FOR KIM MANFREDI, YOGA IS JUST PART OF LIFE
INTERVIEW BY Martha Thomas PORTRAIT BY Lisa Shires
Kim Manfredi started Charm City Yoga in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood in 2000. Since then, the company has grown in Baltimore and the surrounding region. The seventh studio opened in Rivers Corporate Park in Columbia, in September. Manfredi began practicing yoga in 1988 after breaking her back in a fall and began 
teaching yoga in 1996. Charm City opened with Manfredi’s version of hot yoga – vinyasa, or “flow” classes in a heated room.
Q For you, yoga is a lifestyle.
I’ve been lucky because I’ve always had teachers who have emphasized that practice is more than the poses. It includes the way we live, the way we relate to others, the way we relate to ourselves. That feeling of health and vitality is very important as you move into the subtle aspects of a yoga practice. If you’re struggling with pain, discontent, worries and fears, it’s hard to quiet the mind.
Q So being healthy goes beyond the practice.
Well, you’re not going to go out at night and drink if you’re going to get up and do yoga in the morning. Those kinds of choices have kept me really healthy and youthful in my outlook. My body is still working beautifully. I just had an MRI – my first in the 35 years since I had my rods put in. The physiatrist was blown away by how well I’ve done. It’s unheard of that the disks above and below fusions don’t deteriorate. She credited my yoga practice.
Q Can you tell us about your injury?
When I was 18 years old on the Fourth of July, in teenage antics, I fell out of a third story window and broke four vertebrae. I went to the University of Maryland shock trauma and had what was then experimental surgery – titanium rods to support the spine. I have seven fused vertebrae. A good portion of my back does not move at all. I had partial paralysis in the right leg, which I still struggle with. I don’t have full range of motion. When you have a stroke, you know how your arm can curl into the center of the body? I have that in my right leg, it’s the way nerves respond to a trauma. I’ve struggled with it in my yoga practice – I can’t balance on my right leg. I still wobble and fall out of tree pose.
I’ve gone to other studios, and when we get to balance, the instructor will say “don’t worry, after you’ve practiced for a while, you’ll get it.” It’s a little humiliating to be treated like a beginner. But it keeps me humble. It helps me to understand students’ struggles.
Q How did you discover yoga?
I was in engineering school as an undergrad, before I had the accident. When I went back to school there’s no way I could study engineering. I call that window the portal to my life. I discovered myself – my will to live, my sense of purpose. At that point, I began to move into the realm of creativity and transferred to Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore where I got my art degree. I moved out to Arizona. Yoga was established on the West Coast at that time. The teachers in my lineage, Iyenger, Pattabhi Jois, Desikachar, were creating what ultimately became vinyasa yoga, the Americanized version. When I moved back to Baltimore after living in the desert for a year, I realized the kind of yoga I loved didn’t exist out here. That was 1990. I still practiced, but I didn’t become a teacher until 1996. I opened the first Charm City Yoga in 2000.
Q Your business has grown quite a bit in the last decade.
We have seven yoga studios. That’s a new studio every two years, but the openings weren’t spaced out that way. We don’t have any plans to open more; our eighth will be our virtual studio, with online classes, launching in the next year. It’ll be free with membership. So when you’re a member, you can come to classes and take classes at your computer when you can’t get to class. We’ll have a library of videos with a variety of classes, with all our beloved teachers. We’ll probably start with 50.
Q What made you decide Columbia would be a good place to open a studio?
We look at a new location after two things pull on us for a long time: students and teachers. If teachers keep sending us emails saying ‘I would teach if you had a studio in Columbia,’ and students who live in Howard County say they can only come into Baltimore once a week … All our growth is based on the community.
Q You must do some market research.
Yoga is the fastest growing sport in America. The demographic for yoga is 18 to 45, they tend to not be homeowners and don’t have children. I think that demographic is changing. All the students who started with us have established a practice, and those 30-year-olds are getting to be 45 to 50. Our classes also evolve. We now have more restorative, gentle and prenatal yoga compared to the beginning. Remember it used to be just hot yoga.
Q Who is your Columbia clientele?
Columbia has been an incredibly welcoming community. Some of our students who were Charm City clients in 2000 have moved to Howard County to have kids. It was such a surprise to see so many familiar faces. Every day our schedule has a beginner hot vinyasa and a regular hot vinyasa. The classes are equally full. Taking the beginner class doesn’t mean you’ve never practiced yoga before. A beginner class is going to give you space to explore the posture
Q You’ve recently started offering nutrition counseling and cooking classes.
Five years ago, at 45, I realized that somehow between 30 and 45, I’d put on one pound a year. I was overweight. That’s what happens for a lot of women – either our metabolism slows, or we eat a little bit more. I never slowed my practice or my working out – which for me is walking – but I still had this weight gain. I took a look at what I was eating, and enrolled in school for integrative nutrition. When I started to look at it, I began to realize that I had moved into a mindless place and wasn’t looking at what my body needed at 45 years old. So I lost that 15 pounds. I eat a lot of whole foods, a lot of complex carbohydrates, fats and proteins. We’ve tried to incorporate nutrition as one of our pillars. All of our beginner series are going to incorporate nutrition. It will magnify your results. It’s easier to get in and out of the poses if you aren’t carrying around extra weight and you’re not having troubles with digestion. The joints are far more pliable. Everything is supported by nutrition. We’re not promoting any specific way of eating, but awareness around what actually nourishes you. Bringing awareness around our relationship to food can be life changing for people. That’s what yoga is all about. Healing happens with awareness.*
