Community Profiles

David and Ella; photo by Ryan Curtis

Ithaca is a college town, sure. We have Cornell and Ithaca College, as well as TC3 and Wells College just a stones skip away. But Bikram’s Yoga College of India? This town is getting crowded.

Bikram's Yoga College of India, opened locally in 1999 by David Corson, is located on Corn Street between West State and West Seneca.  Enrollment is easy, just a 90 minute sweat fest in 100+ degree heat with a nearly naked instructor who is delivering enough verbiage to shame all the auctioneers from Lodi to Mecklenburg. 

Classes consist of twenty-six pretzel-style postures (or asanas in Sanskrit) that would have Houdini puzzled and two breathing exercises (pranayamas), all in a sauna-like environment. Daily attendance is strongly encouraged, although a day off now and again is only rational. Doors lock strictly at the beginning of class. Graduation would appear to be upon death and, for an exercise regimen founded on yin-yang logic; it comes as no surprise that students receive an enrollment discount.

If the asanas coupled with the mind numbing humidity aren't enough, there is one more thing that's going to get you doubled over: laughter, because David, one of the instructors, is hilarious.

"For you visualization freaks out there I have my baby Asian elephant standing on your shoulders and palms and pressing them down," he instructs. Non-stop hyperbole fills your ears as you attempt to fold into a posture: "Americans want big car, big house, big sex. How you going to have big house, big car, big sex, when you can’t even stand on one leg?" Or the ever-present, "Women you never know how far six inches is, all you're life you've been lied to."

This isn't your mother’s yoga class.

David is the man responsible for introducing Bikram, or "hot" yoga to Ithaca. Bikram is a style of yoga developed by Bikram Choudhury in Japan in the 1960s. The postures he adopted for his techniques are the same postures that have been sweated over for 5,000 years in India; postures with zoomorphic names like Turtle and Cobra. 

David has his hands full these days operating, managing and co-instructing the class. He began in a friend's basement with curtained partitions, and now holds class in a 1,000 square foot, fully equipped studio. The space likely holds the town's hardest working furnace (to keep the space at sauna-like temperatures), and the showers are stocked with Dr. Bronners for cooling down when the class is over and David announces, "Too much fun." 

The popularity of the class has also generated plenty of grist for the rumor mill. One yoga teacher in town warned me in hushed tones, "Watch out for David. He hurts people, even other yogis." Other rumors abound that he was part of a cult of Indian mystics who buried each other alive for days at a time with no food or water, or that he was a ventriloquist who could sound like he was on the far side of the room and then appear right beside you just as you bagged the 'killer death grip' and decided to get a head start on final relaxation. 

Despite the rumors, many people from surrounding areas come to Ithaca for the class, with some schlepping in regularly from Syracuse.

David keeps his classes lively with a cast of different voices and a rap that, even when repetitious, belies the fact that he cares about what he's doing, he cares for every student and wants to see them improve. David's encouragement is infectious and on a good day he can get a class of some thirty-odd students moving in unison, drawing on what he calls "group energy" and surprising themselves by what they can achieve. "Suffer with me for 90 minutes or suffer for the rest of your life for 90 years!"

David grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a world renowned physician, and had a penchant for helping others from an early age.  David says he was "introduced to his own body" by "a local legend of spinal liberation, Shifu Maurice Haltom." After studying Kung Fu, Tai Chi and other Chinese forms with Haltom, David began his practice of yoga with Haltom's encouragement.

"What attracted me to Bikram's was the intensity, heat, trying your hardest and Bikram himself," David says, adding, "Bikram inspired me to go out and inspire others. People's personal opinions about Bikram span the spectrum, but the guy’s got the goods. It just plain old works and what works is right. One of the strongest feelings I have for Bikram is one of appreciation and gratitude."

Lucky for David, yoga comes naturally to him.

"I was in DESPERATE need of a career," he says. "Yoga postures came to me naturally and easily, perhaps I practiced yoga or something in a previous life. I trace my healing gift through my father and have always wanted to be useful and help people. So, I torture people and make them sweat, they pay me, then they come back for more."

Voltaire said, "The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."  Satire or not, this sums up David's class. References from Salvador Dali to Ester Williams fill the space between didactic instructions with nods to politics and topical events and maybe even a song or two ("put your wrists in the air like they just don’t care!").

One particularly strenuous posture is called Full Locust where you start on your stomach and then inhale and look up as high as you can while extending your straight arms and legs off the floor and up, kind of like a bird or airplane. Full Locust can be a dreaded posture but just as you're going into it David informs you in an Indian accent that, "We’re going to fly to Afghanistan and bomb Bin Laden," and you just kind of float up without thinking about it.

The college is floating up too, in popularity. The other day I asked David if he was going to open up some more studios. We talked about Syracuse and Binghamton being potential candidates, and then he left the room. I laid down in Savasana and tried to quite my mind a little before class started. David and his wife, Lisa, have a little daughter Ella and a house they recently purchased, so opening up more studios probably has some economic incentives. However, in a second he popped his head back in the door, "No, I'm going to focus on this studio in Ithaca; I'm never going to be rich."

John Driscoll is an architect, writer and musician living in Ithaca .

More info: http://www.bikramyogaithaca.com/readmefirst.php

correction: Bikram's Yoga College opened in 2003, not 1999. David started teaching yoga in Ithaca 1999.