So the word plaza is an old-world word. A Spanish word meaning public square. In Greek, it’s agora. In Czech, it’s námêstí. In Italian, piazza. In French, carré.
In all those countries, the word plaza means the same thing. Think flagstones and grand architecture. Think fountains and fiestas. Think hangings and military parades. Think promenades and young love. Think public drunkenness and poetry. Think uprisings and crackdowns. Think candles and stars and sobbing-throated songs. Somehow, in the United States, the definition of the word got reduced to a parking lot and a strip mall.
In the famous parking lot and strip mall in uptown Kingston, there’s a grocery store, Hannaford’s — a subsidiary of a Dutch-Belgian multinational retail group in which BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is a large investor. There’s a national automotive retail chain store, Advance Auto Parts, owned by a publicly-traded company in which BlackRock is a large investor. There’s Chase Bank, owned by a global financial firm in which BlackRock is a large investor. There’s a discount variety chain store, Dollar Tree, a publicly traded company in which BlackRock is a large investor. There’s the Verizon store, yes, and the Cricket store — in both of which BlackRock is a large investor. There’s the Walgreens, purchased outright in August and no longer a publicly-traded company, BlackRock was formerly a large investor. But I digress.
What’s important in the strip mall are not these shareholder-beholden, corporately organized metal straws dipped into the communal milkshake, but the small, locally owned businesses among them.
There’s Mustangs Bouldering. There’s Catskill Art Supply. There’s JK Wine and Liquors. Already poetry becomes possible. Climb something. Drink something. Paint a portrait of the experience. There’s a pizza spot and a sandwich spot — all well and good. These businesses are emerald gems set in the blasé, repeating face of a nationally afflicted commercial metastasis. The money a local spends in these places could plausibly end up recirculating right back into the community.
In every strip mall parking lot, armed with a time-lapse camera, one can watch the battle between soul and commerce play out. Inevitably, with no fountains or flagstones or trees or great architecture, the lowest common denominator always wins the day, and the soul flies away. The tarot card readers, street actors and clowns vanish, along with the outdoor painters and jewelry makers, the musicians and buskers. And only outdoor speakers pumping tired hits remain.
But here, there’s something exotic wedged in between stalwart Chic’s Sports Bar and Restaurant and a tobacco shop. Something unexpected between the ghosts of Edible Arrangements and an off-track betting enterprise. Appearing out of a vision, it’s a hot yoga studio called the Hot Spot.
“I’ve been here for eight years now,” says Stephanie Nystrom, owner of the studio. “I did a five-year lease with a five-year option. So, I took the five-year option.”
Nystrom started off leading her classes — just three of them a week — in a basement room of a personal training gym up on North Front Street. This was in 2011.
“I had no idea if people around here were going to enjoy hot yoga or not.”
When her business outgrew that space in 2017, she moved into the plaza, where for a couple of years she worked to pay her bills, but not much else. It was in January 2020 that she turned the corner.
“And I was like, oh, my gosh, I’m going to survive… and then COVID hit.”
Somehow she came out the other side. Nystrom, who has been practicing hot yoga for 20 years now, started out by practicing yoga on her own, following the illustrations in a book.
“I was in small-town Oklahoma at the time, when somebody started offering an Iyengar class at the local women’s gym.”
Later, in Washington, D.C., she attended a Bikram Yoga class.
“And I never looked back.”
(photos Stephanie Nystrom, the Hot Spot )
Bikram is the style of yoga Nystrom teaches. It was made popular in the 1970s by its namesake, Bikram Choudhury, who in turn became infamous for all the wrong reasons and fled the United States to India in 2016 to avoid paying a court-ordered financial judgment. There’s a charming Netflix documentary that examines the subject.
As an ox is yoked to an ox cart, yoga means “to yoke,” and so the body is yoked to the mind through a choreographed physical experience — physical poses, which are called asanas, and breathing control, called pranayama.
“Yoke together your body and your mind,” says Nystrom, “and when those two things come together, then you can open the door to the spirit and find enlightenment. That’s the whole lofty goal of all yoga.”
Stephanie doesn’t explicitly talk about that kind of stuff very often. She says she’s not an enlightened master. She says she’s not a spiritual teacher.
“I grew up in Pennsylvania,” she says.
Following in the motions of the Bikram tradition requires an ambient temperature of 105°F, at least, and humidity starting at 40%.
It may be that Choudhury first proposed these hot and humid conditions because they imitate the ambient summertime temperature in Calcutta, the Bengali city from where Bikram cribbed his poses. If that’s the case, the 40% humidity is rather underdoing it for monsoon season.
But no one will disagree that cold is the enemy of stretching muscles. Tendons, cold, are more likely to snap. I heard the sound once at a track and field meet. With a noise like a little gunshot, one of the sprinters snapped the tendon or whatever was holding his calf muscle down to the base of his heel. Released, his calf muscle rolled up under the skin like a pull-down classroom map of the world, and he collapsed down to the track, blind with pain.
“So, you are gonna sweat,” says Nystrom. “It is not unusual to feel dizzy, nauseous. Everybody feels the same way the first class. Your only challenge is just to stay in the room the whole time. Even if you’re like, just laying on the floor, sucking the cold draft from underneath the door the entire time. That’s fine.”
So says Nystrom, but she’s kidding. There are draft guards installed to block the crack between the door and floor.
Leading a class, what Nystrom does is in the family of drill instructing. She says things like:
“Now you have a million-dollar bill between your knees. Don’t drop it.”
“You are stretching coccyx to forehead with your smiling happy face.”
“Stretch your spine towards the ceiling. Like I’m pulling you up by your hair.”
“Look in that front mirror,” she commands. “And twist your legs like ropes.”
The sweat begins to lash out of every pore while Nystrom runs the class through its paces.
Our next posture is the Eagle. Our next posture is the Standing Bow. Our next posture is the Balancing Stick.
“Reach behind and hold your right foot at your shin and push forward, balancing on your left foot. Keep your eyes up. Keep your left knee locked. Arch your back and now lower yourself…”
The limbs can’t handle this. The body trembles. Who can take the heel of one foot in their hands and stretch it out fully, still holding the foot, while standing straight-legged on the other foot? No one. Or almost no one. Heads laid down to rest on locked knee, there are two or three women in class who impossibly perform the most impossible commands. They stand in the first rank, closest to the mirrored wall.
One woman leans out forward over one leg, face looking at the ground, the other leg pulled up, curving behind her head, held in place with one hand behind. The other arm points outward and up, palm down, like the harmless echo of a fascist salute. She doesn’t even tremble. Maybe she’s a circus contortionist. She strikes the pose and freezes.
“If you notice, it’s supposed to be the better people in the front and the newer people in the back,” Jennifer Greenhalgs says. She’s been practicing Bikram Yoga now for 30 years. Once she was a gymnast. “Your job is to look at the people in front of you and adjust yourself.”
Back when Greenhalgs first started, she says Bikram classes were much stricter. A lot of group control stuff. About Bikram Choudhury: in his small Speedo underwear, his foul predatory behavior, sexual and mental, lurked over the practice he started like the outsized shadow of a disconcerting man-bun. But to reap the benefits, it’s a classic case of separating the wholesome fruit from the poisoned artist.
“Now, I’m a total feminist and I would beat the [crap] out of anybody who tried to… I mean, I would never fall for it,” says Greenhalgs. “What I believe — cult leaders don’t have an existence without a cult.”
The 26-pose system that Bikram refined — 13 standing, 13 on the ground, opening and closing the series with breathing — was actually an abridgment of a much older tradition containing the wisdom of the ancients. Or at least the wisdom of Bishnu Charan Ghosh, a bodybuilder, physical education school founder and author of the book Body Perfection by Will.
Bikram had crushed his knee weightlifting as a teen, and when he sought physical therapy he was introduced to a set of 84 asanas from Ghosh, who himself learned them from his brother who knew even more. Appropriation and repetition, coming down the hill of time — a parking lot becomes a plaza.
Greenhalgs certainly believes the conscientious practice of the 26 forms is the secret to her relative health.
“I’m gonna be 58 years old and I’m literally dancing through life. I’m watching the people around me going on all these medications. They have these problems. They have heart issues. And I’m standing on one leg.”
Another hot yoga enthusiast, Posie, somewhere north of 50 years old, credits it for her physical health as well.
“I had my hip replaced. I was not really into yoga that much, but for a long time a friend kept bugging me. When I tried it, I realized that it has all the best poses for strengthening this whole area around the hip. Once you get your joint replaced, everything around it gets weakened, so it’s really great to tighten up everything around it.”
She’s been doing it for two-and-a-half years but still considers herself a beginner.
“I can’t do all the crazy forms that some of the other students can do, but I’m sure my condition is better because of it. It kind of strengthens your whole core. And you feel amazing.”
There’s a lot of this stand-on-one-leg business. Assuming one has not been entrusted with the secrets of the universe, the Toe Stand, or Padangustasana, may be the most ridiculous pose of the whole series. Essentially, one crouches down onto one foot, keeping the back straight, and bends the other leg up and crosses it over the hip opposite. Now, balancing on the one foot, move the whole pose up onto the ball of the foot. One can make a prayer symbol with one’s hands if one desires.
This smug-looking pose seems calculated solely to intimidate others, a sort of humblebrag rendered physical.
Or the Triangle is a good one. That’s where the practitioner, with back leg straight at the knee and front leg bent, with arms out wide, twists the torso until one hand points up at the ceiling and the other is oriented to the ground. According to one Bikram Yoga spot out in San Jose, this pose has something to do with healing the reproductive system.
We’re ready for Standing Separate Leg Stretching.
Spread your legs wide, grab your ankles and rest your forehead ever so lightly on the mat, as if in preparation for an undefended rear entry. San Jose again claims this pose combats clinical depression.
It’s important to get a good Spine Twisting. Exhale. We’re ready for Padahastasana. We’re ready for Standing Bow. We’re ready for the Tree. It all blurs together in sweat dripping down on the towel-covered yoga mat.
The “warm-up” is over. Lie down on your stomach. Face in the front mirror.
Here’s where the real yoga begins.
Our next pose is the Cobra.
“You don’t have two legs anymore. You have one cobra’s tail. Look up towards the ceiling.”
“Take a breath in the upper body. Lift up off the floor. Using your lower spine strength.”
“Very good. Take a breath. Alright. That was so fun. Let’s do it again.”
It was not fun. Still, we must do it again.
Our next posture is the Full Locust. Our next posture is the Bow. Our next posture is the Half Tortoise. The Half Tortoise promotes mental well-being, memory and clarity, San Jose says. Our next posture is the Camel. It helps to balance blood sugar levels, San Jose says. It looks nothing like a camel. Next is the Full Locust. It looks like a human body pretending to be a plane and coming in for a landing on the East River.
But the Dead Body may be the most enjoyable pose. Flat on one’s back, arms at the sides with palms and eyes facing up — it’s the memento mori of the series. It promotes deep inner reflection of the strength of the heartbeat and outer contemplation of the height of the ceiling.
“Now imagine someone’s pulling your wrist forward, someone else pulling your left ankle backwards. Imagine it’s a human tug of war.”
Turn around. All right. Counter-stretch to the Camel.
“It’s Rabbit. Sasangasana. Arms up!”
After an hour and a half of heart-pounding, flushed-face, slowly dehydrating stretching and trembling, the blood recedes from the reptilian portion of the brain, taking with it the stress and anxiety caused by recognizing the resemblance between the large-scale industrial fishing boat operations and the business practices of shareholder-sponsored multinational corporations — they who drag their infinite miles of nets through the parking lots of America. This is not important anymore.
And then it’s over. The evidence of exertion — every towel set on every yoga mat is soaked down with sweat. There is a bliss and vibrating peace as the heartbeat slows back down and the threat of a heart attack or a stroke recedes after all. One is calm, if not mindful, and waterfalls of electrical charges cascade down the arms and back. One feels an inner glow radiating outward.
“As you leave, check around you,” Nystrom recommends, the class all laying on their towels, recuperating in the dark of the room. “If you left a big puddle on the floor, or if you leave any puddles or drips on your way into the bathroom, or in the bathroom, somebody’s got to clean that up. It’d be super great if it were you.”
In three days, hamstrings ravaged and calves twitching, I’ll be walking like a decrepit and overcautious graveyard watchman, stiff-legged and fearful to climb any stairs. I’ll limp through the streets of the city, waiting to heal from the experience, already planning, irresistibly, like a moth drawn to a strip mall, to go back for more of the same.
Join the family! 
