May 24, 2012 (Honolulu, Hawaii) — Young patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) may feel better after practicing yoga for just six weeks, a new study shows.

Researchers reported their findings here last week at the American Pain Society’s annual meeting.

“It seems to be a very feasible, practical treatment for patients with rheumatoid arthritis,” one of the researchers, Kirsten Lung, tells WebMD. Lung researches pain at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The results are not surprising to Kathleen Sluka, PhD, a physical therapist who researches pain at the University of Iowa. All kinds of physical activity can help with rheumatoid arthritis, she tells WebMD. Sluka was not involved in this study.

RA is a chronic type of arthritis. It is an autoimmune disease. It is most common among women. Early symptoms include fatigue, joint pain, and stiffness.

As it progresses, RA may feel like the flu, with muscle aches and loss of appetite. Early and effective treatment may help prevent joint and bone destruction.

An Alternative to Drugs

The UCLA researchers say some drugs for RA can pose additional risks for younger patients. So the researchers are looking for alternatives. They decided to try Iyengar yoga.

In Iyengar yoga, practitioners may use blocks, straps, cushions, and other props to stretch and strengthen their muscles.

The UCLA researchers recruited 26 women with RA. The women’s ages ranged from 21 to 35. On average they had suffered from RA for 10 and a half years.

The researchers then assigned 11 of these women to classes in Iyengar yoga. They assigned the other 15 to a wait list for yoga classes.

After six weeks, they asked both groups about their condition. The group that practiced yoga said they were happier than when they started. They said they could better accept their pain. They also reported better general health and more energy.

The women on the wait list for yoga classes did not experience these improvements.

Even the women who did yoga did not report less pain or disability. That may be because the study was so short, says Lung. “But six weeks did a world of good for those involved.”

Sluka says that physical exercise usually takes about eight weeks to show significant effects. All kinds of exercise can help with RA, she says. “Yoga is just another form of exercise,” she says.

By strengthening muscles, exercise prevents joints from moving in uncomfortable ways. And it can activate parts of the nervous system that reduce pain.

The study is not conclusive, she points out, because it is very small. Also, there is a possibility that the people in the yoga group felt better just because they were doing something to help themselves, not specifically because they were doing yoga.

But the study is still worthwhile, Sluka says. It shows people with RA they have another option for getting exercise. “Some people like to run. Some people like to lift weights. Some people like to do yoga,” she says.

These findings were presented at a medical conference. They should be considered preliminary, as they have not yet undergone the “peer review” process, in which outside experts scrutinize the data prior to publication in a medical journal.

Robert Sturman, an artist from Santa Monica, Calif., has traveled around the world painting and photographing landscapes, cityscapes, musicians, athletes and even a surfing rabbi. But it is the study of yoga that has triggered one of the most creative periods of his career, resulting in a series of stunning portraits that capture the beauty and poetry of asana, the repertory of postures included in the practice of yoga.

Recently, Mr. Sturman’s stunning photos of Tao Porchon Lynch, a 93-year-old yoga master pictured in a red flowing gown, have been making the rounds on Facebook and other Web sites, bringing added attention to his work, which is featured in the slide show above. (Ms. Lynch can be seen in Slides 5 and 6.) I recently spoke with Mr. Sturman about how he got started, his favorite yoga pose and photographing yoga at ground zero. Here’s our conversation.

How did you begin photographing yoga postures?

This started in 2003, when I started to get a practice in yoga. I wanted to really go deep into it to make a personal transformation, but I noticed everything around me was so beautiful, and I started to make art of it. Yoga offered me an opportunity to change my life, but it was also something that was so beautiful to study, the poetry of asana. It started growing from being able to photograph people on the beach to being invited to a penitentiary with yoga programs to do yoga asana imagery there.

How do you find your models?

They are people who teach or who have a devoted practice. They are interested in catching their moment of mastery on film. They find me. I find them. It’s like a movement where we all know each other. It’s like Paris at the turn of the century.

Robert Sturman Yoga at Ground Zero.

What is it about yoga that appeals to you as a subject for art?

It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen that really shows humanity on its best behavior, of people aspiring to touch something bigger than themselves. They do it in a very pure, longing type of way. It embodies not only the joy of existence, but there is an element of embracing the suffering. When someone is very deep into the asana and reaching out with their hands, in the midst of nature or wherever we are, there is something extremely human about it. I think that’s what moves people more than anything. That’s what moves me.

Is there a particular pose you most like to photograph, or does it depend on your subject or location?

I’m not as interested in certain poses — there are various arm balances that come across as showing off. I like a pose called a dancer’s pose. It’s where someone is grabbing the back of their leg and pulling it forward and reaching. There are certain poses like that that are so elegant.

What is the story behind the young woman in a red dress whom you photographed in New York City?

Last summer I was in New York. I was in a cafe and met a girl carrying a yoga mat, and she had a red dress on. She recognized me from Facebook. I asked her where she was going to practice. We walked throughout the day and made the most wonderful art. For the last pose, she grabbed her leg and lifted it so high it looks like a teardrop. The background was the World Trade Center site. She was just the ultimate model. I haven’t seen her since. It was beautiful.

Anna Raff

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Published: April 28, 2012

In places without hospitals or high schools, without movie theaters or a McDonald’s, the dedicated gather—often in offbeat venues—to practice. Meet the American yogis who are bringing yoga home.

By Andrea Ferretti

Cowboy Community

WHO CeCe Prince, Araya, Jamie Axelrod, Deb Phenicie,Marcia Suniga, Andrea Malmberg, Jagoe Reid
OMTOWN Lander, Wyoming
POPULATION 6,551

In the middle of Wyoming at the foot of the Wind River Mountains is a small but diverse town, which, residents say, is getting groovier by the day. Lander was once dependent on ranching and mining, but it is now the international headquarters for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), which means there’s a steady stream of young outdoorsy types and a growing interest in complementary healing, spirituality, and New Age thinking. “It’s probably more integrated than any other western town in Wyoming. You can go into Lander Bar and see a granola climber with long dreadlocks playing pool with a rancher in a hat, and they’re both throwing cowboy jokes around,” says local yoga teacher Araya (who uses no last name).

Jagoe Reid dreamed of upping the grooviness quotient with a yoga studio, but six months after its opening she found the rent too high and the turnout too low. Not to be deterred, Reid joined together with Araya and eventually created a co-op of seven teachers whose styles range from Ashtanga to Anusara to Iyengar Yoga.

For two years, the Limber Body, Limber Mind studio survived because the teachers donated their time and satisfied themselves with the rewards of connecting to their students. Now the studio is almost profitable. “Small towns take longer to warm up to new ideas,” Reid says. “But those who’ve made a commitment to build our sangha [community] are steadfast.”

I ♥ the Heartland

WHO Kathy Chinouth
OMTOWN Lena, Illinois
POPULATION 2,622

Lena, Illinois, is the sort of place where you leave the car running when you slip into the post office, and where the grocery store will take an IOU. But there’s not much in the way of entertainment; the old farm town has neither a movie theater nor a rec center. As a result, the gym is a popular hangout—so Kathy Chinouth turned it into a yoga hot spot.

“Most people thought it was all about putting their leg behind their head,” she says, recalling the response when she posted a sign offering yoga (free to gym members, $2 for nonmembers). “I just told them to come to class and see.” Six or seven people did.

Over time Chinouth, who studied with a teacher in a nearby town, has drawn devotees-including local farmers—she never expected. Modestly, she chalks it up to word of mouth; no one wants to be left out, she says. But it’s clear that Chinouth, 56, knows her community well and has made people comfortable with the unfamiliar. She dims the lights to help with self-consciousness; she has first-timers come early to learn the breathing; and perhaps most importantly, she urges students to try three classes before deciding what they think.

Plus, she’s a great role model. One farmer, who admitted he almost laughed out loud during his first class, later noticed that his arm was quivering in Side Plank Pose as Chinouth, nearly 20 years his senior, demonstrated the pose with ease—while talking. He was sold.

Now her hatha class is consistently filled, and her students brim with enthusiasm. Not long ago, in fact, after she confessed she wasn’t altogether happy teaching at the gym, her students called landlords and real estate agents in a quest to find her a better space. “I was hoping there would be interest,” she says, “but never in my dreams did I think there would be this much interest.”

Gotta Have Faith

WHO Betty Wooten with Wendy Wilson
OMTOWN Georgetown, Kentucky
POPULATION 19,158

The senior minister of the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Georgetown, Kentucky, believes gays should have the right to marry, so he proudly displays a bumper sticker that reads, “Another person of faith voting against the marriage amendment.” That is no surprise to church member Betty Wooten, who says, “We always were a bunch of rebels.” But she was surprised—and scared—when the Reverend Wendy Wilson, an associate minister, asked her to teach yoga classes to members of the congregation. “My first reaction was, there’s no way I can do this,” Wooten says.

She was selling herself short. Although Wooten had discovered yoga just five years earlier, at the age of 56, it had had a dramatic effect on her life. After the death of her husband, she and her daughter, Vickie, went on a spa vacation to ease their grief. While there, the two stumbled into their first yoga class and have been smitten ever since. “Yoga did for us what it’s supposed to do,” she says. “I tell people that it saved my sanity and they think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.”

Vickie pursued a teacher training certificate, but Betty never considered teaching until she was asked to. After ample prodding by her daughter, Betty decided to face her self-doubt. Equipped with her husband’s old neckties for straps and limited wall space (they have to take down a large cross to do inversions), Betty began to teach—and found her calling as a yoga teacher. Now a loyal group meets at the church every Wednesday morning to chant Om, do pranayama, and practice flow yoga. Wooten is pleased with the class size—nine students. “If it gets any bigger, we’ll have to start ripping pews out of the sanctuary,” she quips.

Onward Christian Yoginis

WHO Cindy Senarighi, Robin Norsted
OMTOWN White Bear Lake, Minnesota
POPULATION 24,453

Cindy Senarighi remembers feeling wary about going to her first yoga class because the church she’d been attending warned against any practice that stilled the mind, thereby allowing “evil” to enter it. After trying a class, though, she realized that she had experienced a new kind of stillness, and instead of feeling further from God, she felt closer. Her friend Robin Norsted felt the same.

“We decided to explore an alternative format for people who wanted to experience the benefits of yoga but who were concerned that it would clash with their Christian faith,” says Senarighi, who is currently a seminary student. So they started a company called Yogadevotion and began teaching in churches with the goal of building healthy congregations. To that end, they give a portion of their proceeds to the health ministries of each church that offers the classes.

The style is hatha flow, with generous helpings of Christian spirituality added. At the beginning of class, rather than chanting Om, students are encouraged to silently invoke a favorite phrase from a hymn or scripture, or a Christian mantra such as “Yahweh,” the Hebrew name for God. In class, Yogadevotion students might imagine grabbing the hand of God for support during an intense Warrior Pose or resting in God’s presence during Child’s Pose. A typical class ends with “Peace be with you,” rather than “Namaste.”

Now seven years old, Yogadevotion has built a healthy following and employs 10 teachers in 20 churches in the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs. Senarighi is delighted but not surprised. “Most people don’t have a problem incorporating their faith into the practice,” she says. “They learn that what’s at your center is what you’ll relate to in the practice. For Christians, that center is Christ.”

When Things Fall Apart

WHO Melissa Derbyshire
OMTOWN Port Clyde, Maine
POPULATION About 150

Since Melissa Derbyshire moved to Port Clyde eight years ago, she’s devoted herself to creating a stalwart yoga community in nearby Tenants Harbor. She finds that yoga helps people cope with the frigid weather and keeps them from going stir-crazy as winter’s chill drags into May. It also forges bonds; her students often sail and socialize together.

But she didn’t realize how caring her community could be until March 2003, when her son, 25-year-old Marine Brian Kennedy, became one of the first Americans to lose his life in the Iraq war. Soon after, her students gathered at her home, brought food, and held a small ceremony to honor Kennedy, planting a tree in his memory.

With 31 years of practice under her belt, Derbyshire finds herself leaning more on her yoga. “The practice gives you that inner strength,” she says. “Even when you’re falling apart, you discover you still have strength deep down.” And now more than ever she is conscious of motivating her students and herself to keep finding the value of yoga. “This has shown people what yoga can do, because it really does help in a crisis,” she says. “It gives me a chance to lead by example.”

Cold Mats, Warm Hearts

WHO Diane Ziegner
OMTOWN Talkeetna, Alaska
POPULATION 860

Seven years ago, Diane Ziegner, 43, went to a class at the local primary school and found a small group diligently following the instructions of Iyengar Yoga teacher Patricia Walden on a much-used video. “They were so enthusiastic,” she recalls, “but most of them had never had a hands-on adjustment. I thought to myself, These people need a teacher.”

“These people” are residents of the remote village of Talkeetna, where there are killer views of Mount McKinley, but you have to drive 60 miles for major grocery shopping. The physically active community of fishermen, dogsledders, skiers, and climbers supports a local radio station, a community theater, a float plane service to carry people into really remote spots, and now a yoga studio in a yurt.

Ziegner regularly commuted two hours each way for a teacher training program with Iyengar Yoga teacher Lynne Minton. Then in 1999 she began teaching at schools and churches, and by 2003 found a permanent home in the yurt she’s named Studio Z. Her corps of students, ranging from 16 to 60 years old, is close-knit, even though they don’t all get to class regularly. “If it’s 20 below here or the fish are running, people aren’t going to come,” she says. “But I know they love it. They always come back.”

Sunshine State Salutations

WHO Mary-Alice Herbert
OMTOWN Sugarloaf Key, Florida
POPULATION Less than 1,000

It’s a dream vacation—morning yoga on a white-sand beach, your gaze drifting toward distant islands floating on the pale turquoise water. When class begins, the sun is shining, but as you lie in Savasana, a breeze picks up and warm droplets of rain dot your body, leaving you calm and refreshed. For Sugarloaf Key locals this trip requires no splurging or travel—they just head to nearby Sugarloaf Lodge beach, where they can join guests of the lodge and Mary-Alice Herbert, a self-described late-life yogini and certified Integral Integrative Yoga therapist, who teaches twice a week.

The rapid and at times extreme weather changes inspire Herbert, 64, to teach on the beach, even though she has her own studio, called Sugarloaf Key Yoga, or SKY. The weather nudges students to remember that just like nature, their yoga practice, emotions, and lives are always in flux. “There are days when it’s hot and sticky and you don’t want to practice. And then a breeze comes and everything changes,” says Herbert, who grew up on the island.

With a handful of regular students in their 80s, a group of teacher trainees, and children who sometimes come to the beach class, Herbert often has to adapt her lessons on the fly. Her solution is simple: “I teach the postures according to my students’ ability. I have an enormous repertoire of modifications.”

Herbert hopes to teach at a prison and is encouraging one of her teacher trainees to teach yoga to hospice caregivers. “At 64, it’s good to feel like I’ve really got my shoulder to the edge of the world,” she says, “and I’m helping to shift it the other way.”

Yogis Without Borders

WHO Desiree Kleemann
OMTOWN Point Roberts, Washington
POPULATION 1,308

If you’re heading to the Madrona Yoga studio from anyplace else in Washington state, have your passport handy—you’ll have to cross the border twice to get there. Point Roberts, with a population that swells from 1,300 year round to 3,500 during tourist season, is a five-square-mile peninsula that hangs off the coast of British Columbia. Call it an oversight or a governmental snafu—the land is just south of the 49th parallel, so when borders were drawn in 1846, it became U.S. territory.

The quirks of cross-cultural living include trips to Canada to go to the movies or shop for shoes, and crossing two borders to hit U.S. soil for school or work. In town, everyone accepts both forms of currency, and Desiree Kleemann, 44, teaches her own version of vinyasa flow to a mix of Americans and Canadians. “I have so many students who come from Canada that the Border Patrol is starting to recognize them,” Kleemann says. “They’ll say, ‘Going to yoga? Have a good time’ and wave them through.”

Like the town itself, Kleemann’s studio on her wooded property is a refuge from the stresses of modern living. “When you’re in Savasana in Vancouver, you hear traffic and smell exhaust,” she says. “Here the most irritating thing might be hearing a dog bark. It’s almost like being on retreat.”

Having lived in Vancouver, Kleemann, a former professional dancer whose own influences include Shiva Rea, Sarah Powers, and Judith Hanson Lasater, enjoys bringing in teachers from the city (45 minutes by car) for workshops. But she doesn’t regret her decision to teach small classes in a small town; she cherishes the relationships she’s developed with her students. “Small studios are doing important work,” she says. “We’re just as important as those with 400 people going through every week.”

Fungh-ky Yoga

WHO Alison Donley
OMTOWN West Grove, Pennsylvania
POPULATION 2,652

After 12 years as a nomadic yoga teacher—driving to and from rec centers, gyms, and colleges to teach—Alison Donley opened a studio in her southeastern Pennsylvania town of West Grove. At a meeting to obtain her zoning license, Donley found herself fielding questions about plans for a massage room—was it all really just a cover for an X-rated massage parlor?

Then she had to deal with an unappealing local phenomenon: manure. “Basically, it stinks—often,” she says with a laugh. West Grove is the mushroom capital of the United States, and the conditions that create great ‘shrooms can make for some foul-smelling days. “There’s nothing like asking people to breathe deeply when it smells like chicken poop.”

Nixing her children’s suggestion to name her studio Yoga Fungha-mentals, Donley invested in an aromatherapy diffuser, peppermint and lavender oils, and a sense of humor about malodorous moments. Less than a year after opening its doors, the small, mainly Ashtanga studio—called the Light Within, based on a quote from Swami Rama—is thriving. Donley and her colleague, Carol Murray, a student of New York-based Beryl Bender Birch, teach 12 classes per week and plan to offer Mysore classes soon.

Donley, 44, says she has “lived yoga” for about 10 years now and attributes her devoted following to her own love of both the practice and her students. “I might not be the most gifted teacher in the world, but I love these people,” she says. “I want them to see how incredibly amazing they are. And the mat’s a great place to start.”

Great Yoga on a Great Lake

WHO Sandra Carden
OMTOWN Leelanau County, Michigan
POPULATION 21,000

In 1973, Sandra Carden and her husband, Field, set off on a three-month road trip from Detroit to do some soul-searching. With the book Be Here Now (by spiritual leader Ram Dass) in hand, the couple cruised the countryside and practiced yoga wherever they could—at campsites, in motel rooms, on top of their VW bus.

Carden, who had run out of medication for her hypothyroidism, decided to focus on poses that would help with the condition. She says that she was “hooked for life” when after the three-month adventure, her doctor said her thyroid was back to normal.

Carden and her husband eventually landed on 10 acres in Leelanau County, on Lake Michigan, and have lived there for the past 26 years. And since 1989, Carden has been teaching at her studio, Union/Yoga. The studio has developed a healthy following of 100 students a week and offers small yoga teacher trainings, based on Carden’s blend of metaphysics and the chakra model.

Her philosophy on keeping things fresh is simple and wise. “My first approach is that we’re all students,” Carden says. “We are all beginners. We must remain open to what is, as we are always changing.”

Deep in the Heart of Texas

WHO Patty Williamson
OMTOWN Fredericksburg, Texas
POPULATION 8,911

In a small town in Texas, not surprisingly, it’s hard to make ends meet as a studio owner. That’s why full-time yoga teacher Patty Williamson decided against opening her own studio. The quaint town of Fredericksburg draws more than a million visitors a year, so the rents are comparable to those in Austin—a city almost eight times its size.

Williamson’s decision has proven wise. She’s found incredible success piecing together a schedule of teaching at gyms and other locations. In five years, the self-proclaimed “corporate dropout” has gone from teaching 6 to more than 100 students each week.

It wasn’t easy—early on, Williamson had to face fearful churchgoers and people who stereotyped her as some sort of strange hippie. “It happens when you’re a vegetarian in a cattle state,” she says. But at the same time, she has been amazed by how much the local residents have grown to accept her. Perhaps surprisingly, half of her current students are middle-aged men—including construction workers, doctors, and real estate agents.

Recently, Williamson caught the attention of the owners of Yoga Yoga, a large studio in Austin. Impressed by her accomplishments, they’ve asked her to share her secrets and help them set up pilot yoga programs in other towns and communities. According to Williamson, “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened yet.”

Smoke-Free in Dodge City

WHO Nathalee (Nat) Shriver
OMTOWN Dodge City, Kansas
POPULATION 25,176

One hundred and fifty years ago, Nathalee Shriver, a yoga teacher whose motto is “Leave a path of peace as you go through life,” might have been run out of town by a bunch of tough-talking gunslingers. Fortunately, Dodge City has come a long way since its lawless days in the 1800s. True, it’s still better known as the setting for the TV series Gunsmoke than for Nat’s Yoga & Dance Studio, but the local community has backed Shriver’s yoga teaching since she introduced it 10 years ago.

“Some people were afraid it was something mystical, but more believe it can really help put their life in order and give them flexibility, strength, and good health,” she says.

From Gridiron to Guru

WHO Kelli Slocum
OMTOWN Iowa City, Iowa
POPULATION 65,000

Iowa City is a college town, home to the University of Iowa. And like many other college towns, it offers the same things as big cities do: culture, good restaurants, and now, lots of yoga studios. Kelli Slocum, a lifelong resident and yoga teacher, has eagerly watched them pop up. Today she’s a regular instructor of both flow and hot yoga at the Studio, a space founded by Tim Dwight, an NFL player with the New England Patriots.

Dwight, Slocum explains, had a favorite yoga studio in La Jolla, California; when he returned to his hometown of Iowa City, he was determined to re-create it there.

“We believe he succeeded,” she says. As a teacher, Slocum encourages her students to challenge themselves but also to listen to their bodies. “The cool thing about yoga is that it’s vigorous and motivating and you can feel great and accomplished, but there is always that next level,” she says. “You can always challenge yourself to take it a little bit further.”

Wisdom Does Wonders

WHO Tracey L. Thomas
OMTOWN Greensburg, Pennsylvania
POPULATION Population 15,889

Many folks in this not-so-tiny town 45 minutes southeast of Pittsburgh don’t like to get too far out of their comfort zone. They turned down an offer to be the home of the first maglev (magnetically levitated) high-speed train in the country. “It would have made Greensburg a landmark,” says Tracey Thomas, a longtime resident, “but they panicked, shut down the idea, and built a Wal-Mart instead.”

And some were a bit suspicious when Thomas opened the city’s first yoga studio, suggesting it was part of a religious cult that involved brainwashing. Others have been more supportive of Wisdom and Wonders, Thomas’s yoga studio and child-care center; the number of students has risen from 8 to 68 in just six months. Even the kids at the daycare center do yoga; other specialty classes include senior, prenatal, and family yoga; candlelight meditation; power yoga; and even yoga for golfers.

Thomas believes that her training as an elementary school teacher informs the way she guides her students. “I never focus as much on content as I do on planting that desire to learn,” she says. “Your gift as their teacher is to give them something to carry with them forever—the yearning to learn more.”

A Refreshing Hit of Southern Comfort

WHO Rebecca Gatz
OMTOWN Paragould, Arkansas
POPULATION Population 22,000

If you wander into one of Rebecca Gatz’s classes in Paragould, Arkansas, don’t be alarmed if you hear instructions given in the local vernacular: “In Warrior II, don’t point like a coonhound or let your knee or toe go catawampus!”

In the heart of the Bible Belt, Gatz decided to bring yoga to her hometown once she discovered it helped with her asthma attacks. In fact, she went to her first class 12 years ago and hasn’t had an asthma episode since.

Gatz teaches Iyengar-style yoga and loves teaching all ages and types-from the local Senior Bees to a summer kids’ college program to leadership groups.

O Pioneers!

Responding to a call for submissions on the Yoga Journalwebsite, more than 150 yoga teachers wrote in and told us that, yes, yoga really is everywhere. You flooded our in box with passionate stories about thriving yoga scenes from Skagway, Alaska, and Fargo, North Dakota, to Frankenmuth, Michigan, and Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia.

You showed us how, teacher by teacher, yoga is making its way into America’s nooks and crannies—into farming villages, resort towns, through subfreezing weather, and onto dazzling beaches—and improving the quality of life for people who never thought they’d be doing the Down Dog. Most of you are pioneers; you’ve overcome immense challenges to offer classes, many of you volunteer your teaching time, week in and week out, and you are almost all women. (A few male yogis wrote in with stories of great enthusiasm and inspiration, too, but most were students, not teachers.) What really rocked our world was to learn that all the teachers we interviewed know each and every student by name-heck, they usually even know whose daughter scored the winning point at the basketball game last week.

Andrea Ferretti, Yoga Journal’s lifestyle editor, is an Omtown yogini who hails from Allentown, Pennsylvania.

YOU are sitting behind the Humvee where you’ve dragged a wounded soldier. You’ve wrapped the gaping hole in his leg, given him a shot of morphine and radioed up the line for help. Your eye is trained on a distant, hazy point through the scope of an assault rifle. You can see the tiny, magnified bodies of your enemy. Maybe they are waiting for another explosion. A bigger one. Your heart starts pounding harder. The temperature is over 100 degrees. The kid next to you, a kid you always found slightly annoying, with his Massachusetts accent and his unwillingness to walk in the front position of the line, is now holding a bloody pad to his thigh and biting down on a bandanna to keep from screaming. Sweat is pouring down his face. There is no easy way out. You simply have to wait and try not to give away your position. Through your scope you can see their rocket launchers in a pile on the ground.

What you do, without moving your hands from the rifle, is to start breathing, because you realize you have been holding your breath for a long time. So you deepen it. Slow, deeper, deeper. The hiccups of fear start to mellow out. You can feel your belly soften a bit. Then you visualize your breath. In the left nostril, out the right. In the right, out the left. After just a minute, the mad thumping in your chest begins to slow. You hold the fingertips of one hand to your forehead to calm the fight-or-flight response so you can think clearly. The situation has not changed, but you feel yourself change, and you are now able to deal with it.

Back in the safe and cold green mountains of central Vermont, I walk into the yoga room to face a roomful of boys and girls. They are 17, 18, 20 years old, but they seem more like boys and girls than men and women. The stress in my students’ lives is not at combat level. Yet. Right now, most of them have the stress of being in the Corps of Cadets at a military college. That means P.T. at 5:30 in the morning, and constant building, running, gunning, learning, hiking, jumping and being yelled at.

Norwich University, the birthplace of R.O.T.C. and the oldest private military college in the country, trains both military cadets and civilians in discipline, integrity, confidence, loyalty and honor.

From here, many of my military students will deploy to the deserts of Afghanistan. I have a boy leaving next week.

They are young. They are strong. They have incredible stamina. But they don’t have fluency or ease within their bodies. They do push-ups and pull-ups and bench presses and weighted lunges. They run 10 or 20 miles with heavy packs on. But they don’t know how to breathe or to access the core muscles in their abdomens that could help them hump their packs or carry a buddy to safety. I teach them this, and also, how to find that place deep inside that is whole, untouchable, sacred.

Halfway through the semester, I ask my students how they think yoga will help them. Why did they sign up for this class? “It helps us to focus on the good,” one says. “That’s the only way we can get through this place.”

I think of them as if they are in the Bhagavad Gita, the great Indian treatise on war. The soldier Arjuna stops on the battlefield and cries out to Lord Krishna: “Do I have to do this? Do I have to kill?” Krishna, instead of telling him what to do on the battlefield, teaches him yoga. So that is what I do. I teach them yoga.

I am humbled by this prospect, but I come in to the classroom strong. This is a community used to leadership. They stand at attention and call me ma’am. I have to show that I have enough strength to lead them. But I don’t teach them strength. They learn that enough. One girl said to me, “This is the only class where I don’t get yelled at.”

I want them to love and respect themselves. At the end of class, when they lie on their mats in savasana like children at nap time, I nurture and tuck in these bodies. I hold their ankles and swing their legs back and forth to let their hips soften. I roll their shoulder blades under their backs to help open their hearts. I hold their heads in my hands, while they lie there. They don’t get touched here, at military college. They don’t get nurtured. Everything is hard and harsh and angry and fast and sharp. Some of them are so stiff and rigid. They hold their heads at attention even when they’re lying down.

“Let go,” I say. “I’ve got you.” They relax their necks and let their heads sink into my waiting hands. Their hair is buzzed to the scalp or tied back in a tight bun. I hold their heads and pray over them. I pray with all my might that God does the right thing by this boy or this girl. I place their heads down on the blankets and hold my thumb over their third eye, hoping that they keep their intuition strong and will remember that their inner souls are stronger than any enemy outside of them, seen or not seen.

In the beginner’s class, it’s all I can do to keep my students breathing while they move. In the advanced class, I teach these future soldiers the profound philosophy of yoga: how to sit in a stress position and still breathe, smoothly and steadily. How to keep minds open and flexible, to develop non-attachment, compassion, contentment.

We talk about what it would be like to have a buddy blown open next to you. How you would immediately feel yourself flooded with the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. How your natural impulse would be to run like hell to get out of there, or to train a machine gun at the horizon and blaze away at everything in your path. How much harder it is to remain calm, to analyze the situation and respond from a place of strength.

It may seem out of whack to hold chaturanga for 10 breaths and think this will be preparation for war. But in fact, this is what yoga is all about. And in fact, if there is anything at all that could truly prepare them to go and fight, it is yoga.

Many people ask me about ahimsa — the grand yogic tenet of nonviolence. I respond with what the revered yoga teacher T. K. V. Desikachar says: It simply means that we must always behave with consideration and attention to others.

So I teach them this, too.

Indeed, Arjuna killed members of his own family. He was following his dharma, and his conscience. He was fulfilling his destiny, playing out the role in the world that he, and only he, was created for.

In the world we have created, there is a huge divide between the ideal and the real. If everyone truly wanted no more war, we would have to change the behavior that leads us into war. But I am not here to teach the world to have no more war. That is for the Dalai Lama. I am here to teach these soldiers, these young men and women who are willing to pay for our system of democracy with their lives, how to uncover the truth of who they are. Who they are — warriors, lawyers, doctors, mothers, fathers, teachers, priests — is each one’s own specific path. I am here to help them find their inner souls, and to help them walk their paths with honesty, integrity and grace. It is what I teach in every yoga class.

But here at this military college, it feels weighted with much more consequence.

Do you get bouts of restless energy in the springtime? It turns out that spring fever is more than just a turn of phrase, and you can use yoga to harness all of that seasonal energy!

Scientists tell us that when the days lengthen and the temperature rises, changes in our bodies’ melatonin and serotonin cause what’s commonly called “spring fever.” Our energy spikes, winter’s dark mood brightens, and we may crave socializing, shopping, and sex. While frolicking in the sun (or a dark bedroom) is a well-deserved treat after months of hibernation, spring fever can sometimes plow over our core priorities. When the cherry trees blossom, we may find ourselves shirking work, fidelity, exercise, spiritual practices, and savings plans.

What is Spring Fever?

Yogis describe this seasonal lust for life not as a chemical change in the brain, but as a rise in the energy called apana. A counterpart to the often-discussed prana, apana resides in the pelvis and lower abdomen. In addition to regulating some physical outward functions such as urination, apana is responsible for our “urge to merge” with the material world and each other. According to Chris Mastin of PranaShine Yoga, when this energy shoots off the charts in spring, we can use postures and breathing to channel it in a positive way and ground ourselves.

Using Yoga to Calm Spring Fever

Here are Mastin’s recommendations for calming spring fever, on and off the mat:

1) If apana runneth over, you’ll need to burn off the excess before introverted breathing and stretching are doable. Crank some music and dance before you settle into lotus. Many yoga studios offer dance classes and parties, if you want to boogie en masse.

2) Make calming and integrating postures, such as forward folds and gentle twists, the bulk of your practice. Hold each for at least 30 seconds, maybe melting over a bolster or foam block for a fuller release.

3) Move your spine in all directions for balance, but minimize backbends, since these poses are invigorating.

4) To cultivate calm and self-awareness, do dirgha or ujjayi breathing with this twist: make your exhales longer than your inhales (say, count of 6 versus 4).

5) Do a session of nadi shodana breathing: press down your right nostril and breathe only through the left to activate the calming aspect of the nervous system. (Don’t switch sides, because breathing only through the right nostril is energizing.)

6) If you’re still buzzing with excess apana after a calming practice, direct the energy toward something you find uplifting, such as gardening or calling a friend, rather than an activity you’ll regret.

MADISON, Wis. – A new treatment program for post-traumatic stress disorder is under way at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that doesn’t involve drugs or traditional therapy.

Some veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan are finding relief through yoga.

Some returning veterans who suffer from PTSD can’t turn off the sounds and sights of war, which flood their mind.

“PTSD is the past hijacking your mind and impeding you life in the present moment,” said Dr. Emma Seppala.

Symptoms of PTSD include intrusive thoughts, hyper-vigilance and emotional numbness, symptoms which sometimes go unnoticed.

“I didn’t think anything was wrong,” said Travis Leanna, 25, who served with the Marines in Iraq for six months

He was never diagnosed with PTSD, but something wasn’t right, and Leanna said he didn’t even know it.

“If you would have told me I had a problem, I would have laughed at you. I didn’t think anything was wrong,” he said.

Traditional treatment of PTSD includes antidepressant drugs and something called exposure therapy.

“A therapy in which you remember and recount the traumatic event so much so that the idea is it doesn’t have an impact anymore. However, that’s a very difficult thing to do, very challenging,” Seppala said.

Only 50 percent of the vets who undergo the traditional therapies are cured. Seppala said she thought there had to be a better way.

Researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center on the UW-Madison campus have turned to the ancient practices of yoga and breathing.

For the past year, in a week-long regimen, veterans came to the center to learn yoga and breathing to help them deal with problems some didn’t even know they had.

Rich Low served as an infantry officer in the Army in Iraq, leading some 280 combat missions.

“I didn’t think I suffered post-traumatic stress,” Low said. “Mediating and breathing was something I didn’t consider, and I was surprised that when I came out on the other side, I found the desire to just be active and involved with life again. Coming back from Iraq, I was suppressing a lot of things and just living day to day.”

Low said he didn’t think his time in Iraq affected him in any major way, but he said the class changed his life.

“I went through several failed relationships, and I was wondering what was going on, why I wasn’t connecting,” he said. “I did the course and things starting opening up. I started to feel happiness, sadness, emotions I couldn’t even explain because I wasn’t familiar with them. It was a little jarring at first; I didn’t know how to handle them, but overall it’s been a great experience.”

Now researchers such as Seppala are crunching the numbers, trying to determine if the yoga therapy will stick. A year into the study, they said the answer seems to be yes.

Phase two of the study is about to begin. The founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, Richard Davidson, said he is encouraged by the initial findings but said there is more to learn.

“One of the key things we need to determine is who is best impacted by this of kind intervention, and for which individuals will it best less effective. And with a larger sample size that’s a question we hope we’ll be able to shed some light on,” Davidson said.

For more information on the program, and to learn more about how to participate in the study, people can visit www.investigatinghealthyminds.org. The next round of classes begins in March.

Seeking to Clear a Path Between Yoga and Islam

As a community activist in Queens, Muhammad Rashid has fought for the rights of immigrants held in detention, sought the preservation of local movie theaters and held a street fair to promote diversity.

But few of those causes brought him anywhere near as much grief and controversy as his stance on yoga.

Mr. Rashid, a Muslim, said he had long believed that practicing yoga was tantamount to “denouncing my religion.”

“Yoga is not for Muslims,” he said. “It was forbidden.”

But after moving to New York in 1997 from Bahrain, he slowly began to rethink his stance. Now Mr. Rashid, 56, has come full circle: not only has he adopted yoga into his daily routine, but he has also encouraged other Muslims to do so — putting himself squarely against those who consider yoga a sin against Islam.

In New York City, where yoga has become as secular an activity as spinning or step aerobics, the potential sins of yoga are not typically debated by those clad in Lululemon leggings. But in some predominantly Muslim pockets like Jackson Heights, Queens, yoga has been slow to catch on, especially among first-generation immigrants, newly arrived from cultures where yoga is considered Hindu worship.

When Mr. Rashid, who also tutors children, had his students learn yoga to help improve their concentration, three Muslim students quit after a few yoga sessions, he said, in part, he believed, because of their families’ stance toward the practice. “I am putting them in something extra that is not in the Muslim religion,” he said. “The parents did not accept it.”

The religious opposition to yoga also extends to some Christian sects. One widely publicized clash came in 2010, when R. Albert Mohler Jr., an evangelical leader and the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, declared the practice of yoga blasphemous because of what he said were its pantheistic roots.

In India, near-annual pushes by members of Parliament to make yoga compulsory in schools have riled Muslim parents who feel it bridges on indoctrination. When a member of Parliament proposed to insert yoga into most curriculums in 2010, wording was included to exempt things like madrasas, or Islamic schools.

Four years ago, a council of Malaysian Muslim clerics issued a fatwa against yoga, declaring it haram, or forbidden by Islamic law. The ruling followed similar edicts in Egypt and Singapore, where one of the earliest bans was issued in the early 1980s.

The fatwas typically cited the Sanskrit chants that often flowed through yoga sessions and which are considered Hindu prayer by some Muslims. According to “Yoga in the Hindu Scriptures” by H. Kumar Kaul, yogic principles were first described in the Vedas, the Sanskrit scriptures that form the backbone of Hinduism, and are considered to be over 10,000 years old.

Even the word “namaste,” which is often used to open and close a yoga session, invokes the divine.

Given that cultural history, it was understandable that when Mohd A. Qayyoom, an imam who runs the Muhammadi Community Center of Jackson Heights, joined a yoga demonstration at an interfaith festival in Jackson Heights last summer, it did not go unnoticed.

His participation drew instant reproach from the community, he said. “As soon as we finished our event, they said, ‘Imam, what is that, why are you doing that?’ ” he said. “ ‘This is not within our Islam.’ ”

But Imam Qayyoom said he had come to believe that Islam and yoga could be compatible — if the Sanskrit benedictions are left out, he said, and women’s skin-tight yoga gear is traded for more conservative garments. “Reformed, it will be more popular” among Muslims, he said. “It will not contradict with Islamic religion.” Others are less convinced.

Anwar Hassan, 27, who is from Bangladesh and works in the Queen of Sheba grocery in Jackson Heights, said yoga’s roots were irreconcilable with his faith.

“When I came here, I see there is yoga and everything, but we don’t go,” Mr. Hassan said. “A lot of people, they are new to it so they think it’s a gym class, or something. But Hindu people started it, and I think it’s Hindu religion, so I don’t go.”

When Alex Eingorn prescribed yoga recently to a Bangladeshi woman who came to him with spinal pain at his Better Health Chiropractic clinic in Midtown Manhattan, “she looked at me in horror,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m a Muslim, I can’t practice a different religion.’ ” Mr. Eingorn persuaded her to try it, he said, by saying that in New York, it is considered a secular practice.

Mimi Borda, 46, who runs MiMi for Me Yoga, a serene studio in Jackson Heights that is one of the neighborhood’s only yoga centers, has had to make similar allowances. “If there is a little chanting going on, right away this is a turn- off” for some of the Muslims who sign up for her sessions, she said. “Often they won’t come back.”

In response, Ms. Borda has tailored certain classes, cutting out Sanskrit chants if she thinks it will upset certain students. “Emphasizing the physical, they’re kind of cool with it,” she says. “They feel safe.”

For Ms. Borda, who has taught yoga to a variety of audiences, including Hasidic women in Brooklyn, it came as a shock, when shortly after opening a previous studio in the area eight years ago she was approached by a Muslim student who voiced concerns with customary chants like “ohm.” She found herself fielding questions like “ ‘Is ‘ohm’ God? Is ‘ohm’ Allah?’ ” she said.

Ms. Borda adapted her classes for her new clientele, either omitting chanting, or adding both “shalom” and “amen” to the sign-off of namaste.

“A lot of us in the Western world, we look at it as anything that is going to enhance the way we look aesthetically,” she said. Some Muslim students, she added, were “not looking at the physical aspect, they’re looking at the spiritual aspect.”

For many immersed in a culture where vinyasa yoga is more readily associated with a New York Sports Club than a Hindu temple, the origin matters little. And for some of the devout living here, the American conception has overridden the beliefs with which they were raised.

When Mr. Rashid finally took up yoga, he said there were more similarities with his faith than contradictions. In salat, the five-times daily Muslim prayers, which entail a meditationlike centering of focus and several kneeling bows, he felt there were echoes of yogic poses.

“I discovered whatever I’m doing in yoga, I’m doing five times a day in prayer,” said Mr. Rashid, who is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

During the daylong yoga class at the festival that Mr. Rashid helped organize in Jackson Heights last summer, classes were halted for salat. Imam Qayyoom and others performed those prayers on their yoga mats.

It dawned on him then, the imam said, that many Muslims, in a sense, practice yogic postures several times a day. “Maybe they’re getting that same benefit in their prayers,” he said. “Maybe they don’t need to do yoga.”

Considering yoga’s stress-busting effects, one would think that high-schoolers might benefit from the practice.

And now, a study shows that yoga does confer benefits to teens. The research is published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School conducted their study on 51 junior and senior high school students. Some of the students did a 10-week yoga PE class, and some did a regular PE class. The yoga PE class included Kripalu yoga, which included meditation, relaxation and breathing exercises, along with yoga poses.

At the beginning of the 10 week study, all the students took a number of psychological tests for things like mood problems, anxiety, mindfulness, resilience and anger expression.

The researchers found that by the end of the study, the teens who did yoga scored higher on some of the psychological tests, while the teens who didn’t do yoga scored worse on some of the tests. For example, teens who did not do yoga during their PE classes scored higher for mood problems or anxiety, while those who did do yoga scored lower on these tests, or their scores remained the same from the beginning of the study period.

In addition, the teens who didn’t do yoga reported more negative emotions during the study period, while the teens who did do yoga reported fewer negative emotions.

Plus, the study seemed to show that the teens liked the yoga classes — the researchers reported that almost 75 percent of the teens who did yoga said they would like to keep taking yoga.