The Making of a GURU

Yoga mats were arranged on the wooden floor like sticks of fruit-flavored gum, their owners striking poses while waiting for class to start. Dead-center of all that pastel color stands Marge Roberts, a Hatha Yoga instructor at the YMCA in Spartanburg, SC.

“Top of the mat,” she calls out to a full room and class begins.

At 74, Marge’s gentle approach to yoga has garnered a huge following at the Y that has elevated her to guru status, at least from the perspective of those she teaches. On any given weekend, the exercise room is usually filled to capacity as last-minute students try to squeeze in, mats tucked under their arms.

Marge has been teaching yoga at the Y for 25 years, leading classes five times a week when she first started. Nowadays, Marge is finding new kind of balance for her life that will allow her to reduce her time on the mat and enjoy the pleasures of travel and family. For someone who always maintained a busy schedule day in and day out, the change was as impactful as it was imperative.

Becoming a Yogi

Marge journey into yoga was unconventional by today’s standards. The New Jersey native had been an active woman most of her life, running every day – rain or snow -- for 30 years. But when she neared 50, she found a powerful substitute. It happened when she was reading an article on American singer and songwriter Madonna and saw a picture of the music icon posing with her limbs wrapped almost unnaturally in a yoga pose. It looked complicated with lots of body parts twisting in strange contortions, Marge recalls. Still, she thought, if Madonna could do it, so could she.

“Well, I couldn’t do it,” Marge said, matter-of-factly.

The challenge, though, was on. So, she started learning about yoga in her bedroom following flipcharts with poses and their definitions. Each posture (or asana) was studied and replicated without the benefit of a guru of her own. She learned how poses help the body and how to be sure not to overdo a stretch.

As time went on, Marge signed up for yoga classes at the Y and even went to a weekend retreat with her yoga teacher for certification, becoming more confident in her newfound passion. She became so proficient in the art that the Y signed her up as an instructor, giving her the opportunity to teach almost every day of the week if you included subbing for other teachers.

“It was a lot but I didn’t know it was a lot at the time,” she said.

Marge enjoyed the teaching aspect of Yoga because it allowed her to offer her expertise on a subject that became near and dear to her. Hatha Yoga also allowed her to use her love of dance too as she learned to move fluidly from one pose to another. Most importantly, she learned the importance of breath.

“The United States is the top 10 (regions) for people who breathe the worst,” she said. “You have to learn to breathe whether you have anxiety or asthma. When I do breath exercises in class, we do it laying down so if you get lightheaded you aren’t going to know it.”

An Intro to Hatha

Hatha Yoga is defined as a yoga of force, a practice of balancing the body and mind through movement and postures. Marge said yoga can help students get fit and stay fit as they work on their breathing and balance.

“If they do nothing more than maintain their weight, they will at least improve their strength and flexibility,” she said. “For the new person walking in room, they think they are not flexible enough. But once they’re in the room, it is up to the yoga instructor to prove they can do it at any level.”

Marge explained that the purpose of yoga poses is to still the mind. That’s why the balancing poses are her favorites. Finding balance requires a person to stop and focus, quieting the thought process and meditating only on the pose. Marge also uses gentle music in her class to assist with that focus and aid in calming the mind.

Aside from teaching yoga at the Y, Marge was recently the instructor for Lifelong Learning Program at Wofford College, teaching yoga to interested participants, most of them retired. She has also worked with children at various programs in the community, showing them simple animal poses like the Cat and Cow asanas. This introduction, though brief, is one way Marge helps kids start their journey to a healthy lifestyle.

Probably the most reward she gets from being a teacher of yoga is helping people find relief through this ancient practice, especially those dealing with medical issues. One of those people was student whose sister suffered from fibromyalgia. Marge searched to find something that might help and found a pose specific to the ailment.

A Life Changed

Through years of practicing and extolling the benefits of yoga, Marge would learn on a personal level how it very well may have saved her.

In October 2022, Marge suffered a stroke and suddenly the life she knew had been permanently altered. The day it happened, Marge had driven into work even though she felt a little off. She tended to business but could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. After a brief phone call with her son – who recognized something serious was going on with his mother -- Marge was whisked off to the hospital where she was treated for a stroke.

Marge was in the hospital for two days and spent the next few months trying to come to terms with this life altering experience.

“It changed everything ‘cause now I know I could die one day,” she said.

Physically, Marge appears to be the embodiment of health: Strong, lean, flexible and full of vitality. She even believes that yoga could have been instrumental in lessening the severity of her stroke. But things were not the same after October, and her ability to connect thoughts to speech made teaching more complicated. “I have stroke brain,” she said. “I can hear the word, I can see it I just can’t get it out.”

In January, three months after her stroke, Marge was back at the Y with a classroom full of relieved students. Going back to work was a leap of faith for her but slowly, the love of her craft took over and she was back on her mat, in the center of the class. Only, now, she holds lessons once a week to give herself more time to enjoy some of life’s little pleasures … like travel.

“I realized they could live without me,” she said of her employers.

Her students, however, beg to differ. Marge, they will tell you, is celebrity at the Y community and has a loyal following. Marge greets everyone as they slip in the door and ascertains the needs of the majority who were taking the class that day. It is that attention to detail that has won the hearts of her students.

“I started taking Marge’s Yoga class at the YMCA when I retired eight years ago,” Trish Hanley Edgerton said. “I immediately fell in love with it, her and the community she had created. This is very inclusive so that everyone feels welcome and successful. Marge is very supportive and always inquires about changes in health or lifestyle that could impact a practice.”

Marge said the main difficulty she has had with yoga poses after her stroke was the side plank. She just couldn’t do it anymore, she said. But during a recent Saturday class, she proved herself wrong. “I didn’t do it ‘cause I wasn’t sure I could do it,” she said, delightfully surprised that she was successful.

As another Saturday yoga class neared its hour mark, when the shifting from one pose to another was finally over, Marge led her students to the quietest pose of the day, informally known as the corpse pose. With students lying flat on their backs, arms extended, music softly playing, Marge’s voice speaks out above the music as it does every week gently lulling the students into a meditative state -- a time, she says, for prayer or reflection.

“Picture yourself on a raft in the middle of a lake all alone and gently drifting….