By Laurie Sarkadi- With enviable results, Judy McNicol has brought the principles of ashtanga yoga – selflessness, restraint, austerity, discipline – to the business world. It was an overcast summer day in 2005 and I was standing on the sidewalk by my yoga instructor’s house. We’d happened upon one another and struck up a conversation about a friend who had drowned weeks before. He was young, but had touched many lives during his short time in Yellowknife. We spoke of his dream to open a free drop-in space where people could meditate, do art, play music, cook. My instructor, Judy McNicol, said she had a similar dream, inspired in part by the yoga therapy she’d done with cancer patients. She wanted to create a warm, sacred place where people could heal, rejuvenate, relax, restore.

When she said this, she was no longer speaking to me. Her eyes looked past me and her voice softened.

I was shocked. To me, yoga was a hard sweat, albeit one linked to mental discipline and, on occasion, metaphysical experience. It usually happened over lunchtime at the Yellowknife Racquet Club, where Judy taught and where she seemed, to me, perfectly content. Clearly, she wanted more.

Two-and-a-half years after our sidewalk meeting – and five months into a global recession that had not yet bottomed – this lithe, no-nonsense Scotswoman opened the doors of Taiga Yoga and Therapy Centre. Lots of people have dreams. Some chase them. In the basement of a non-descript downtown office space more famously known as home to Kopy Cat Printing, Judy McNicol caught up to hers.

In its first week, Taiga Yoga had six students. “It was February and freezing and nobody knew I was here,” McNicol recalls. By last summer, 785 people had bought memberships, testing the limits of the 800-square-foot studio. So, in July, she hired a contractor and expanded the studio space to 2,100 square feet, much to the relief of her devotees, who could now twist and bend on a new cork floor without risk of bumping into their neighbours.

To hear her speak of this accomplishment, one would think transforming an old computer software workplace into a successful yoga studio was simply a matter of good karma. “People poured in to help,” she says. “They just came in and did things; flooring, wallpapering, painting. The guys I teach in the military showed up and did hours of drywalling. All that to me was an indication I was on the right path.”

But what qualification does she have to run a business? She worked briefly as a nanny after arriving in Yellowknife 21 years ago, then had twin boys while raising her first two children (so she can multi-task). She’s a graphic artist and photographer (which explains the attention paid to Taiga’s aesthetic, an eye-opening mix of shapes, colour, texture and light). She spent nine months of self-described “torture” working at her family’s multinational food brokerage business in Glasgow, now run by her brother, Neil, who earned Scotland’s entrepreneur of the year award for his efforts.

She has been heavily influenced by her father’s honesty and business integrity, but was more inclined toward the ballet lessons offered her as a child. “I was not that interested in business,” she says. “I told my brother I really struggle with the numbers, the books, and he said, ‘So what, get good at it. There’s no point whining about it.’”

So McNicol has worked with an accountant from the get-go to stay on top of that department, and credits two other men for sage business advice – Yellowknife financial consultant Graeme Dargo, and foul-mouthed British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Dargo helped her develop a modest business plan, while Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmare – a TV show in which Chef Ramsay berates failing restaurateurs – hammered home that in order to succeed, the owner simply has to be there and know what’s going on.

Of course McNicol also has a string of yoga credentials, and the well-being of her students, is clearly a priority. So perhaps it’s not surprising this 48-year-old mother of four has a devoted following of men and, even more, women. She started off teaching 23 classes a week (she’s cut that by half with the addition of seven yoga instructors, all of whom approached her for teaching opportunities) and is at the centre 10-12 hours a day. She fills her non-teaching hours with cleaning, website maintenance and meetings. The meetings involve seeking out drop-in instructors to conduct weekend workshops in areas such as nutrition or pre-natal yoga. At about $50 per two-hour session – and with frequent sell-outs – the workshops have become a lucrative staple to her business, bringing in cash and allowing her to finance upgrades like the expansion.

McNicol spent $22,000 of her own savings to start the centre, abiding by another of her business mantras, to not take out loans or buy anything that couldn’t be used in her own home if Taiga tanked. Her expansion costs were kept to $12,000 by reusing everything from nails to baseboard, and the original laminate flooring is destined for her two rental spaces.

Taiga is now about more than yoga. Starr McLachlan runs Northstarr Therapeutic Massage and Jill Peterson offers up pedicures and a host of holistic therapies at Sanctuary Holistic Esthetics. Like the rest of her operation, McNicol says the process of finding renters was organic. “Both of them came to me and asked if they could be part of the centre,” she says. “I could have searched the country 10 times over and not found any better fit. We have a shared philosophy that’s very non-aggressive.”

“I quite like it because it’s a little bit of a getaway,” says Peterson. “It’s really quiet.” Her clientele tripled after moving her esthetics business from a busy, uptown hair salon into Taiga’s downtown location. The earthy aroma of essential oils wafts from her room into the central reception.

That yogic sense of harmony gets soaked up by McNicol’s student, Leslie Allan. The two have known each other since their days taking aerobics at the Racquet Club, before yoga was offered there. “When you enter Judy’s studio, you step into an environment that is stimulating and appealing,” says Allan. “People who work at the studio possess similar values. The studio is well run but, importantly, it is thoughtfully run.”

McNicol operates Taiga in accordance with the principles of ashtanga yoga (see sidebar), symbolically reflected in the eight leafy limbs of her logo. Her decision to add a retail element to the business last spring meant seeking out Canadian-made clothing and environmentally-friendly products. And the prickly question of how much to charge for yoga was more than an exercise in price points; she could not breach a tenet of the first ‘limb,’ aparigraha, which calls for abstaining from possessiveness, greed and selfishness.

She scoured the Internet for prices across the country, took an average, then lowered it a couple dollars, settling on $15 for a drop-in and $125 for a 10-punch pass valid for three months. More serious yoga students opt for unlimited monthly memberships, ranging from $130 for one month to $650 for six. It may seem pricey, but in the burgeoning big business of yoga, southern studios routinely charge $20 – and as much as $28 US­ – for a drop in, plus a fee to use a mat.

Still, Taiga is costly compared to yoga at the city’s established gyms, where it is but one of many draws for a broader range of clientele. Cheaper still are classes offered by the City of Yellowknife in public buildings or by individuals at their workplace, usually a government building where high rental costs are not an issue and people can practice an hour of yoga for as little as $5. “It’s like comparing apples and oranges,” says McNicol. “I simply can’t compete with that.”

Neither could Sylvie Boisclair. She opened Yellowknife’s first dedicated yoga centre in January 2005 beside the now-defunct Sportsman’s Bar with the help of a small start-up loan and ongoing business counselling from the Akaitcho Business Development Corp. That sparked what she describes as a “yoga war.” She says local gyms started advertising their yoga and teachers’ credentials and the City of Yellowknife, after 30 years of offering the same yoga, added two new disciplines at low prices.

“Mine was a very humble little centre, a very plain space, so I had to charge quite low – although people still complained about the price – and I couldn’t make a living at it,” says Boisclair. She only offered one traditional style of yoga, Sivananda, but still attracted about 700 members during the three years she worked as the sole teacher, enabling her to pay off her loans and buy a trip to an ashram in India.

Boisclair’s business closed three months after Taiga opened, when an exhausted Boisclair took up full-time nursing studies. Now, she’s teaching classes at Taiga.
“I’m very happy there’s such a place in Yellowknife,” she says. “It continues what I started and if offers something people want that I didn’t cater to, which is variety.”

What Boisclair resolutely shares with McNicol are yoga principles that encourage people to stretch beyond down-dog and sun salutation, into the mental and spiritual aspects of themselves. It worked for Madonna, the Beatles and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it’s helping Yellowknife’s Casey Balden.

In his first tour of duty in 2006, the 26-year-old Balden served as a platoon commander in Afghanistan. Early on, one of his soldiers was killed by a suicide bomber and Balden suffered a broken shoulder in the blast. He says yoga helps him meet the physical demands of the military and helps him cope with the mental and emotional tolls that go hand-in-hand with the horrors of war.

“Military personnel often deal with extreme circumstances overseas, and while we see institutions trying to raise awareness about mental health and stress, the issue is still a bit taboo and tends to be easily dismissed,” says Balden, who admits to getting occasional yoga ribbing from his comrades, even though the military promotes yoga and pays for the passes. Because yoga teaches you to still your thoughts, Balden says a lunchtime class allows him to pause and recharge his body and mind.

Before joining the Taiga studio, Balden attended Bikram Yoga classes in Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary. Also known as “hot yoga,” the Bikram method involves 26 poses choreographed by its founder, Bikram Choudery. He copyrighted the sequences, overheated the studios and spun the package into a multi-billion-dollar franchise spanning 34 countries. Yoga traditionalists say such “McYoga” dilutes the founding ethics of a 2,000-year-old practice. For Balden, it introduced him to the possibilities of yoga and made him realize the star qualities of his latest instructor.

“Other instructors in the south can tell you what to do, but Judy can tell you how to do it,” he says. “When I think of teachers and coaches I’ve had in my life, be it at university, playing sports or in the military, Judy is among the very best. She’s more of a mentor figure, which is a rare find indeed.”

High praise indeed. But can she stay true to her ideals and grow her business? The answer lies on her face, which takes on that same dreamy look as she talks about plans to renovate the studio again within a year. She’ll make another rental space, and use the income to build a meditation room. “I won’t charge anything,” she says. “It’ll be a karma yoga place.”

Photographs by Patrick Kane