Laughing All the Way to the Mat

Canada’s first lady of yoga, Kareen Zebroff reflects on her journey from lonely, depressed housewife to national TV star and bestselling author

by PAMELA POST

I was wandering along West Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano recently. Once known for its peace ’n’ love hippie ways, tie-dye palaces, and macrobiotic eateries, I marvelled at how it’s become an enclave of million-dollar real estate, designer clothing stores, and yummy mummy boutiques.

At this most unlikely—and perfect—juncture, I encountered a woman who had changed my life for the better when I was a teenager, the child of a simpler, earthier Kitsilano.

Our chance meeting had all the hallmarks of a Kits-cosmic event.

A man was panhandling outside Duthie’s Books. I felt a strong urge to give him some money, but then I remembered I had no change in my wallet. I barely had time to feel a pang of disappointment before I saw a smiling woman approach the man, her hand outstretched with a generous donation. I felt a little burst of gratitude that the Universe had given me exactly what I wanted, without me having to do anything.

Then the Universe supplied a bonus. I recognized the woman as Kareen Zebroff, someone I had never met in person, but whose face still radiated the luminous life force that used to beam out of the TV set in my parent’s living room with the brown shag rug, back when I was a teenager. Back when yoga was weird.

“It’s weirder now, darling!” laughed Kareen, as we stood talking on West Fourth, the street people well outnumbered by the “Lulu-lemmings” herding past us, clutching their designer totes and Swarovski-crystal-encrusted cellphones.

It’s not often we get to thank the people who influenced or inspired us in our early lives—especially if we didn’t know them in person. I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity.

When I was 16—the same age my daughter is today—Kareen Zebroff helped steer a lost and stumbling girl (admittedly a bit of a wild child) toward a nobler path: the path of yoga. A path I was to lose again in the materialistic ’80s and ’90s, and return to in the new millennium when I came back to the mat, as it were, even completing my own yoga teacher training.

For a decade, from 1970 to 1980, Kareen hosted a national daytime show, Kareen’s Yoga, on CTV. She was like a lithe, spiritual Elke Sommer with her blonde hair, German accent, and awesome ability to bend into the full pantheon of yoga poses. She brought yoga, meditation, and whole food nutrition into the living rooms of ordinary Canadians. Folks with a penchant for Kraft Dinner and Hockey Night in Canada began doing headstands and eating whole grains. Depressed Canadian housewives got off their meds and started meditating.

It was a quiet revolution, but it made an impact. “I like to say we made more shows than M*A*S*H!” says the still vivacious, still blonde, and ebullient 66-year-old Kareen over lunch at her False Creek condo. “Over 1,100 shows! And we received over 200,000 letters from viewers and readers. It was incredible.”
Kareen is reluctant to blow her own horn, but her husband, Peter, who produced her TV show, is more forthcoming. “Many of the letters said, ‘you saved my life.’ They felt like Kareen was their friend. She came into their living rooms every day. They wrote about how she helped them get out of their funks, how she was instrumental in changing their lives.”

Kareen’s ascent to yoga superstardom in Canada was anything but contrived. She emigrated to Canada from Germany as a teen, attended UBC, became a teacher, and married Peter, a high school principal. By the late 1960s, she found herself living in the small community of Hudson’s Hope in northeastern B.C.—an isolated, overweight, and unhappy young mother of three little girls. Then she discovered yoga, which she taught herself from the one book she found on it in her small town. She went on to study with teachers including Indra Devi, Marcia Moore, and B.K.S. Iyengar, whose book Light on Yoga served as her bible.

“I took—immediately—such delight in these stretching movements; it was liberating! It took me out of my tense, slightly depressed, slightly overweight being, and it made me into this sylph-like, svelte thing. And the meditations came so easily to me, and I became liberated! My daughter, who was five and a half at the time, remembers me weeping. I had been depressed. I tried to do my crying after they went to bed, but I was not happy. Yoga brought me back to myself.”

Kareen went on to teach classes in yoga in church basements and community centres. Her classes had wait-lists. Translating a 5,000-year old Eastern practice and philosophy for a Western audience, it turns out, was Kareen’s great gift. After she did a guest spot on a Vancouver TV talk show (she and Peter had moved to Agassiz in 1968), BCTV asked her to submit a pilot of her own for a spot they wanted to fill with an exercise program. With the help of her husband, some friends, and a black feline named Mouffie who delighted viewers by demonstrating “cat pose” on demand, Kareen wowed the broadcaster.

But this was back in the day, remember, and yoga was still “weird.”

“We had to go to Vancouver City Hall and defend ourselves against charges that this was witchcraft,” Kareen recalls. “People didn’t know what yoga was. They called it ‘yoyo’ or ‘yogurt.’”

Yet her show was so popular that it went national, and eventually became part of Canadian TV history, along with The Friendly Giant and Mr. Dressup. And Kareen went on to write books about yoga, health, and nutrition that sold in the millions.

“I’ve been so lucky—so blessed. But I can’t take the credit,” Kareen says. “There was a readiness in the air for this. People wanted something more than ‘hup-two-three’ exercise. They were open to expanding into the stillness, healing themselves through the breath. Why did all this come to me? My gift, I think, is that I’m not hoity-toity. I didn’t talk the high esoteric talk, because people were not ready to hear that.”

Shortly after her show went off the air (it ran in reruns till 1986), Kareen had a disastrous fall that put a halt to her yoga teaching career. She went on to embrace holistic health, act (she appeared in episodes of The Beachcombers, Danger Bay, and MacGyver), lecture, and write more books. She’s now working on her 11th book, about yoga and sexuality, with her daughter Petra, who has a doctorate in human sexuality.

Now, Kareen’s yoga is walking. And she and her husband of 47 years practise the yoga of “loving relationship” as they walk the False Creek seawall, where for years Kareen has photographed and followed the fortunes of a pair of mating eagles. She also practises the yoga of “breathing fresh air—inspiration—being in spirit, and the yoga of Mother Earth beneath my feet.”

I know that after spending a few hours with her, Kareen also practises the yoga of laughter. And she has never forgotten something that can get lost in today’s obsession with doing yoga to get Sting’s biceps or Madonna’s abs: that the physical aspect of yoga is a preparation for meditation, for going inward—to find the you that is beyond the physical.

“These days my meditation is mainly in the form of prayer. I meditate in the morning while I’m still in the alpha state, but at night, it’s prayer and it can be quite, quite long. Now you are my friend, Pamela, and I put you in a golden light—all my family and friends each night. That’s my prayer.”

Kareen Zebroff—my first yoga teacher, the über-yogini, and a Canadian yoga pioneer—is putting me in a golden light each night.
Sweet.

Pamela Post is a CBC News reporter and writer who needed yoga to cleanse her teenage years of the bad karma that disco brought with it.

| | | | | | | | |
printer friendly version