SALT LAKE CITY —
Standing inside his modest, four-room, solar-powered yoga studio just off 800 South on the city’s west side, his legs tucked underneath him, yogi style, Micah Scholes sure doesn’t look like a rebel.
He speaks softly and deferentially; his body language is as nonthreatening as a golden retriever.
And yet, just being here speaks volumes. Two years ago, Micah was a top trainer of yoga teachers in one of the country’s largest fitness companies. He lived in Detroit, drew an attractive salary and had responsibility directing training curriculum for the company’s hundred-plus franchises spread out nationwide.
He chucked all that to return to his native Utah and open Scholé Yoga (scholeyoga.com), an enterprise that might politely be called a mom-and-pop business — but without the mom.
He leased a space in a city-owned building in the Granary District, next door to Save Our Canyons, Heal Utah, Bad Dog Art and numerous more do-gooder causes, designed every nook and corner of the studio himself, and three months ago opened up for business.
It’s still yoga he’s teaching, but a far cry from the corporate brand he was dispensing in Detroit. There, the emphasis was on flexibility, posture and body movement. Here, it’s on meditation, enlightenment and the mind.
“They wanted to turn their form of yoga into another form of fitness, another crossfit,” says Micah, meditating on the six months he lasted in Detroit. “They’re teaching posture, they’re not even teaching yoga. I found I had no interest in being a gym teacher.”
A student of meditation ever since his grandfather gave him a copy of Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha” when he was 7, Micah, 35, is of the opinion that any of the long-ago yogis would be flabbergasted by what they’d see if they were around today.
“Ancient yogis had zero interest in being able to touch their toes, or have six-pack abs or take pictures of themselves and put them on Instagram,” he says. “These ancient practitioners of what we call yoga did things like sit in stillness for days, lay on beds of nails, walk on hot coals, stare into the sun. They weren’t interested in physical posture at all. They were interested in the practices of mindfulness and meditation.
“The truth is, what we now know as yoga is about 100 years old. Most of the movements actually come from stretching bodybuilders in Scandinavia and Great Britain. That got coupled with meditation and it became a global phenomenon. That’s not a bad idea at all — it changed my life — but when people are taught, like I was, that yoga postures are 5,000 years old, it’s the myth not the reality.”
So Micah has gone back — way back — to the basics, emphasizing function over form instead of the other way around.
If you get tighter abs and drop a few pounds at his place, which you probably will, that will be a byproduct — an agreeable side effect — to the real goal, which is enlightenment.
“Helping people get in shape is great,” he says. “But what we’re about is helping people see their own lives, and the actions they’re taking or not taking, with clarity, and then with that newfound enlightenment they can use that to effect real change.”
Micah first started studying to be a yoga teacher 15 years ago at the University of Utah, after taking Bill Parkinson’s legendary Tai Chi Yoga Movement class. He taught yoga on the side while getting first his bachelor’s degree and then a law degree, which landed him a job as a prosecutor with the Salt Lake District Attorney’s office.
A life in the law was quickly interrupted, however, when the aforementioned nationwide fitness company — it would be un-zen-like for Micah to mention its name — offered to double his salary if he’d join them to train their yoga instructors.
“It suddenly became my job to try to get all these teachers in all 50 states teaching the same thing,” he says. “A, it’s impossible to do that. B, it’s also not yoga.”
Not his definition of yoga, that’s for sure.
“We’re in a time warp, like a yoga studio on the Starship Enterprise,” he says of his newer, humbler venture. “And so happy to be here.”