The fifteen or so students in her Tuesday night level 3 Yogadance class at the Northampton Yoga Center have just completed a particularly difficult vinyasa, or series of yoga postures. They performed the asanas, or postures, to music, a quietly compelling tape of a woman's plaintive singing.

One student has for the first time reached her arms around her legs to clasp her handsÑ"binding"Ñwhile twisted into an extended "warrior," a strenuous standing pose. And Kingston, with her back turned to her class, noticed. She praises her student.

"And that's just how it happens," she says. "You try and try, and one day, you reach and you're there. You were solidly there, too."

Kingston says that's the way she feels about her return to teaching. A yoga practitioner since the 1960s and a teacher since the '70s, she had her own yoga center in Connecticut and taught in towns all along the Connecticut coast for many years. Several years ago, though, she decided to leave teaching. She took up sculpting and established a Native American gallery on the Cape. She continued her personal practice, but felt she was "done with teaching."

That was before the terrible event that wrenched her from her moorings.
Kingston, now 60, had just moved back to this area (she had lived for a couple of years in Hatfield in the '80s) to be nearer her two daughters. In November of 1997, her daughter Pam was killed in an incident of domestic violence, and Kingston fell into an abyss of sorrow. But in the midst of her deepest mourning, she clung to her practice, and one day while meditating, she says, she heard her daughter's voice: "Mom, you've got to go back to work." The message was powerfully reinforced a month or so later, when a healer told Kingston her daughter had been present and had repeated her urgent exhortation: "Mom, you've got to go back to work."

She has been teaching at the Northampton Yoga Center since June 1998. "When I went back to teaching, I taught some pretty crummy classes," Kingston says. "My timing was off, my creative impulses were dead . . . It was one of the hardest things I'd ever done. But I kept thinking about the warrior pose."

"I've got my Ôteacher's feet' back again," she says.

It's another Tuesday night at the yoga center. Kingston devotes ten minutes at the end of every Yogadance class to student comments and questions. One woman, herself a dance teacher, says, "When we did that thing, I was thinking, I hate yoga, why am I here? Then you said, just breathe, you're doing fine, you'll get through it. And I did." Many students comment on the strength they draw from Kingston's voice. It is steady and quiet; instruction flows with the postures, but always she offers encouragement and sincere, enthusiastic praise.

Kingston pays attention to detail, to the smallest changes in movement, in posture, and yet promotes throughout the class a feeling of flow, of the dance. Her students get the feeling she has eyes in the back of her head.

Kingston began to dance as a small child, in Isadora Duncan dance camps, learning "that wonderful moving, expression from the inside." Her Aunt Louise, who was also a Duncan student, used to dance and sing to her that old song: "The hipbone's connected to the thighbone, the thighbone's connected to the kneebone, . . ." and that sense of the body's internal interdependency stuck with her, she says.

In her teens, she worked with the greats at Connecticut College's summer dance school: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, JosŽ Lim—n, Merce Cunningham, Pauline Kohner, Lucas Hoving. Kingston says that though she was always among the favored group asked to perform, she never really had faith in her ability, an attitude common among dancers. "I fell right into it," she says, "Not ever to be OK, never able to get my leg high enough. . . ."

That painstaking, obsessive perfectionism is something most women are raised to share and need to learn to outgrow, she believes. "My body was always a tool to get me something, never my friend. I think every woman is like that."

Kingston pursued dance, moving to New York after high school and modeling to help support herself as a dance student. She terms that move "very scary." Though she was doing wellÑstudying with Martha Graham and being paid to dance professionallyÑshe was in love and "It seemed easier simply to get married," she says. She moved to Middlebury, Vermont, while her husband finished college. There, she helped launch Middlebury College's dance programÑand proceeded to bear four children in less than four years. She kept on with her dance career, choreographing and performing in Europe as well as the United States.

During the '60s, starting with a book, she got into yoga. "Yoga has its own rhythm, its own pace," Kingston says. "It crept into my life inch by inch, and dance crept out inch by inch. I had to go from dance to yoga before I could go back to dance."

The climate of the '60s swept Kingston along as it did so many others. She became involved in antiwar efforts and soon embraced feminist causes.

Her newly raised consciousness turned her even more toward yoga, away from the dancer's attitude. She says she took what she needed and could use from each of her teachers. "I studied with everybody," she says, noting that the Himalayan Institute was a particularly important influence in her early intensive study of the discipline in San Francisco. She took years of training, including a stint of rigorous Iyengar-style instruction. But her practice and her teaching were always her own. "I'm a maverick," Kingston says.

She has been following a vinyasa styleÑthe posture flow now popular in the mainstream and claimed by many practitionersÑsince the earliest days of her teaching. She credits her dance background: "When I'm in one move, I'm already going to the next place," she says.

She seeks to share her insights about women and their bodies with her students, most of whom are women. "I really want women to connect with their bodies in a loving way," She knows that what she says next may be controversial, but, she says, "You don't find that in an Iyengar class." She feels the emphasis reinforces women's neurotic perfectionism. "It's so familiar [to women] not to be OK," she says.

That entrenched pattern for women of "not being OK" is reinforced, she feels, in a style of yoga that tried to get postures "perfect." "There's one way to do it and that's it. Don't we want to use our body in a sense of comfort?"

Kingston has herself taken much from the Iyengar method. She likes, for example, the use of props, but only to help along someone who's almost comfortable in a pose, not "to get it absolutely right."

Of course, she says, alignment is important so that people don't get hurt, but "such attention to every little detail . . . keeps us in the left side of our brain."

She wants women to hear her message in their practice of yoga and in their lives. "I'm not sitting on a pedestal never having had problem," she says. "I've been there, and that's why I speak out about it, because others who have spoken out about it have helped me."

Kingston feels comfortable with the "interesting and complementary group" of teachers at the center. Each, she says, is well versed in all aspects of yoga practice, but each is particularly strong in one or two aspects. Where one is completely consistent, with no surprises, another will be particularly good at explaining verbally what to do in a posture. Yet another takes a more intellectual approach that many find appealing. "My strongest point," says Kingston, "is becoming the posture. Suspending the doing, and becoming."

With illustrator Micha Archer, Kingston is currently working on a book to share her yoga methods more widely.

At the end of every class, Kingston bows to her students, her hands palm to palm in namaste, the customary greeting in India and Nepal. She always says, "I bow to the light and the darkness in all of you, from which our greatest lessons come." The sentence resonates with her. "Yoga keeps me on a course," she says simply. "I don't know what I'd do without it."