Yoga pioneer Lilias Folan, 90, had little-known local connection

Lilias Folan in 1976. DUANE HOWELL/THE DENVER POST, VIA GETTY IMAGES

By JEFF MORRIS 

When Lilias Folan died at the age of 90 on March 9, and when her obituary appeared in the New York Times on March 25, there were undoubtedly people in our area who recalled her groundbreaking PBS show, “Lilias, Yoga and You,” which has been credited with making yoga accessible to millions of viewers.

Based in Cincinnati and running from 1972 to 1992, it led to her being called “America’s First Yoga Influencer,” “The First Lady of Yoga,” and “The Julia Child of Yoga.”

But a small group of local people took special notice. To them, she would always be “Muffin Moon.”

That’s because, though the Times made no mention of it, Lilias, then known as Lilias Antoinette Moon or by the nickname “Muffin,” lived in Pound Ridge and graduated from Katonah High School in 1954.

Among her classmates — in a senior class with a grand total of 40 students — were two young men who would later become well known in the local community, and still live in the area: Paul Lewis and Ernie Marshall, as well as Marshall’s future wife, Nancy Sayer.

Marshall went on to become president of the family business, Marshall Oil Company in Pound Ridge, a mainstay of the community.

Lewis went on to become an engineer and to serve as Lewisboro’s Planning Board chair, as well as on the Zoning Board, Conservation Advisory Council and multiple other town and neighborhood committees. He and his wife, Jean, a former longtime member and president of the Katonah-Lewisboro Board of Education, have shared a home on the shore of Lake Oscaleta for decades. Paul kept his 1954 yearbook all this time, and it was Jean who alerted The Recorder to the Lilias connection.

Lilias Folan’s 1981 memoir MACMILLAN PUBLISHING

Among others who were in that same class and remained active locally, though they have since moved away, are C. Edwin Cantine and Edwin Covey.

The Times obituary said that Lilias Antoinette Moon was born Jan. 13, 1936, “into a wealthy family in Boston.” It said her father, Harold P. Moon, was an oil broker and mineral production executive with a background in aviation, while her mother, Norah (Goldsmith) Moon, “was a socialite who volunteered for programs to rehabilitate disabled servicemen and to provide guide dogs for the blind.”

Unfortunately, it went on to cite her description, in interviews, of an unsettled, painful childhood spent away from her parents at boarding schools and camps. She developed an interest in art and photography, the Times said, attended Bennington College in Vermont for two years, studied in Rome, and in 1959 married L. Robert Folan, a transportation executive.

A 1980 People Magazine interview includes roughly the same narrative — except it begins, “Originally from Pound Ridge, N.Y., Folan was born Lilias Antoinette Moon and known thereafter as ‘Muffin’ (‘Can you see Muffin, Yoga and You?’ she asks with a giggle). Her parents divorced when Lilias was 2, and her mother remarried several times, sending her daughter off to boarding school at the age of 9.” The People interview was quoted in a blog in 2013. 

While the Times said Lilias was born in Boston and People at least said she was from Pound Ridge, neither made any mention of her time at Katonah High School.

Paul Lewis, who grew up in the house that is now the Horse & Hound restaurant in South Salem, was not aware of her prior to high school. He thinks she may have arrived sophomore year; her blurb in the yearbook says she had been student council president at New Canaan Country Day. Lewis remembers her being outgoing and quite popular.

At the time, before there was a Fox Lane High School, students from Pound Ridge attended Katonah High School, which was located in what is now Katonah Elementary School. Though this was years before John Jay High School and Middle School were built in Cross River, the name of the KHS yearbook was “The John Jay.”

As for Lilias, she gave birth to two boys in the early 1960s and developed what she later realized was postpartum depression. In her 1981 book “Lilias, Yoga and Your Life,” she said that she had everything but “was not happy.” When her doctor suggested exercise, she took a yoga class at the YWCA in Stamford, Conn., near her then-home. As a result, she told Yoga Journal in 2023, she “stopped smoking, slept better and had more energy.”

In an article that appeared in Cincinnati Magazine on Feb. 25 of this year, just days before her death, Folan talked about having gotten comfortable teaching yoga classes in Stamford until her husband threw her a curveball: he’d gotten a promotion at work, and the family was moving to Cincinnati. She didn’t want to go, and she laughed, telling the magazine, “Bob said you could see my heel marks in the dirt all the way from Connecticut.”

But after resuming her yoga teaching in Cincinnati, a student was so impressed she suggested a show starring Lilias to her TV-producer husband, which eventually led to WCET, the local PBS station — and the rest is history.

In 2023, Yoga Journal presented a new interview with Folan, in conjunction with the release of her book, “Yoga Gets Better With Age.” In it, she revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012. 

“About a year before my diagnosis, my doctor said, ‘Lilias, slow down. You’ve got to slow down; it’s beginning to show in your health.’ Then much to my surprise, I had a mammogram and they found cancer was knocking at my door.”

Folan said she went into it like it was a teacher. “Cancer is a guru,” she said. “Nothing is by accident. I made the vow more than 40 years ago that if there are things for me to learn here, bring them on.”

And so she remained upbeat. 

“How amazing to make this a part of the journey — the sadhana, the practice,” she said. “Strangely enough, I didn’t feel discouraged about it at all. If I leave this body tomorrow, glory hallelujah. I know there’s a next step. If you can breathe, we can do something. That has always been sort of a motto of mine. We will go onward and upward. Really, the joy is in the journey.”

In addition to her sons, Matthew and Michael, Folan is survived by a brother, Harold Hamilton; a half sister, Melinda Moon; and seven grandchildren. Her husband died in 2018.

Jeff Morris has been a reporter for The Recorder since its inception, and previously wrote for The Record-Review, The Lewisboro Ledger, and business periodicals, and even edited jokes for Reader’s Digest.