By Grace Pernecky • Photos by Edda Pacifico

Jody Tull was trained in the Sivananda Vedanta Yoga tradition after receiving her master’s degree in Piano Performance and Music Education from Columbia University. For the past three decades, she has brought her unique approach to teaching to the Ann Arbor area, combining her music background with yoga, meditation, and healing in distinct, interpersonal ways. For years now, Tull has taught the Finding Your Voice workshop that she developed through her years of expertise in yoga and professional music background. She teaches this workshop along with yoga classes in a variety of locations throughout the U.S., Europe, India, and the Bahamas. She leads an annual yoga meditation and hiking retreat in Soglio, Switzerland. Tull is also the founder and director of Be In Awe Yoga Center, where she sets an example of what a yoga community and relational practice can look like.

Once Upon a Time, 40,000 Feet Above the Ground…

Jody Tull did not feel well.

The airplane was already well on its way to its destination. Though Tull was a flight attendant at the time and had become accustomed to the gradual rise and fall of a plane through the sky, for whatever reason, she really felt ill this time around.

A woman sitting next to her noticed. “You look like you don’t feel so good.”

Tull looked up. “Yeah, I feel really horrible.”

The woman leaned in and spoke the words that would forever alter the trajectory of Tull’s life. “Would you be up for an experiment?”

“At this point, I’m in my early twenties,” Tull said, relaying the beginning of her yogic journey to me as we sat at a table at Avalon Cafe and Kitchen in Ann Arbor thirty years later. “I thought, what do I have to lose? ‘Sure, I can be up for an experiment.”

And so, many years ago in a plane, 40,000 feet above the ground, the woman guided Tull through a couple of basic yoga breaths and stretches. “I felt 200% better,” Tull recalled, still obviously in awe at the transformation.

Young Tull asked the woman how she could learn more. “Try Richard Hittleman’s 28 Days to Yoga,” she said. And so, when Tull got off the plane, she made a beeline for the nearest bookstore.

“For the next 28 days, I gradually felt taller, more alive, full of curiosity, and full of wonder. Why is this happening to me? Why is this so good? And easy?” Present-day Tull reminisced, wondering at the paradoxical immensity and simplicity of her experience.

Tull was a musician living in New York at the time. She was composing music and taking voice lessons at Columbia University where she was pursuing a degree in music education. On the 28th day of her yoga journey with Richard Hittleman, she was walking past a series of brownstones, wondering what was next, when she spotted a “jolly-looking picture, next to this very vibrant-looking bald head. It read ‘Sivananda Yoga Center.’”

Another hidden thread, another part of the universe was opening up to her without effort. She knew that this was what was next.

“I had butterflies,” she told me. “It was edgy for me to go in there. There wasn’t a buzz about yoga at that point. This was in the 90s. I was raised to be familiar with evangelical Christianity. And so, I had these nightmarish worries of what might happen to me if I entered that building. It felt very daring.”

Despite her fears, Tull walked through the doors and immediately signed up for a four-day Yoga Intensive course, and then discovered another hidden thread: the swami leading the Sivananda Yoga Center asked Tull if she would be willing to exchange voice lessons for yoga classes. Tull happily agreed, and the journey toward her life practice continued unfolding in ways more beautiful and unexpected than she could’ve ever imagined.

Out of the Closet

As Tull continued telling me story after story, weaving together thread after thread of the quilt that made her who she is today, I began to piece together the sort of person that Tull is and why she has become such a respected person in Ann Arbor’s conscious living and yoga communities. What makes her unique is that back in the early 90s, she was fully embodying many of the practices that today are now mostly accepted--or at least tolerated. But back when her passion for yoga and meditation began, many folks still tied them to specific religious and spiritual traditions and didn’t think it was an acceptable form of practice because of that.

“When I was 15 years old, my mother, although coming from an evangelical background, signed [my sister and I] up for transcendental meditation classes,” Tull reminisced. “To see my mother doing something so outside-the-box was inspiring! I was really easy going and I really trusted her, [so I did it].” Tull gathered what she learned in the meditation and mindfulness practices and still continues today.

“I was so disciplined,” Tull responded when I asked her what made her latch onto meditation at such an early age. “I was at Bowling Green State University for my first degree and was living with three other roommates. We had two walk-in closets, and in one of them, I would meditate 20 minutes before breakfast and 20 minutes before dinner.” She laughed, remembering how her roommates had made her a little sign for the closet door stating, “Do not disturb; Jody is meditating!” Tull firmly believes that meditation is essential to her being able to connect deeply with the flow of her life. “When I stop meditating, [life just] dries up.” She could see this very early on, and continued her meditation practice alongside her yoga practice, when that tradition found its way into her life on that fateful airplane.

After Tull moved back to Ann Arbor in the early 90s, she started to become more integrated into the community. She met Haju Sunim, the founder of the Ann Arbor Zen Buddhist Temple. They became lifelong friends, and soon, Tull started substitute-teaching Haju’s yoga class.

Alongside this, she initiated a weekly yoga class at First Congregational Church where she had already been the director of children’s music.

She recalled the story of one young woman, who called her years after the class had ended to thank Tull for changing her life. “I was seriously depressed,” she told Tull. “And I was actually enroute to go back to my student apartment to take my life. I was walking home, and a flyer fell right in my path, [advertising your yoga class at the church], and it just so happened that this yoga class started in five minutes. So, instead of going back to my apartment, I came to the church and took your class.” Tull said that after this woman graduated from U of M, she qualified as a Sivananda Vedanta yoga teacher and then completed a PhD in education administration. She moved to D.C. because she had dreams of working as a policymaker and “wanted to work on an initiative to include yoga in the national public school curriculum.”

Another thread of life, another ripple sent out into the world.

Push Back and Push Forward

Tull herself had previously proposed an initiative to integrate yoga into the elementary school curriculum in Ann Arbor Public Schools. There was serious concern in the districts about children not performing well on MEAP tests, reflecting badly on the quality of education being provided in the district. The scores didn’t look good. The community was looking for answers.

Enter Jody Tull.

The superintendent agreed to pilot a yoga program at Angell Elementary School, and Tull gladly took up the challenge. “It was phenomenally successful,” she said. Soon, the press took an interest in the program, and within a few months, the Ann Arbor News had put out an article entitled Youngsters use Yoga for Relaxation. The article made the front page.

“The mistake was that we called it yoga. There were so many letters to the editor saying, ‘If she can teach her religion in the school system, then we want to teach our religion in the school system.’”

Tull’s response was characteristic of her approach to yoga and meditation; “Having an evangelical background myself, I did understand, having also faced my own fear, and what I loved most about the experience was that rather than condemning other traditions, I became increasingly curious about and in awe of them.”

Despite her response, the superintendent of schools informed her that, unfortunately, they would have to discontinue the program due to the severity of pushback from the parents they had received. “I’m sorry, Jody. We know that this works; we know from the teachers, we know from the principal, we know from the students, but we need to shift the attention elsewhere.”

Though the integration of yoga into the public school system proved a barrier too significant to overcome in the 90s, Tull forged ahead with other projects in the meantime. Through a series of coincidences and creative, outside-of-the-box thinking, Tull collaborated with the children’s poet Jack Prelutsky to write music to go along with some of his books. Perhaps even more telling about Tull’s approach to life and teaching is the way that this collaboration came about.

“I was teaching at the College of DuPage in Chicago… and one of my [piano] students approached me saying that she thought her daughter was really talented, but that she [just] wouldn’t practice. Would I work with her?” Tull recalled. “[For her first lesson], I asked her daughter to bring in five of her favorite things from her bedroom. She brought in a stuffed animal, an old blanket, and a book of Jack Prelutsky’s poems. And so, I started taking the poetry and [using it to] guide her through how a melody happens, how a baseline happens, and how you can create different colors with the chords.”

It was during these exercises that Tull fell in love with Prelutsky’s poetry. Soon, she had recorded some of the music she had created (“on my little tape recorder,” Tull recalled fondly), and sent the music to Prelutsky’s publisher (“they loved it!”). Eventually, some of her songs made their way to ears inside the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra (AASO), and Tull was approached to see how she would feel about AASO performing some of those songs at a children’s concert.

In an eloquent statement reflecting on the ripples that have brought about such incredible adventures and experiences in her life, and the hidden threads that were pulled to connect her with those she needed to be connected with, Tull said the following:

“In retrospect, you can kind of look back and see something really divine that has nothing to do with anything other than attuning. It’s [all] just a tuning process. Just like you tune your violin. You [end up tuning] into something that is the source of life, the source of radiance.”

Finding Her Voice

Tull had been a student and teacher of yoga for about a decade before she opened Be In Awe Yoga studio in Ann Arbor in the early 2000s. She became especially interested in the healing power of chanting and sound therapy. Combining her experience of yoga with her music education background, she created a workshop called Finding Your Voice, which is still being offered today.

Tull remembered being put off by chanting when she first started training as a yogi in the Sivananda tradition. When she took some of those first classes back at the Sivananda Yoga Center in New York, she recalled that she always left the room whenever the chanting session began. “Given my background [in evangelical Christianity], I was super uncomfortable. There were all these words that took me forever to remember that represented deities I didn’t understand. I felt very conflicted.” It ended up being a source of great irony for her, as later, she discovered that chanting would become the centerpiece of her own practice. “Why did that feel so scary? Why did that feel so alien somehow?” She asked her younger self. She realized later that “in letting all that go, you come back home… to the truth of vibration and sound.”

Another lesson she has learned over the years is that, although discipline and effort are important, of greater significance is to get so inside the music of life and that you let it sing through you. Again, in this respect, she combines her yoga practice with her music background. “As a pianist, you spend half of your life practicing scales and arpeggios. [There’s] so much time [spent] in the practice room. [But] the goal is [actually] to forget all the scales and arpeggios. The goal is to get so inside of the music that the music is really just part of your bloodstream, that it sings through you. It almost plays you rather than you playing it. And I think that with finding your voice, the whole essence is sort of a listening practice where you get out of the way. You just listen in, and you show up.”

Finally, Tull placed great emphasis on the community of students that has been cultivated through her studio in the past couple of decades. To highlight this point, she recalled a sign she’d seen at a local thrift store that said something to the effect of, “Surround yourself with people who believe in the beauty of your dreams.” She said that she’s never wanted Be In Awe to be a “yoga factory.” “I wanted it to be just like my life--as it’s meant to be.” And so instead of providing a great breadth and quantity of a variety of yoga classes and retreats, she’s really focused on building community within her studio. Many of her students have been practicing with her since the beginning. “We’ve been on so many adventures together,” Tull said, clearly proud of how far her students have come, still excited about past adventures they’d taken together, and yet also, incessantly focused on the present.

So, when I asked her “what’s next?” Tull simply looked at me, unblinkingly, and with a smile of genuine glee, said, “I don’t know.”