FAYETTEVILLE -- When Louise Ellis took her first trip to India to study Ashtanga yoga under guru Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, she caught some flak for leaving her husband and three children, then about 12, 14 and 17. She was gone a month.
"It was really hard, in terms of leaving the kids, even at that age," says Ellis, 62. "You don't want to miss anything."
Date and place of birth: April 4, 1953, Los Angeles
The first thing I do in the morning is mantra practice.
The last thing I do at night is reflection.
My greatest joy as a yoga teacher is interconnectedness with other practitioners.
The biggest obstacle I continue to overcome is over-thinking.
What draws me to yoga is the pursuit of freedom.
What draws me to India- the beauty of chaos.
The turning point of my life was making practice a priority.
If I learned anything from my yoga teachers, it’s fearlessness.
The key to a good, life-long yoga practice is courage.
Favorite food: mangoes
The last book I read- The Miraculous 16th Karmapa compiled and edited by Norma Levine.
My husband would describe me as determined (or possibly just a nutter).
One word to sum me up: evolving
Had she been a man, she believes, her decision would have been met with less resistance. Women judged her the harshest.
"People who I thought were very liberal-minded were coming at me and saying, 'Well, that's just horrible.'"
What she knew, and her kids would come to realize, is that the trip to India made her a better parent.
"It gave them the idea that you can actually have a life," she says.
Her youngest, Maria Korzendorfer, admires her mother for the life she created for herself and the family.
"I think it's actually been good for me in terms of being an independent person and being self-sufficient," says Korzendorfer, a student at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Korzendorfer has been to India four or five times herself, spending months at a time studying Ashtanga.
"I understand the draw behind it and the reason you go do it," the daughter says.
Ashtanga (pronounced ash-TAHN-ga), has been described as a rigorous and flowing style of yoga that involves synchronizing breath with progressive and continuous postures. It was developed by Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, considered one of the most significant yoga teachers of the past 200 years.
The practice is based on six levels of sequences that increase in difficulty. The majority of students never get past the primary series, which includes 75 poses and takes between an hour and 1 1/2 hours to complete.
Ellis was at the forefront of Ashtanga yoga before it was the ascendant yoga practice. Her teacher, Jois, was a student of Krishnamacharya, and in the 1990s Ellis became one of a handful of women certified by Jois to teach Ashtanga.
She splits her time between Fayetteville and Rishikesh, India, where she has an apartment and Ashtanga studio. Students come from all over the world to learn from this American woman in India, a place rich in masters teaching all different styles of yoga.
"What distinguishes her from other really great, experienced teachers is the fact that she basically gave up the chance to do anything else to go to India as much as she could, to practice with her guru and then dedicate herself to carrying out that teaching," says Kristen Albertson, founder of Ashtanga Yoga Fayetteville, where Ellis guest teaches when she is in town.
Albertson, the mother of two school-age children and a full-time lawyer, embodies Ellis' philosophy.
"The most important thing she ever taught me was that any amount of yoga practice is not wasted, and that I should just do it no matter what, even if it's only a little bit each day, until inevitably life changes and you have more time for it," Albertson says.
Ashtanga classes can be led by a teacher or taught in the Mysore method, named for Ashtanga's birthplace in India. Ellis teaches mostly using the Mysore method, in which students progress through the postures at their own pace, with gentle adjustments and coaching from Ellis. Students commit the series to memory and move with their breath.
In class, Ellis moves gracefully around the room barefoot, laying a scarf on students before pushing with her hands to move them deeper into the poses. When she sees people struggling, she pulls them back to a point in the series she feels is achievable for them.
"She just has no judgment about people. She just teaches them exactly where they are," Albertson says.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Ellis was a voracious reader, a self-described "oddball, bookish kid." She read books on mysticism, philosophy and shamanism.
"I wasn't very social," she says.
Her most prevalent childhood memories are of playing at the beach with her family, which included an older sister and brother. Her father, Lyle, was a lawyer, and her mother, Diana, a housewife and artist.
"I didn't really like school, but I liked my own pursuits," Ellis says. "I'm still that way. I only like researching things I'm interested in."
She went to her first yoga class at 18.
"I got in the class and they started 'Ommmm-ing' or something, and I was just really looking for the exit," she says. "I finished the class because I just didn't see any way to get out of it. But after, I felt so great and loved it so much.
"Yoga was the first thing I ever felt connected to physically."
She became a devotee of Adelina Pedroza. Ellis followed Pedroza all over Los Angeles, walking with her yoga blanket or riding the bus to wherever Pedroza was teaching. After a while, Ellis began substitute teaching in Pedroza's classes, and eventually, she met Pedroza's teacher, Swami Vishnudevananda.
Vishnudevananda had written the Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga in 1959.
Ellis took her first teacher-training course, a six-week curriculum in Sivananda yoga, at one of Vishnudevananda's centers in Quebec, Canada. She took what she learned back to Los Angeles and began teaching in earnest. Back then, yoga teachers were largely unpaid. It was considered a service.
She met her husband, Chuck Korzendorfer, at a Sivananda yoga class taught by Vishnudevananda in Hollywood. They married in 1975.
'A LEG BEHIND THE HEAD'
In 1979, they were living in Los Angeles' perennially hippie-centric Topanga Canyon -- staying on someone else's property in exchange for the handyman work that Chuck did and housecleaning Louise did for the owners -- when a flood came through and washed everything away.
"We were like refugees in the canyon for a while," she says jokingly.
Chuck had close friends who had homesteaded in Winslow. Lack of money kept Louise from making the scouting trip, so Chuck came alone.
"I didn't even have the slightest idea where Arkansas was," she says. He showed her pictures, and she gave the move her blessing.
The transition from California to Arkansas was a culture shock for Ellis. Topanga Canyon was her idea of "country," and the concept of winter was lost on her. Ellis recalls driving down miles of red-dirt road to get to their friends' house the first time, and the locals waving at her.
"I didn't know what they wanted, Ellis recalls. "I had no idea about the culture."
They lived in Fayetteville at first, then on a 10-acre tract they bought in Winslow, and now they are back in the house where they landed when they came here.
She was doing yoga throughout, but spent her early Arkansas years having babies and seeking out other young mothers and home-birthers she could relate to. Their son, Jason, was born in Los Angeles in 1978; daughters Tara and Maria were born in 1981 and 1983 in Fayetteville. All were born at home, with the aid of a midwife or midwife assistant.
Maria Korzendorfer's earliest memory of her parents practicing yoga was in elementary school.
"You'd walk in from school and I'd see them in some sort of strange posture, a headstand or handstand or a leg behind the head," Korzendorfer recalls. "I would walk in the room and step over Mom to go into the kitchen."
Ellis taught the Sivananda method in Fayetteville for about 10 years, then became interested in the teachings of B.K.S. Iyengar, one of the foremost yoga teachers in the world. Iyengar's yoga styling is structured, rigid.
"There was a very strong influence for all of the yoga in the United States on alignment-centered practice" such as Iyengar, Ellis says. "I really liked it and really learned a lot, but there were too many rules. It wasn't quite free enough for me."
She was also heavily influenced by another of Sivananda's disciples, Swami Satyananda Saraswati, whose practices were more meditative. He taught asana, or postures, but he also provided instruction in purification of the lungs and how to achieve deep relaxation while remaining conscious.
"Those kind of elements I was very interested in," Ellis says.
She was about 20 years into practicing and teaching when she came upon Ashtanga yoga. By then she felt like she had gone as far as she could go in the kinds of yoga she was taught.
'GOING TO INDIA'
On trips back to see her mother in Los Angeles, she would drive out to Santa Monica for classes at the newly formed YogaWorks, a yoga studio chain founded in 1987 by Maty Ezraty and Chuck Miller. On one of those trips, a woman struck up a conversation with her about Ashtanga. Ellis hadn't heard of it.
"I was immediately taken with it. It was what I was looking for," she says. Back then, there weren't a lot of Ashtanga yoga teachers. Living in Arkansas, the closest one to her was in Boulder, Colo. Once back home, she memorized the sequences using illustrated copies of the poses Miller gave her.
It was at a two-week workshop in Boulder that she first met Pattabhi Jois.
"My idea was to go out there and if it was a drag, that would be that," Ellis says. "Or I thought maybe they would tell me, 'Go home. Who said you could come here?'"
Toward the end of the workshop, Jois told Ellis to go to India to practice yoga.
"I had always wanted to go to India but didn't think I was in a position to. I was closed to the idea and it wasn't being reinforced by everybody around," she says. "But when I went to Boulder and saw these people doing Ashtanga, they were all regular people who went to India all the time, who had jobs, who had kids, who weren't really fabulously wealthy."
"I went home and told my husband, 'I'm going to India.'"
She finally got to Jois' studio, or shala, in Mysore, India, in 1994. The space held only a dozen students at a time, and there was always a line of people waiting to get in as someone else finished. Stacked so closely on top of one another, "you couldn't get away with anything." And Jois, in his 80s at the time, often taught from 4:30 a.m. until 11 p.m. or midnight.
"He was just a really funny, sweet man," Ellis recalls fondly. "He could be really fierce at times, but really sweet." He had an uncanny knack for knowing when a student had sort of schlepped through a pose, even if he was out of the room, she says.
"He would have done this whether he made any money. He was just fortunate that the foreigners got interested."
Jois was 93 when he died in 2009.
'HOURS OF PRACTICE'
As Ellis' trips became more frequent, she eventually sublet a house in Mysore from some other Ashtanga students. Her shala in Rishikesh is at the top of a three-story building. She used to spend more time in Rishikesh than in the States, but that has changed since her granddaughter, Quinn, was born about a year ago.
She's drawn to India for reasons other than yoga.
"India is a place of great paradox, which tends to throw you out of your habitual identity and comfort zone," Ellis says. "There is a quality of inclusion of all aspects of life and death there. Dark and light and all the apparent ambiguity. [It's] ancient and enduring, modern and basically hopeful in its aspirations."
That dichotomy is reflected in her teaching, says Mark Cain, co-owner of Dripping Springs Garden in Madison County and an Ashtanga teacher at Albertson's studio.
"She has a certain way about her that is very gentle, but with a lot of strength behind it," says Cain, who also travels to India to study Ashtanga and other forms of yoga.
"If you see someone like Louise doing the postures, it looks super human, but what you don't see are the gazillion hours of practice behind it," Cain adds.
There's a tendency to put teachers such as Ellis on a pedestal, Cain says. But in doing so, "you dig a hole for yourself."
"Some teachers encourage that type of adulation from their students. They're very show-offy and the class becomes about trying to emulate the teacher. I don't feel like Louise teaches that way," Cain says. "I think she's into empowering the students as much as possible."
This year, Ellis is planning workshops in Estonia and Italy. At the height of her teaching career she traveled to Thailand, Japan, Bali, China, England and Mexico. Her students sprinkle the globe and number in the thousands.
Her husband, an electrical contractor, accompanies her on some trips.
Albertson says Ellis has never advertised, even when she owned a studio on North College Avenue in Fayetteville. You won't find much about her on the Internet or on social media.
Ellis wakes at 3 a.m. for mantra practice and then her own two-hour asana workout -- one hour when she teaches Mysore in Fayetteville, which typically begins at 6 a.m., five days a week.
Ellis enjoys going to the movies and just basically exploring. "I'm kind of a crazy person, eccentric," she says. "I don't take myself too seriously."
High Profile on 02/14/2016