:: June 2005 Volume 4/Number 4

Teacher Profile: Steve Walther

By Judith Lewis

One evening, after Steve Walther had been teaching yoga for only a year or two, he ended his class with a poem. “What we choose to fight is so tiny,” it went, “what fights us is so great!”

The words were Rainer Maria Rilke’s as translated by Robert Bly, and to his students, who lay in savasana recovering from Walther’s often punishing Astanga-inflected routine, it had an immediate application to life: In those days, Walther taught in the cramped upstairs at Center for Yoga, lined his students up Mysore style and gently explained to each newcomer that his was a “very strenuous practice.” Students either consented or left, but the ones who stayed usually came back – not to show off all they could do, but to face head on what they could not. “This is how he grows,” the poem ended, “by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.” Walther’s students had got what they came for.

Eight years later, Walther has moved into the big room at what’s now Yoga Works’ Center for Yoga, where he still teaches a flow class in the tradition of Ganga White, rooted in Astanga, and still offers up constantly greater beings by which to be defeated.

But he does so gently. Walther delivers his instructions in a calm, incantatory style conducive to a meditative flow, guiding his students into difficult asanas without pressure: He never asks you to “try,” only to “consider” – “just consider lifting your back leg,” he’ll say plainly, “if it’s appropriate.” If you emerge at the end of 90 minutes with trembling knees and mild hallucinations, perhaps you needed to grow.

Walther came to yoga like so many men his age, after a long period of workaholic self-abuse fueled by coffee and cigarettes. Twenty-five years ago, he was catering to finance moguls at the travel business he built. “A typical day would start at 5 in
the morning with a call from someone who needed to be in Sydney that night,” he re-members. When in his late 30s he began to recognize that “my way of life augured an early grave,” he took up skiing and joined the L.A. Athletic Club to train. One day a friend suggested they take the club’s yoga class, which was taught by Frank White, the now legendary octagenarian who himself healed his life with yoga. The year was 1985. Walther went once, and stayed for over a decade.
By 1995 he had closed his business and was taking teacher training with Diana Beardsley (“with no intention of teaching,” he claims). A year later, after emergency subbing for White when another substitute was delayed in transit, he scored his first two classes at Center for Yoga, and fully dedicated himself to his practice. He took workshops with Shandor Reméte and Tim Miller, devoured books about yoga and studied both Buddhist and Western philosophy. “Suddenly it mattered,” he says. “What I had to say to people mattered.”

In these days of Power Yoga and Astanga for everyone, Walther’s class no longer stands out as the singular challenge it once was. But a loyal following has stuck, nonetheless – many of the same people who stood in his Sunday night class eight years ago still show up on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays – and the quiet, dignified tone of self-reflection he sets makes his class a perennial refuge. When someone asked why Walther doesn’t play music in his classes, he answered that while he had nothing against music – in fact, he plays it for himself sometimes when he practices – he wants his class to be a retreat from sounds and stimuli.

“Our whole lives are about distractions,” he says. “We get in the car and turn on the radio, we get home and turn on the television. But yoga is a chance to train the mind. We impose a structure on the body as a way of bringing discipline to the mind and to begin to see what it really is, who we really are.” The peace of his class leaves room for his self-discovery.

He allows that his grueling series of asanas is not everyone’s route to bliss, but “it’s what I’ve been asked to do here,” he says. “One thing Frank always connected me to was that teaching yoga is about giving back the blessings that yoga has bestowed on our lives. Teachers used to hold down day jobs and teach in the evenings, gratis, because it was that important.” And it was the blessing of White’s “strong physical yoga practice that I used to clear the residue of the stress of sitting behind a desk all day.

The physical response of working in that way transformed my life,” Walther says. “I wouldn’t be here without it.”

Judith Lewis is Features Editor of the LA Weekly.

 

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