Yoga that saves your neck, with Katie Flinn

2024 lessons for on and off the mat, from a Fresno Yogini who helps negotiate moments from the small to the traumatic

(What follows is an adapted version of a podcast that was published here last week.)

Sometimes art gets me in trouble.

Like, I’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law at least a half dozen times. Yet, because it is one of my core films —and features the incomparable “I scream for ice cream” scene—I recently sat riveted while the flick streamed on Max. My position: reclining in bed, with a lot of head and body weight resting on my neck.

Down by Law is a mid-80s black-and-white indie set in New Orleans. New York minimalist in its aesthetic, the Jarmusch flick has us first with the great John Lurie, a white pimp with a Black girl who’s giving him his just desserts, naked. Disgraced DJ Lee “Baby” Simms, played by Tom Waits, falls apart next, eviscerated by a smokin’ Ellen Barkin. And in to make a trio worth hanging a movie on comes Roberto Benigni, in his first American cinema. He would forever after be less funny. 

So, I’m like sitting there, engrossed in Jim Jarmusch, leveraging way too much weight on my neck across its 107 minutes. And for the first time in my life I have been visited by recurring neck pain. Please let me apologize to every one of you who ever complained to me about neck pain and suffered my blank reaction. I had no idea.

Then, a 10-minute yoga session from YouTube took my neck to a healing place. Plus, a surprise: As well as the clear health benefit, up popped personal insights that I associate with long, intense yoga classes. Blown away once more by the practice, I reached out to one of the most accomplished and interesting humans ever to guide me through yoga.

Katie Flinn is what Central Valley yoga people are talking about when they talk about COIL Yoga. A certified yoga teacher for more than a quarter century, the Greater Fresno dweller has spent these past decades studying with masterful teachers around the nation. Twenty-one years ago the mother of two began COIL—Conscious Open Integrated Living—in downtown Fresno. In 2015, she moved the studio to a former Christian Science Reading Room, a quirky little feature of the city’s Old Fig Garden section. Fitness Magazine named COIL the nation’s Best Small Yoga Studio.

The energy at the Fig Garden iteration of COIL, which ended in May of 2020, was as righteous and soothing as any studio I’ve experienced on the West Coast. As we enter 2024, COIL classes happen in a charming Tower district dance space. Because COIL is wherever Flinn takes it, the classes remain top-flight.

That child’s been touched, spiritually.

Before discussing her life in yoga, the yogini engaged my neck yoga enlightenment. Lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Donnell Alexander: I’m so happy to have you. You’re one of the most important people in my entire spiritual life.

Katie Flinn: Yes. [Gestures behind] This is your sacred Zoom room.

DA: Everyone, we’re looking at the Zoom room that got me through the pandemic, when I was living in downtown LA. It was very hard to get yoga classes at that time.

KF: You and how many millions of people were on the living room floor or cramped in a kitchen… in their kids’ rooms…

DA: We have a yoga relationship that goes back beyond the pandemic. But the thing that made me want to talk with you was a 10-minute experience with neck yoga.

KF: Hunh.

DA: I’m sure you know Yoga with Adrienne. I have a neck issue that she’s perfect for. Now, I don’t mock what she does—I appreciate it. But it lacks the intimacy of your old studio, COIL, in Fresno. And I was thinking that, I’m having this yoga experience, that’s very revelatory, holistically healing… from something that’s canned, a YouTube clip. You can have revelations that are just as powerful from there as with a hot yoga class that takes 90 minutes. What is it about yoga that makes it transcend? Why is it always applicable?

KF: You mean whether in person or on YouTube?

DA: But also the sense that because it was a neck-focused thing nothing [revelatory] was going to happen.

KF: You assumed, Oh, it’s just my neck. This is very “technical,” routine. You didn’t have any expectations, and all of a sudden [stretches arms before her] Ta-DAH!

My short answer is that yoga is the one form of movement “exercise”—I call it innercise—that’s deliberately designed to create connection. The word yoga itself means to join, to connect with. And when we are in a state—spiritually, mentally, emotionally—and there’s that opportunity to connect? That can be a very profound opportunity for people to cultivate insight. Or have moments of… Oh, okay. I understand now.

That’s the shortest answer that I can give you, because the opportunity for connection to something within yourself that you may not really be connecting to when you’re in a spin class and they’re like, “Get up and go! ” It’s hard to have a moment with your heart chakra in that scenario.

DA: Do you have an origin story with yoga?

KF: I think my origin story started with suffering. [laughs] I was in more of a depressed state in my life in my early 20s. Yoga was something I bumped into. I think I was 19 or 20. At first I was like, Ugh, I hate this. This is for weinies. There’s no sweating involved. All this spiritual crapola. I was not into it.

DA: Were you an athlete?

KF: Yes. From that push yourself hard, no pain no gain.

DA: What did you do?

KF: Running, cycling. Lacrosse in high school. That was coming into college when I found yoga. I was 19. Slowing down did not feel safe. [laughs]

DA: What do you mean by that?

KF: Slowing down was way too confrontational for my nervous system back then. It meant that I had to feel what was going on, and that’s what I didn’t like about yoga back then. But I didn’t know that. I just thought, Oh this feels bad because it’s boring. But the boringness is really what I needed. I didn’t have the capacity at that time to slow down and just recognize all of the things that I was pushing away.

Just being really active in doing things that require physical contact and pain and suffering. [laughs] That was more, Yeah, I want to do half marathons and do Ultimate Frisbee with this team of mostly guys who are knocking me over and causing me pain.

DA: Did that keep you from dealing with yourself?

KF: Until a point when I was in San Diego taking an Iyengar yoga class. It was very strict and rigid with lots of rules: Your foot goes here and your shoulder’s here. I kinda needed more of a boundary. Like a container that was going to keep me. And for some reason I just kept going to that class.

I have this vivid memory of being in downward dog. At the time I was struggling with some things physically in my body. I just remember feeling the pain of what I was struggling with, and I just started crying in this yoga class. In downward dog, where you’re upside down. And I was like [waves upper body] what was that?

That got my attention in a way that, Ooh there’s some more underneath all of this. I started trying all types of yoga and finding teachers, ultimately deciding to do a teacher’s training, but that was farther down the line. I just got the bug: This is why I keep coming back to this weird flow practice.

DA: How long did it take?

KF: I was probably 23 at the time. Then, by the time I got serious about a teacher training I was 26. So it took me about three years of exploring, going to different teachers. I did the hot yoga thing in San Diego. I’d go and party.

DA: Were you into it?

KF: The hot yoga?

DA: Yeah.

KF: Or the partying?

DA: The partying.

KF: There was like one year in my life when I took advantage of partying a little too much. So the yoga was like, Oh I can just detox from the partying and I feel so much better, which is not a great reason to be going to yoga. [Laughter] But I liked the hot yoga at the time. Now it’s not for me. It’s too like [hand above head, vibrating] aahh!

DA: I want to go back even further, and then we can talk general yoga stuff. Where are you from?

KF: Probably another planet.

DA: Ah, I knew that.

KF: My roots are here in the Central Valley. My mom and step dad are from here. My biological father is from California. I tried living on the East Coast and I was like, Nah. I don’t really fit in here. It’s not my jam.

DA: Was your upbringing conducive to you being receptive to yoga? Did you grow up in a spiritual household?

KF: I grew up in a household with a lot of… challenges with the adults in my life who were preoccupied with their issues. That made it challenging just to be a kid. I think that experience of having conflict as a younger person brought in the roots of having a lot of stuff to unravel as I got older.

But as a young person I never thought about doing yoga. I didn’t even know about it. If I had known about it, I think it would have helped me through just a lot of challenging times emotionally. To have another way of regulating the way that we feel, which is just another biproduct of yoga: Self-regulation. It’s not something that a lot of parents have the capacity to understand, much less teach their children. Especially in the seventies and early eighties. [Laughs] No, I don’t think that was happening. There was a lot of, Go run through the neighborhood! Do your thing, and then come back!

[Laughter]

DA: COIL is one of my favorite yoga studios on the West Coast. How do you become the person who starts COIL Yoga?

KF: I just had an epiphany when I was 25 that I wanted to quit my job that had benefits and a steady paycheck and follow my vision, this dream I had to open my own studio. I had already been teaching fitness classes, so I knew that I was comfortable with people. And I had started pursuing workshops and diving into the teacher training. I felt like, Okay, I’m going to become more experienced and credible, but now I have the time and energy.

I always think of COIL as though it were a child. Right now she’s 21, so she’s like, “See ya!” But when I first started I treated her like an infant—“I don’t know what I’m doing with you, I need a lot of advice. I need a lot of help.”

And I just had to spend time with her, teaching every day, all kinds of classes every day, just to get the foundation. I started in downtown Fresno, in an old building that, ironically, was owned by a man that was really good friends with my grandfather. Art Dyson owned that building in downtown Fresno. When I approached him about renting the space, told him who I was, he was like, Is your grandfather Bill Bray? And I was like, Yeah.

He was extremely generous and gave me six months rent free, so I could get my feet on the ground. That really helped. On April 1, 2001, I opened. She’s going to be 22 very soon.

DA: You surprised me by speaking in present-tense. I don’t even know what the state of COIL is. Is COIL a state of mind at this point?

KF: Let me see if I can describe her. In May of 2020, she became homeless.

DA: Yeah.

KF: Like many people during the pandemic. Then I realized that COIL isn’t a place. It’s me, and wherever I am, it is. And in my home we built this room here that I could use as a studio. At first I didn’t have a clear vision of what I was going to do with this space. How often was I going use it? Then, March 14–everyone’s inside. I transitioned, got this fancy camera, got this equipment, and within three days was zooming almost all of our yoga classes and with quite a few teachers.

Over time it has dwindled. Fast forward to now. It’s just me, here online in my house. I have a lot of clients who come to see me privately—I also do trauma work, which is another part of my story. I combine the trauma work—which is called somatic experiencing—with yoga therapy, which is supported yoga poses, like restorative yoga.

I do that here, then I go into town and teach, where you’ve been, and teach the group classes to anyone who wants to come explore. So, she’s no longer homeless, but she’s very versatile. And she’s wherever I am.

DA: Do you feel as though the classes you taught during the pandemic were some of the most important classes that you’ve ever taught?

KF: Yes. I remember this one class where, for some reason, there was a lot of glitching with Zoom. I had like 25 people in class and my video camera just wouldn’t work. I looked and nobody dropped off. They were like, as long as we can hear you. [Laughter] We don’t even need to see each other anymore. We need to connect and feel ease so badly that all we need is some guidance coming in. We don’t even need the visual.

People came on because they just wanted to connect. When we’re in this [gestures] state with each other—even if it’s just on a screen—and seeing each other’s eyes—I won’t use super scientific brain terminology—we’re in our hearts when we’re like this. When we’re like this [folds body forward] we’re in our grief. So, allowing people to have some connection and to be seen in any real capacity allows us to feel some ease. As long as people were able to do that? It got us through, on many different levels.

DA: Why aren’t there more men in yoga classes? It’s maybe 15 percent men. When you’re talking straight Black men in particular, the numbers get really narrow.

KF: My classes are, say, 60 percent women, 40 percent men now. Years and years ago, it was 70 percent women, 30 percent men. Or even less. Men of color? Very few.

I don’t have a specific answer to why men of color wouldn’t come as frequently as women. But I will just say in regards to female and male, the men aren’t typically being raised by fathers who are speaking about emotional intelligence or emotional literacy or how to process a feeling. That’s a dialogue that tends to be—unfortunately—swayed more toward younger girls and women. So when we get into yoga class and there’s some touchy-feelyness, women are like, We’re all about that. Sign us up so we can feel all of the things!

Men are like, Whoa, whoa! [assume fighting posture]

DA: I think it’s the physical vulnerability. Downward facing dog is a position that a lot of men would find emasculating. Some of the postures—

KF: Yes, you’re hitting on it. “Oh, wait. I’m not good at this.” Then the competitiveness kicks in and they go, “Well, I look ridiculous.” [counts fingers] “I’m failing. I look ridiculous.” The ego’s like: Get out.

DA: How do you feel about yoga in a sports context?

KF: It’s great. I remember teaching yoga to the Fresno Falcons.

DA: The hockey team.

KF: A bunch of 19, 20, 21 year-olds. Most of them were dealing with all sorts of injuries from being hockey players—lots of concussions. That was just me, teaching to a whole team of young men. [Pauses] That was challenging for a lot of different reasons. But they would get very frustrated if they weren’t [finger quotes] good at it. If I step back and kind of look at it from a bird’s eye view… if they weren’t figuring it out or getting “better” as quickly as they thought they should be, they were frustrated with it.

When I would do classes with just men—and not women in the class—they tend to do a little bit better overall, because they see their male counterparts struggling and that makes them feel better. [Laughs]

DA: Fascinating. 

KF: I taught a class for years called Yoga for Stiff Guys. That was a workshop series. It was very popular, we got a full room every time we did it. And men loved it. They kept coming. If you looked at the general classes, it was always more women than men. But if you said it was just for guys and we’re going to call it Yoga for Stiff Guys—partial genius on my part—it worked. It got them in there. 

DA: I know people who have bad backs to whom I evangelize for yoga and they would rather go through life with back pain than make the leap to yoga. I think it’s about the masculine and feminine.

KF: Well, pain is a good motivator, right? If we feel, Oh, here’s something that might make me feel better, you’re going to want to go to it out of desperation. Then there are other things we go to that aren’t so good for us, that get us out of that pain. Yoga’s something people will turn to when they’ve never before if their doctor says they should go or if they’re in so much pain that they feel this is their last resort.

DA: Do you feel like we’re in a post-pandemic malaise?

KF: I think there’s still a lot of recovery happening. People still have some PTSD from that time. You know there’s something in your body that just happens if you just pause and you think back to March 2020. A slight contraction. For the human organism to go, I survived, that’s very healing in and of itself. But when we think back to certain periods of time during that time, there’s always a visceral kind of response. That may never go away, but how we relate to it is what people are still working out in their bodies. 

And a lot of people are still experiencing some deep loss. That time is coupled with losing somebody. There’s a lot of conflict on both sides: Whoa, look at what they did to the children, putting them in masks. People are still hanging on to that, because we’re seeing some of the repercussions of not being in school, with kids that are behind. I feel like it will always be trickling down, but the way people relate to it will change over time. We still need more time.

DA: The one last question that I really wanted to ask, the one I have never asked in real life: Can you tell when I’m stoned in class?

KF: [Laughs] Yes, I can! You want me to tell you why I know?

DA: Tell me please.

KF: I’m like, Donnell, bring your right foot forward. [looks around, confused] What is right?

[Laughter]

DA: Uhh… yeah. Some of that is just inherent clumsiness and awkwardness.

KF: No. Nope, because it definitely affects your spatial awareness. And the pupils are a tell-all. 

DA: Is it annoying, ever?

KF: No. But here’s my question for you: What is the difference for you, coming to a class naturally high or high from your friend?

DA: That’s a good question. They both yield benefits. I feel everything more deeply with cannabis. I go to concerts, I’m probably going to smoke some pot. Yoga class is enhanced. 

I had a period of real guilt in your classes—not just you; I have two or three people I really rely on—that I’m not absorbing everything you’re telling me. It’s undeniable that I don’t take it in as well. I feel it more deeply, but I don’t take it in as well as I should.

KF: So, do you have recollections of classes you were in that you weren’t high in?

DA: Oh, yeah. I have years and years of that. When I moved from Portland to Los Angeles, it kind of became my job.  I became indoctrinated and [cannabis] became a lifestyle. There was just so much pot around me and my work life.

Like I always say I want to play the violin again, I want to do yoga without weed. [Laughter] It’s not an empty aspiration. It’s an inevitability, frankly.

KF: I actually had that thought earlier today: If I could ask Donnell a question… Honestly, I was watering my plants and I thought, I would ask him what’s the difference for you coming to a class and creating your own high versus already being high. My thought, from what I know about yoga, is that it’s such a deep work in—coming from the inside out—and if there’s anything tamping that down then the work is actually harder down the road. 

DA: Hmm…

KF: Because it’s all about feeling what’s there. Sometimes what’s there is really hard. If you’re softening it, how do you work through what’s really hard?