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Breathe In, Breathe Out
The Art of Yoga
By Greg Downs
It was a Monday evening, and almost everyone at a Chicago-area Bally Total Fitness club was frantic. As always, there were men leaning heavily on stair climbing machines up front. In a back room a bass-heavy soundtrack blared as a Tae-Bo workout leader yelled instructions.
Only a few feet away, though, one room was almost entirely silent, and the yoga workout leader, Yirser Ra Hotep, wasn't telling his class to speed up. In his soft, insistent voice, he kept urging his pupils to slow down. "Breathe in, and with your exhalation, lean over to the side. Slowly, turn your heel from the side to the front," he told his class. Behind him, three women and three men slid slowly but gracefully into their next position.
These members chose yoga over the bustling class next door because they wanted to improve their flexibility, to combat nagging injuries and they were curious, but mostly because they had been busy all day and wanted to find something to help them calm down.
While the benefits of yoga are plentiful -- and sometimes miraculous -- most students and teachers come back to that basic point. Yoga teaches them how to relax and how to take control of their lives.
The key to that relaxation, says Hotep, is yoga's emphasis on controlled breathing. "Yoga helps you learn immunity to stress," says Hotep, who offers video and audiotapes about yoga through YogaSkills.com
