Renowned Yoga Teacher Christine Hoar Puts Bristol on the Map

By Alexis Lathem

Photo: Tom Rosenthal

Bristol, Vermont's Ashtanga Yoga expert Christine Hoar at  Somnathpur, a thirteenth century Keshava Temple in India.

The first time you take a Primary Series class at Bristol Yoga, you might be a bit intimidated. In one corner, Vermont’s martial arts champion is practicing his full splits. In another, one young woman is gracefully springing onto her hands; another is bending her body in unthinkable ways. There are skiers, dancers, former gymnasts and rock climbers.

Eventually, your eyes will light on a woman with a thick flowing mane of flax-colored hair who is, perhaps, playfully performing a handstand while balanced on someone else’s knees. That would be Christine Hoar.

Studio owner and renowned teacher, 39 year-old Hoar is one of only a handful of ashtanga yoga instructors in the country to be authorized by S.K. Pattabhi Jois, the guru of the ashtanga lineage in Mysore, India. In fact, if you live anywhere east of the Mississippi and want to take ashtanga with an authorized teacher, you can go to New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts – or Bristol, Vermont.

Several years ago, Hoar began offering yoga classes in her office in the Old High School on the Bristol town green, where she worked as a marketing consultant. On Tuesday evenings, she would move the furniture aside and roll out the yoga mats. At first, she taught her friends, who brought along their friends. Before long there were 28 people in the room, with barely two inches between mats. The classes spilled into a cubicle adjoining the main room that became known as the “annex.” Then they spilled into the closet. “That's when I knew we had to grow,” Hoar laughs.

In 2000, she gave up her work as a marketing consultant, ripped up the industrial carpeting in her office and turned it into a full-time yoga shala (studio) – an elegant space with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and windows facing the Bristol cliffs. Today, the studio offers classes six days a week as well as special weekend workshops. Hundreds of students have taken classes here; many have traveled from all over the region for teacher trainings and other intensives; some have been returning for years.

Although Hoar has a background in professional marketing, she did not need to call upon her marketing skills to grow her yoga studio. She never advertised. “I offered classes because the community wanted them,” she explains.

When Hoar began teaching, she had not been practicing long herself, although she already seemed as comfortable upside down as she was on her feet (she’s a former competitive athlete). Hoar took her first ashtanga class with Kathy McNames, who went on to found Yoga Vermont in Burlington, where Hoar, in turn, became a teacher. “I knew I’d found a practice I would do for the rest of my life,” she says. From that day forward, she became a devoted student of ashtanga, traveling to workshops on weekends, studying Sanskrit and the yoga sutras, and later making trips to Hawaii to study with Nancy Gilgoff, one of the first individuals to bring ashtanga yoga to the United States in the 1970s. Eventually, Hoar ultimately traveled to Mysore, India to study with Jois, ashtanga’s 90-year-old guru – “Gurudji,” as he is affectionately called by his students. Currently, Hoar is enrolled in a two-year study of ayurvedic medicine, yoga’s “sister science.”

Only ashtanga yoga is taught at Bristol Yoga – an energetic, sweaty style very different from the quiet, meditative practice of hatha yoga, for example. Many ashtanga practitioners will tell you that what they like about ashtanga is “the flow.” What distinguishes ashtanga from Iyengar or bikram or any other form of yoga is that once you are on your mat, you don’t stop moving until the session is over. In the ashtanga practice, a set series of postures, or asanas, are linked together by transitioning movements, called vinyasas, like phrases in a musical composition.

“Once you’ve learned the sequence, you don’t need to think about what comes next, you just do it. It really is a kind of moving meditation,” says Billy Simmons, 21, who practices almost everyday at the Bristol shala.

Because ashtanga is practiced in a heated room, the windows of the Bristol studio will often fog up from the body heat in the room; on a hot summer day, the floor can be slick with sweat. “There’s something about the heat,” says Dan Rueger, 19, who also practices here daily. “It allows you to reach a degree of calm that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.” More important than the heated room is the internal heat that comes from the aerobic component of the practice: a central tenet of ashtanga is that heat is therapeutic, releasing tensions and toxins from the body. In other words, where there is no effort, there is no benefit.

But still, ashtanga practitioners will insist that ashtanga is not aerobics. “People think it’s a physical thing,” says Simmons. “But it goes deeper than that. It changes you from the inside. I can honestly say that it has transformed my life.”

“If you want to change things about yourself,” says Rueger, “this is the best way to get results.”

Besides the aesthetic, ceremonious aspect of the practice – which begins with the peal of a brass bell and ends with a melodious chant and a lighting of candles – there is more to yoga than “just” exercise. While yoga, like the workout at the gym, may be focused on the self  (ashtanga may even do a better job at giving you sexier arms and abs), you do not just have a relationship with your mat, the way you have a relationship with a treadmill or an exercise bike. You have a relationship with a teacher, and with the others in the room, and with a lineage that is very, very old.

“Where else can you go in the middle of winter any day of the week to get warm and be with your community?” asks Deb Gwinn, one of Hoar’s original students and the first she trained to teach. Gwinn, who has lived in Bristol for more than twenty years, says she has never felt so connected to the village as she does now, because of the yoga center. “It’s one of the paradoxes of yoga,” explains Gwinn. “It’s a solitary activity that you do on your mat… And at the same time, you are moving and breathing with other people. It’s a different way of being with people. It makes you very close.”

“It’s one of Christine’s gifts – she’s very good at connecting people,” says Tre McCarney, a studio regular. “Christine will make sure that you are introduced to the person next to you. Everyone is made to feel welcome. People who visit say how supportive this community is. It’s noticeable.” McCarney began studying with Hoar over seven years ago in Burlington; when Hoar stopped teaching there, McCarney began making the trip to Bristol. “When you have a very special relationship with a teacher," says McCarney, "you don’t want to give that up.”

Hoar is also very good at connecting her students to the global ashtanga community, says Gwinn. For example, she brings in other renowned ashtanga teachers for special workshops that draw students from all over the region. These events have even included a “yogi-magician.” Hoar also teaches nationwide, and is becoming increasingly well known in the global ashtanga community; consequently, so is Bristol. And, she travels to Mysore, India almost every year, sending long email letters home, which are tacked onto the wall of the studio in Bristol. Often, those letters have words of wisdom from Gurudji:

“Yoga is 90 percent practice and ten percent theory. But now the world is ten percent practice and 90 percent theory. The world needs more practice. Practice, practice, practice.”

And:

“God has given us 100 years. Don’t waste it. Don’t waste even ten minutes. Now, days are coming. Nights are coming. Soon 100 years is coming. Every day, your life is going and not coming back. Life is not like money. Once it is spent, it is gone and not coming back.”

Hoar has received special recognition from Gurudji: she is now among the few authorized ashtanga teachers… in the world. What it means to be personally authorized by Jois is no small distinction: while it is possible to be “certified” to teach yoga by completing a three-day training somewhere, to be authorized in Mysore means, at the very least, that you have trained for years; it means that you have been through the rigors of Gurudji’s teaching, not just once, but several times (for at least one month at a time); and it means that, most certainly, you have long ago given up your day job and have made yoga your life.

And Gurudji’s teaching is demanding and strict. No modifications are allowed as they are back home in Bristol; if you can’t do a posture, and do it well, and if you can’t hold the posture for an excruciating period of time (while remaining, of course, calm), or if you don’t know its Sanskrit name, then you are politely asked to leave.

Upon returning home, Hoar described receiving Gurudji’s blessing as “one of the happiest moments of my life.”

Hoar admits that in Mysore, where a roomful of ashtanga devotees are all practicing together, vying for the special attention of the guru, the atmosphere can get highly competitive. “People are focusing on a single aspect of yoga – the physical asana. It can border on (and cross into) self-absorption,” she reflected in a note from India. But, while living in this “intense” atmosphere in Mysore, Hoar has found a way to stay reminded of the spiritual meaning of the practice. Two years ago, she was connected to a non-profit organization, called ASHA (meaning “hope”), which provides education to underprivileged children in India. While there, she visited with over 700 indigent children over a four-day period, in groups of 250 at a time. The youngest group was napping when she arrived; the children were “lying in rows, like sardines neatly packed in a tin, on straw mats on the floor,” she wrote in one email letter. “There were obvious illnesses – skin lesions and eruptions, leg deformities, yellowish eyes, and small statures.” In a dusty courtyard, without speaking their language, Hoar soon had the children laughing and doing yoga; they sat in lotus together and chanted "AUM." Next day, she returned and heard the children calling out “Auntie! Auntie! Yoga yoga!” She went outside and saw them all doing the postures she had taught them the day before…“perfectly.”

Also through ASHA, in another trip to Mysore, Hoar taught yoga twice a week to a group of women who had been rescued from the sex trade. They practiced on a cement roof with no mats and no stretchy yoga clothing; Hoar spoke only a few words of their language – the words for inhale and exhale, up and down – but it was enough to get them into the postures. “They kept coming back,” says Hoar. “No one made them come, but they liked it. It made them smile.”

Before long, a local rickshaw driver learned of the Vermont woman’s rooftop classes, and was so enthusiastic about her efforts that he would transport her to and from the site, waiting in the meantime.

Hoar had hoped that some of the other western yoga students at Mysore would carry on for her after she left, but she concedes, “it’s a difficult place to get to.” Still, she will continue the effort to connect the budding yoga teachers at Mysore with such projects and to establish yoga instruction within the Mysore community and in local schools.

Days are coming. Nights are coming. The world is hurting. Between Bristol, Vermont and Mysore, India, this yoga teacher will not be wasting any time.

Alexis Lathem is a freelance writer and award-winning poet who lives in New Haven.