It’s about her struggle to find places to practice yoga after moving from New York City to Paris, and provides lots of great teachers and studios in case you are planning a trip to Europe!

Excusez-Moi, Parles-Vous Yoga?

PARIS — When I moved to Paris from New York last year, about the first thing I did was seek out yoga. The city, job, language, food, telephone numbers, currency, even the way the milk was labeled: every element of my life from the most major to the tiniest details, had changed. Sure, it was thrilling, but it was also exhausting and humbling. At least on a yoga mat, I thought, I could feel at home.

An Internet search led me to Rasa, an airy, skylit studio near the Sorbonne entered through a massive wooden door from rue Saint Jacques and across a postcard-gorgeous stone courtyard. Classes were offered in English and French. “Ah, good for my rusty French!”’ I thought. I chose a class with a teacher exotically named Rajeev. Turned out he was from Chicago, né Aaron. His English was impeccable.

Yoga knowledge in Paris is spread mostly by word of mouth and fliers. At Rasa I learned of Marc Holzman , a teacher newly arrived in Paris from Los Angeles who was offering Saturday classes at the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay. From that class I learned of a newish studio in the 14th Arrondissement called Be Yoga, a cheerfully painted little neighborhood place adorned with a string of prayer flags and some bells outside the entrance.

Many other studios dot the city; yoga events are drawing ever-bigger crowds. On Oct. 2 some 3,000 people turned out at the Eiffel Tower for la White Yoga Session, led by Elena Brower, identified in the weekly French magazine Marianne as a grand priestess of “new-yorkaise yoga.” Ms. Brower is the founder of Vira Yoga in Greenwich Village.

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It’s about her struggle to find places to practice yoga after moving from New York City to Paris, and provides lots of great teachers and studios in case you are planning a trip to Europe!

Excusez-Moi, Parles-Vous Yoga?

PARIS — When I moved to Paris from New York last year, about the first thing I did was seek out yoga. The city, job, language, food, telephone numbers, currency, even the way the milk was labeled: every element of my life from the most major to the tiniest details, had changed. Sure, it was thrilling, but it was also exhausting and humbling. At least on a yoga mat, I thought, I could feel at home.

An Internet search led me to Rasa, an airy, skylit studio near the Sorbonne entered through a massive wooden door from rue Saint Jacques and across a postcard-gorgeous stone courtyard. Classes were offered in English and French. “Ah, good for my rusty French!”’ I thought. I chose a class with a teacher exotically named Rajeev. Turned out he was from Chicago, né Aaron. His English was impeccable.

Yoga knowledge in Paris is spread mostly by word of mouth and fliers. At Rasa I learned of Marc Holzman , a teacher newly arrived in Paris from Los Angeles who was offering Saturday classes at the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay. From that class I learned of a newish studio in the 14th Arrondissement called Be Yoga, a cheerfully painted little neighborhood place adorned with a string of prayer flags and some bells outside the entrance.

Many other studios dot the city; yoga events are drawing ever-bigger crowds. On Oct. 2 some 3,000 people turned out at the Eiffel Tower for la White Yoga Session, led by Elena Brower, identified in the weekly French magazine Marianne as a grand priestess of “new-yorkaise yoga.” Ms. Brower is the founder of Vira Yoga in Greenwich Village.

Click here to read more!

A recent story in the NY Times points out the irony of today’s $6 billion yoga industry — not only do a large percentage of western yogis not know who to thank, but the young Swami Vivekananda had zero interest in the physical exertions of the practice when he introduced yoga to the U.S. with his speech at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago of 1893.

“I have a message to the West as Buddha had a message to the East,” he informed an audience in Brooklyn.

Vivekananda wanted to impart the philosophies that “all souls are potentially divine,” to show westerners how yoga is a prescription for life — “work and worship.” A simple and very American concept. He quickly amassed followers, the new American yogis. The likes of Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, Leo Tolstoy and Henry Miller were now hooked on this new practice.

“You are not your body,” he often reminded Americans, who tend to prefer “doing” over “being.”  More distressing, for some, was his other message: “You are not your mind.”

Yoga to the man who most famously delivered its message to America meant just one thing: “realizing God.” He abhorred channeling, séances and past-life hunts as diversionary. Worse, the great seer savored a good smoke, and on occasion chowed down on meat.

Among those who never doubted the messenger during his lifetime was Leo Tolstoy. The restless Russian was especially keen for writings on Ramakrishna, Vivekananda’s own guru. Two years before his death, Tolstoy wrote, “Since 6 in the morning I have been thinking of Vivekananda,” and later, “It is doubtful if in this age man has ever risen above this selfless, spiritual meditation.”

The Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James was fascinated by the 31-year-old Indian and quoted at length from Vivekananda’s writings in his seminal work, “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

“A very nice man! A very nice man!” Vivekananda reported after his first meeting with James, who called his new friend “an honor to humanity.”

The novelist Gertrude Stein, then a student of James’s at Radcliffe, reportedly attended Vivekananda’s 1896 talk at Harvard — which so wowed the college’s graybeards that they offered him the chairmanship of Eastern philosophy. He declined, noting his vows as a monk.

Read the full article “How Yoga Won the West.”

THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!). Read more here at the New York Times.

How do you save money on food costs?

To honor the life and spirit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, who died this Sunday at the age of 71, we will remember to be like the hummingbird.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Like the hummingbird, Wangari Maatthai changed the world one tree at a time. On Earth Day in 1977 she planted seven trees in her village to honor Kenyan women Environmental leaders. Later, in 1986, she launched the Green Belt Movement, a grass-roots movement that uses tree planting as an entry point for self-determination, equity, improved livelihoods and security, and environmental conservation to raise community consciousness. In 2004 she was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

We will remember that every effort towards change counts.

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness. To reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now – Wangari Maathai

Read her NY Times Obituary.

This article from the New York Times delves deeper into the outdoor yoga trend, and some of the reasons it might be so popular. Enjoy!

ONE night early this month, hundreds of yogis accustomed to grounding to the earth figuratively did so literally, on the green expanse of lawn near Pier 63 along the Hudson River. Schuyler Grant of the Kula Yoga Project, a founder of the event, Wanderlust Yoga in the City, made in situ additions to the yoga canon, suggesting, “Reach your heart to the water,” and encouraging participants to try handstands on the forgiving grass.

Traditionally practiced outdoors, yoga obviously is not a hothouse flower to be confined to a studio, yet for years urban yogis tended to relegate open-air practice to retreats in places like Bali or Mexico. That began to change in recent years, and while an exact timeline of the New York outdoor yoga movement is tough to pinpoint, one of the early pioneers was Dana Flynn of Laughing Lotus, who started holding classes in a West Village park in 1997, moving them to a rooftop in 1999.

“We brought the boom box and had Annie Lennox and Al Green blaring into the open sky,” Ms. Flynn wrote in an e-mail. She runs free weekly sunset classes for 80 students on Wednesdays in a park at 10th Avenue and 15th Street near the High Line, a series that began in 2009.

These days, “we are basically in the growth phase for outdoor yoga; every year there are more and more options,” said Ben Fleisher, who helped develop the Yoga Local NYCiPhone application. “It’s at the critical mass where enough people are doing it, so it doesn’t feel weird to be outdoors.”

The Wanderlust event recently held near Pier 63, which blends indie rock and yoga, will be in six other cities this summer; it has already been held in a few. It is a three-and-a-half-hour edition of the weekendlong events held in remote areas, including Stratton, Vt., from Thursday to June 26.

“In New York, practicing outside is becoming more and more common,” said Jeff Krasno, another founder of Wanderlust and Ms. Grant’s husband.

What was once remarkable is now ordinary, as yogis colonize rooftops, beaches and public parks. There are outdoor classes, both free and paid, in every borough.

The streetscape is also fair game, with the Solstice in Times Square being held from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Monday. Fitness in the Square, in Union Square, has yoga in the mornings.

There is even surf and turf. Open Ocean Sessions holds Saturday classes, weather permitting, at Rockaway Beach that combine meditation, yoga practice, surfing and a well-earned taco at a local stand. Kristopher Krajewski, an organizer, says that the group practices on hard-packed, not “fluffy,” sand, and that a meditation shelter with Tibetan prayer flags is being built for shade from the sun.

“Ironically, the terrain being not as stable helps to focus our practice,” said Mr. Krajewski, who has a day job running a talent agency, Bond Music Group.  “I’ve done yoga in Times Square, and it can be a challenge to find the stillness in the chaos. This is the ocean. It is humbling and easy to interconnect with nature around you.”

Click here to read more

The following via the NY Times by Emily S. Rueb

For some yoga practitioners, the body is a sacred vessel that should not be tainted. For others, the skin represents a blank, movable canvas for tattoos displaying thoughts, texts and deities that inspire and inform their practice. These works of art, stretched across shoulders, chests, arms and legs, may be tucked away during the workday. But when clothing comes off, as it often does in yoga studios, they are on display for all to see.

DAVID LIFE, 61 “Tattoos mark a moment in time you want to give credit to,” said Mr. Life, a Lower East Side resident since 1979 and a co-founder of the international Jivamukti Yoga School. Mr. Life acquired his elaborate web of body art in four major stages but has stopped since tattoos became “mainstream,” he said.

RAPHAELLE ROMANA, 33 A half-budding, half-rotting tree sprawls across the back of Ms. Romana, who recently moved from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, to Dublin Ireland, and is a practitioner and teacher of the sweaty Bikram style of yoga. The tree, she wrote in an e-mail, “is rooted to the earth and at the same time it reaches for the sky.” It is, she added, “a reference to the duality of humanity: life and death, good and evil.”

DOUGLAS ABRAHAM, 41 Mr. Abraham, who lives in SoHo and practices at Ashtanga Yoga New York there, started layering “creepy crawly things” all over his body when he was in his 30s. They include Sanskrit, Japanese and Tibetan imagery and phrases.

LULA TRAINOR AND ADRIANA RIZZOLO, BOTH 28 The hands of Ms. Trainor, left, and Ms. Rizzolo, right, are tattooed with a mantra in Sanskrit. The women are lifelong friends who live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and go to yoga class together in Dumbo. Ms. Trainor translated the mantra: “May all beings be peaceful and free.”

Click here to see more incredible tattooed yogis!

The below article was written by Sindya N. Bhanoo for the NY Times Blog – enjoy!

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Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

I’ll admit I’m a skeptic

But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

But how exactly did these study volunteers, all seeking stress reduction in their lives but new to the practice, meditate? So many people talk about meditating these days. Within four miles of our Bay Area home, there are at least six centers that offer some type of meditation class, and I often hear phrases like, “So how was your sit today?”

Britta Hölzel, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, said the participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s. It traces its roots to the same ancient Buddhist techniques that my husband follows.

“The main idea is to use different objects to focus one’s attention, and it could be a focus on sensations of breathing, or emotions or thoughts, or observing any type of body sensations,” she said. “But it’s about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.”

Generally the meditators are seated upright on a chair or the floor and in silence, although sometimes there might be a guide leading a session, Dr. Hölzel said.

Of course, it’s important to remember that the human brain is complicated. Understanding what the increased density of gray matter really means is still, well, a gray area.

“The field is very, very young, and we don’t really know enough about it yet,” Dr. Hölzel said. “I would say these are still quite preliminary findings. We see that there is something there, but we have to replicate these findings and find out what they really mean.”

It has been hard to pinpoint the benefits of meditation, but a 2009 study suggests that meditation may reduce blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease. And a 2007 study found that meditators have longer attention spans.

Previous studies have also shown that there are structural differences between the brains of meditators and those who don’t meditate, although this new study is the first to document changes in gray matter over time through meditation.

Ultimately, Dr. Hölzel said she and her colleagues would like to demonstrate how meditation results in definitive improvements in people’s lives.

“A lot of studies find that it increases well-being, improves quality of life, but it’s always hard to determine how you can objectively test that,” she said. “Relatively little is known about the brain and the psychological mechanisms about how this is being done.”

.…Click here to read more

Check out this article below by Samuel G. Freedman from the NY Times:

Using Yoga to Help Cabdrivers Relax Body & Mind

Thomas Lowery clomped down the hallway in his jeans and Timberland boots, 6-feet-2 and 290 pounds and 54 years old, until he reached the classroom. It was an improbably delicate place, a dance studio with blond wood and mirrored walls. Mr. Lowery cut down his strides to pick a path between the nine purple mats arranged on the floor.

“Taxi Yoga,” declared the flier in his hand. “No more Road Rage. Become a Road Sage!

The man depicted on the flier, Andrew Vollo, stood at the front of the studio, clad in black from head to bare feet. “How you doing?” he asked Mr. Lowery and the other students as they assembled. One of them replied, wearily, “Managing, managing.”

The flier was one of more than 3,000 that Mr. Vollo had sent or handed out to promote the class. He had visited mosques, Sikh gurdwaras, Hindu temples and had been interviewed on the cable show “India Talks.” For this has been his mission for the past seven years, to help New York City’s taxi drivers manage the physical and psychic toll of their job by means of yoga.

Earthy and ethereal in equal measure, Mr. Vollo teaches the Taxi Yoga class as an administrator at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. Sometimes, when his Astoria accent gets the best of his enthusiasm, he calls it “yoger.” His students include, he said, those “who think yoga is something like yogurt” as well as observant Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists who incorporate what they learn into their existing faith lives.

Mr. Vollo’s “dese” and “dem” lexicon is part of his skill set as the de facto guru for some unlikely disciples. The son of a welder, the veteran of years behind a taxi’s wheel, Mr. Vollo embodies the spread of yoga across traditional barriers of gender and class.

His course, in turn, shows how what has commonly been a religious practice can ultimately infuse popular culture with a more general sense of Eastern spirituality. While a public college like LaGuardia can hardly offer a class that compels worship of a deity, Taxi Yoga fits into a more contemporary and amorphous realm of mind-body harmony and meditative practice.

“I really think I’m chipping away,” Mr. Vollo, 56, said of the blue-collar aversion to yoga as stuff for hipsters, yuppies and space cadets. “If I get nine people in a class, that’s fantastic. They’ll learn enough exercises to loosen their back and legs. I’ll tell them how to eat better, give them breathing exercises. Because if you’re driving in pain, you’re going to be a nasty person.”

Strange as it may sound, yoga’s history does sort of lead to Mr. Vollo and his cabbies. In postwar America, amid the counterculture and New Age movements, the lines have often blurred between physiology and theology. “The question is: Are psychology and spirituality on a continuum? And I think they are,” said Stefanie Syman, the author of “The Subtle Body,” a history of yoga in the United States. “It’s difficult to be receptive to deeper levels of self-transformation if you’re exhausted and stressed and uncomfortable.”

The number of yoga practitioners in America has risen to 16 million today, from 5 million in 1976, according to Ms. Syman’s research. But while what she terms the “tougher yoga” styles like Bikram and Ashtanga have attracted an increasing number of men in the last generation, economic class has remained an obstacle.

Mr. Vollo discovered that resistance firsthand over the course of his career. He had begun studying yoga, as well as tai chi, when he was driving a cab as a college student in the 1970s. In the process he moved from the Roman Catholic observance of his youth to considering himself a Taoist, albeit one who still attends Mass with his wife and son.

Intermittently over the decades, he tried to evangelize for yoga among drivers, sometimes persuading three or four to study together for a few sessions, then having years pass without any interest. In 2004, as the director of LaGuardia Community College’s educational program for taxi drivers, he gave another push.

He passed out fliers to dispatchers and brokers and at driving schools. People laughed. People ignored him. One office manager kicked him out. But somehow he got his first four students to enroll.

“I don’t do the chanting, the Om, the religion,” he would assure them. “It’s pure exercise.”

….Click here to read more

Tara Stiles’ Brand of Rebel Yoga Draws Claims of Heresy

TARA Stiles does not talk about sacred Hindu texts, personal intentions or chakras. She does not ask her yoga classes to chant. Her language is plainly Main Street: chaturangas are push-ups, the “sacrum” the lower back. She dismisses the ubiquitous yoga teacher-training certificates as rubber stamps, preferring to observe job candidates in action.

In her classes, videos and how-to book, “Slim Calm Sexy,” Ms. Stiles, a 29-year-old former model with skyscraper limbs and a goofball sensibility, focuses on the physical and health aspects of yoga, not the spiritual or the philosophical. For traditionalists, this is heresy, reducing what they see as a way of life to just another gym class.

But if she has deviated from the conventional path, it has not slowed her down. Ms. Stiles, a native of rural Illinois who owns Strala Yoga in NoHo, has built a powerful yoga brand, with no less than Jane Fonda and Deepak Chopraamong her devotees.

Critics abound. Jennilyn Carson, the blogger known asYogadork, cites “deep practitioners who feel it is a disrespect to what the practice is” for Ms. Stiles to pitch yoga as another quickie weight-loss regimen. “It’s not a few minutes a day, it’s not fitness, it’s a lifestyle,” Ms. Carson said.

Another detractor, who is known as Linda Sama, described “Slim Calm Sexy” and its marketing campaign as “a complete sellout for the almighty dollar.”

“Don’t even try to sell me on the ‘yoga for the masses’ excuse; it’s pathetic, and, frankly, she should be ashamed for allowing herself to be talked into shilling for this trash,” she wrote on her blog, Linda’s Yoga Journey. “That is, if any convincing was really necessary — somehow I doubt it. But if asked about it, I am sure we would hear the typical higher-lighter-brighter-peace-love-dove-I’m-just-bringing-yoga-to-the-people crap.”

A third yoga devotee, speaking anonymously to protect her job in the industry, added: “I don’t care what Tara Stiles says yoga is; it’s not about making your body beautiful.”

What Tara Stiles says — with a shrug and a smile — is “Who made these rules?”

In the decade since she came to New York, Ms. Stiles has built a business out of breaking those rules. She rejected the city’s yoga scene as exclusive and elitist — it reminded her of the mean girls in high school, only with incense and bare feet. She refused to pledge allegiance to one teacher, one studio or even one style of yoga. She charges $10 a class, a bargain in Manhattan. And her short online videos have catchy, user-friendly titles like “Yoga for a Hangover” and “Couch Yoga.”

“I feel like I’m standing up for yoga,” Ms. Stiles said. “People need yoga, not another religious leader. Quite often in New York, they want to be religious leaders, and it’s not useful.

“Here, people want to sit and talk about yoga; it’s very heady. It’s very stuck, very serious,” she continued. “I was never invited to the party anyway — so I started my own party.”

Besides running the studio — which draws about 150 people to 40 classes a week that are called simply “Strong,” “Relax” and “Stralax,” a combination — Ms. Stiles posts a short video most weeks to YouTube. There, she has a channel with nearly 200 videos that have drawn about four million views. She stars in the yoga DVD that was part of the fitness set that Ms. Fonda issued in December (it sold out in Target, where it was first introduced). And “Slim Calm Sexy,” published last summer, was the No. 1 yoga book on Amazon.com until recently, she said.

None of this has made Ms. Stiles rich, but it has led to a certain celebrity. Last summer, Ms. Stiles released an iPhone app, “Authentic Yoga,” with Mr. Chopra, and the two recently completed a video in Joshua Tree National Park that will be released this year.

We are both nonconformists who have incurred the wrath of traditional yogis,” Mr. Chopra said of Ms. Stiles, whom he now considers his personal instructor. “A lot of the criticism is resentment of her rapid success. I have been doing yoga for 30 years. I have had teachers of all kinds. Taking lessons from her has been more useful to me than taking yoga from anyone else.

“She is not a showoff,” he added. “She is ambitious, but there is a lack of ego.”

ALL too often, Ms. Stiles said, people on the outside view yoga as something “Jennifer Aniston does.”

With her black gym socks and her down-home sensibility, Ms. Stiles is not trying to appeal to the yoga elite or to the purist. She is going for the firefighter from Long Island who feels intimidated by “oms” and New Age music. The African-American 30-something from Brooklyn who is looking for a little diversity on the mat. Or the cashier from Morris, Ill. — the river town of 14,000 where she grew up — who drives to McDonald’s for dinner several times a week.

“One of the things I like about her is her ability to make yoga accessible to people who might be scared of it or think it might be too esoteric,” Ms. Fonda said of Ms. Stiles.

The unorthodox approach has deep roots. Ms. Stiles described her parents as “straight-edged hippies,” independent thinkers who designed their solar-power house long before it was fashionable and who seldom, if ever, touched the peach schnapps, the lone bottle of liquor in the cabinet. Dad worked at a nearby nuclear plant.

Enamored of ballet and tutus, a 4-year-old Tara announced to her mother, who mostly managed the household, that she wanted to move to New York. As a preteenager, she meditated in the forest. In high school, she sidestepped boyfriends and the prom despite her cheerleader looks. “I’m a nerd, always,” she said.

Cliques were not her style. She preferred to hang out with everyone but was best friends with no one, holding to the credo: “You should be nice to people.” “It’s a pretty simple thing,” she said.

AFTER high school, Ms. Stiles moved to Chicago to study ballet and was introduced to yoga by a ballet teacher. At a dance performance, she was spotted by someone who steered her to the Ford Modeling Agency in Chicago.

Despite modest success in print advertisements for yoga-related products and commercials for Pepsi and Verizon, among others, she decided that modeling was not her passion; her peers were aghast when she arrived at photo shoots on a skateboard wearing a plain T-shirt. She wore makeup only when paid. Ms. Stiles may photograph sexy, but in person, she is the cut-up sidekick, the one most likely to guffaw rather than to sashay her way across a room.

It was modeling, though, that let her fulfill her dream of moving to New York, at 19. And it was modeling that catapulted her more firmly into the yogasphere. In 2006, Ford asked her to make snappy yoga videos as a promotion for the agency and to post them on YouTube before YouTube was a household name.

An Internet devotee, Ms. Stiles began using social media and other Web tools to lure people to yoga, an innovative move at the time. The YouTube videos and her modeling connections led to a yoga DVD with the model Brooklyn Decker that has also sold well at Target, and to her own DVD, “Yoga Anywhere: The New York Session.” Ms. Stiles blogged for Women’s Health magazine and for The Huffington Post, a platform that brought her more eyeballs; one of her 2009 posts, about Facebook addiction, is still among the site’s most-viewed, with nearly 1.2 million hits. And her iTunes podcast has even bested Oprah’s in the health category.

In 2007, Ms. Stiles left Ford and focused on teaching yoga. Parlaying her Facebook habit into something useful, she promoted the free classes that she offered in her tiny apartment on Bleecker Street and in her boyfriend’s place in the Flatiron district. At first, a trickle of people showed up. Eventually, she was packing 22 people into the living room and a couple more in the entryway and bathroom. She also taught private sessions, eventually charging up to $200 an hour.

Going private brought her into contact with a Page Six clientele. “In New York, you know, some women have their nanny, their cook and their yoga teachers,” Ms. Stiles said. “I realized it was a status symbol.”

It led to the opening of Strala — a word she said she and her husband made up, but it turns out to be Swedish for “radiates light” — in 2008, in a smaller space than she has now. Frugal and practical to the core, Ms. Stiles did not want to overextend; now, the studio is profitable enough that she is considering opening a second branch.

That year, she also met Michael Taylor — an Exeter-Harvard-Oxford man with perpetually mussed hair who runs a social media Web site, Odyl — on an ashram in upstate New York, where she had sneaked in M&M’s. The two married at City Hall, then traveled with her extended family to Negril, in Jamaica, where she persuaded her uncles, both farmers, to do yoga by the sea. The couple share a cramped loft around the corner from Strala that is bedecked year-round with Christmas lights.

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