting edge for 1996. She was not the only person to question an art history major yogi receiving this task over a trained psychologist. But take it on she did, and experienced powerful breakthroughs, particularly with children adopted from Romanian orphanages. However, the work was intense and draining, “I learned a ton. I am grateful, but I chose to leave. I needed to go from the healing arts to the living arts.” Which brought her back to Michigan and to the edge of Elk Lake, native turf for 66 years. “I decided to replant myself in Michigan. Here I’ll build my business, AliArt Living Arts Guide.”
An early acquaintance from the Suttons Bay Friendship Center, Martha Phillips, remembers those days. She offered a space at the Center to Alison for her budding classes: “I’d done Yoga before, but hadn’t found the right fit. I’d heard of Bikram, did some reading, Alison gave me some material on it. Alison is Alison, so why not try it? Because of her I got into it, I’ve been practicing it ever since. It was right for me. The timing, and what it did for me in my elder years. I wish I’d started it when I was 12. I was in my fifties when I started.”
What I hear again and again is the devotion and regularity of Alison’s students. “I did it absolutely, unbelievably consistently, two times a week for the vast majority of [the past 15 years]. I missed when I was sick, when I had open heart surgery, a ruptured disk, but as soon as I was medically cleared to go back, I did,” said Cook. And if he wasn’t in class and hadn’t let Alison know ahead of time, he received a concerned call. “It’s interesting how yoga becomes a part of your life—it is physical, mental, and social.”
As for many of us, this is a period for Alison to hunker down, take stock and contemplate what’s next. She is grateful that she does not own a yoga studio, or have to worry about rent. Over the summer two students offered their yards for outdoor classes, which continued until the weather consistently dipped below 50 degrees. She offers coaching by phone, and has been quick to suggest alternatives via YouTube for her students, encouraging them to develop a home practice. However, for those who practiced with Alison, it was far more than the sequence of poses that kept them coming so regularly. The community she created, the acceptance, affection and comradery she nurtured are what so many profoundly miss. That, and feeling ever so wonderful after 90 minutes of remarkably intense mental and physical exertion in a very warm room next to 20 others, gleaming in sweat as droplets cascade down from head to toe.
