A Tribute To Bobby Clennell.
There have been many teachers over the years who have shaped how I teach. One of them—teacher, mentor, and friend—was Bobby Clennell. She passed away unexpectedly last month, and I’ve been thinking about her ever since.
Bobby came into my life at exactly the right time, though that’s something you only recognize in hindsight. In 2003, my stepson started at NYU, and on my first visit to see him, I wandered into Bobby’s Friday afternoon Restorative class at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York. After that first experience, I made sure every future flight landed early enough on Fridays so I could make it to class. For the next four years, whenever I was in New York for a weekend visit, my Friday afternoons belonged to Bobby.
That first class helped me settle out of travel mode and the noise of the city. A few weeks later, she remembered me—a surprise, considering how many students filled those large classes. A friendship grew from there. We’d have tea. She invited me to her home for a private lesson in one of her specialties, women’s health, and read passages from the book she was writing, The Woman’s Yoga Book, while I moved through the poses and she watched, observed, and offered guidance.
I’ve never had another teacher-student friendship that felt so effortless. I looked forward to every visit. After I opened the studio in 2006, she encouraged me to begin a Prenatal Yoga class. Later, she welcomed me and our prenatal teacher, Laura Hedges, into her home and coached us both in working with pregnant students.
In 2008, I invited her to Memphis for a weekend workshop. She agreed, with one condition: a free Friday afternoon session for breast cancer survivors. I said yes immediately, though privately I assumed no one would come. You never know who will walk through the door when there’s no sign-up sheet.
Eight women came.
Some had undergone mastectomies. Some had reconstruction. Some were in the middle of radiation or chemotherapy. I assisted, though I had no business calling myself qualified. What I remember most is watching Bobby with them. Each woman left that room looking as though she’d been truly seen—and knowing it.
I never asked Bobby why breast health mattered so deeply to her, and she never told me. Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t ask. But I was thirty-eight and she was sixty-eight—a friend, yes, but also something more nurturing than that. She never made it strange, but I can see now that she had become a kind of mother figure to me. Perhaps that’s why I never felt the need to press for the details of her life. She didn’t need to explain herself. She simply met me where I was, answered what I asked, and made herself available without fanfare or drama.
One summer, during a particularly difficult period when I was struggling with a depression I couldn’t explain, I spent an extended stretch in New York and went to her classes regularly. More than once, she showed up to our lunches with wet hair, fresh from the pool. She mentioned it the way you’d mention coming from across town — “just had a swimming lesson” — no pause, no explanation, nothing to see here. In her seventies, she had taken up swimming in preparation for retiring to a place by the sea in England.
Finding a pool in New York City, finding a teacher, learning to swim — she treated it as the most ordinary thing in the world. At the time, I simply noted it as remarkable. Now I see it differently — as a kind of lesson. There are still things to look forward to as a woman grows older.
Whole new skills to acquire. Whole new chapters waiting to be lived.
Bobby was a teacher, a friend, and a mentor to people all over the world. I feel lucky beyond measure to have been one of them.
She taught yoga, of course. But more than that, she taught me something about how to grow older—with curiosity, generosity, and the quiet confidence that life keeps unfolding.