When Heidi Audet told her class to remember to breath, I thought she was kidding.

A minute later, I had one hand touching the floor, one hand reaching for the ceiling and I don’t even know where my right foot had gone.

I was stretched taut like a rubber band, trying desperately to maintain my balance and waiting avidly for the next set of instructions. Did I forget to exhale? It’s possible. That tends to happen when you’ve awakened parts of the body you had completely forgotten about.

Turns out breathing is kind of important.

“The breathing aspect of yoga activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation response,” Audet told me later. “Folks have been known to regulate their blood pressure through the action of nasal breathing. Breath-powered yoga practices help to oxygenate the muscles, thereby allowing for the deepening of the stretches.”

With that in mind, I concentrated on breathing. I didn’t always know where my legs were or understand how my right shoulder seemed to be on the left side of my body, but with regular breathing, good stuff started to happen.

Feel the burn

For years, I had been hearing about the many joys and wonders of yoga. Gone were the misconceptions where the practice was limited to hippies, bored housewives and peyote smoking weirdos from mountaintop villages.

Some of the most athletic people I know swear by yoga as a means of clearing the mind, increasing breathing capacity and training the muscles.

“It definitely improves flexibility,” said a 25-year-old named Ben, who’s been practicing at Audet’s Chill Yoga in Lewiston for five months. It helps with resistance training, Ben said, and with other athletic endeavors.

I thought about that as Audet guided us into utthita trikonasana, the triangle position. On paper, it doesn’t look so bad. The feet are flat on the floor, the legs spread wide apart. One hand reaches down for the ankle, while the other rises like a shark fin toward the ceiling.

The hamstrings begin to burn. The lat muscles are pulled tight as a bow string and it occurs to you that if you were to lose focus even for a second, you might topple like a bowling pin.

Are you breathing? Don’t forget to breath.

Yoga brings everything into focus; the muscles, the mind, the breath . . . No single part of it feels more or less important than the others.

“Ashtanga yoga has many purposes,” Audet tells me. “It is a meditation in motion – breath-powered yoga practice begins to calm the mind while the body moves through the practice. With a relaxed mind and a gentle effort, you can relax the muscles. Ashtanga also helps to tone the muscles, and has been believed to create more of a lean muscle mass over time for some populations of practitioners.”

Lean muscle mass is fine and all, but can yoga help you contend with the stress of the daily grind? Will it make you live better, or perhaps even longer?

Some people swear that when it comes to promoting a sense of calm and well-being, nothing beats yoga.  It all comes down to something called “vagal tone,” which – trust me – is not as scary as it sounds.

“Improved vagal tone has been discussed as what helps to increase our longevity, for many reasons,” Audet says. “The vagus nerve, our largest cranial nerve, begins at the base of our skulls and directly affects our respiratory, digestive and circulatory systems. It is suggested that the higher someone’s vagal tone, the more resilient they are to stress. This vagus nerve meanders throughout the body, which would explain why it can help in overall relaxation of body systems when it is in high tone.”

OM

It’s impossible to ignore the meditative aspect of yoga. Even before the lunchtime class began, most of the nine or 10 people who arrived for it seemed to settle instantly into their own inner space. There was very little talking as they laid out their yoga mats and began to stretch.

Audet says she gets a good mix of men and women for the lunchtime classes. These are people who work up and down Lisbon Street. Many come in during their lunch hours and they want to get as much yoga as they can. They focus their minds instead of engaging in a lot of empty chatter.

“You really want to be present for it,” Audet says.

In fact, the class opens with “Om” rounds, during which the participants utter the sacred word in unison while sitting in relaxed poses.

“The vibration,” Audet says, “has been said to stimulate the thymus gland, and the vibration helps to still the mind.”

Cheater, cheater

I don’t lie to you. For the first part of class, I attempted to cheat. I feel no shame over this. It was my first time on a yoga mat, and if I could stay upright by sneaking peeks at the young lady next to me, then by God, I would do it.

Problem was, the young lady next to me had been doing this awhile.

Audet led us into utthita hasta padangusthasana – an extended hand to big toe posture. One stands upright on one leg, the other leg outstretched. The idea is to grab onto the big toe of the outstretched leg and hold that position. My official assessment of this move is: “Are you freakin’ kidding me?”

Newbies like me will clutch onto the knee instead of the toe. This diminished position has less of a stretch and it’s easier to maintain balance. Easier being a relative word.

I swayed first left and then right, like a skinny oak tree in high winds. I tried desperately to remain on one foot, but a second before I crashed headlong into a wall, I brought my other foot down to catch myself. Very embarrassing. I tried again, with the same results: swaying left, swaying right, bringing the foot down in utter panic.

I glanced at the young lady next to me and there she stood, one leg outstretched and held motionless with an easy grip on the big toe. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t sway, her legs didn’t wobble. There was no panic whatsoever on her serene and pretty face.

Turns out I should have stood next to George Merrill. At 54, George was taking his very first yoga class, too.

“It was hard,” he said when we were done. “I thought I had better balance.”

He liked it, though, Merrill said. He felt wonderful at the end of class and he plans to come back.

According to Audet, the lunchtime class is the same every time. The second visit will seem easier than the first and the third will be easier still. After that, she assured Merrill, he’ll be “poetry in motion.”

Look! I’m a rhombus!

For some, yoga is a way to increase flexibility so you can hit the weights or the heavy bag with extra gusto. For others, it’s as much about the spirit as it is about the body.

“Like reiki, yoga is a way to fall into the flow of the universe,” says Meredith Kendall, reiki coordinator for the Patrick Dempsey Center. “Yoga helps me recognize waves of energy. Yoga is part of my self-care. I have to care for myself so I can care for others. When I do yoga I twist and stretch my body into geometric shapes: triangles, circles and parallelograms. I breathe and balance. I move with my breath. I focus my mind on my form, but it wanders down interesting alleys. Breath connects my spirit to my mind and my mind to my body, merging mind-body-spirit into one.”

Shavasana: Translated, the word means “corpse posture,” and it comes to signify the death of the day’s yoga practice. Shavasana is how Audet ended our class, asking us to soften our muscles, relax our breath and focus on the relaxation of the work we had done.

She also includes a a practice she learned at the Himalayan Institute wherein we created heat between our palms, which were then placed over our eyes. No stretchy muscles, no battle with balance, just an opening of the eyes to the darkness of our hands.

“I liken it to gaining fresh perspective after detoxing the body through a breathing and movement practice,” Audet says. “Letting go of what doesn’t serve you and welcoming that which supports you.”

It’s a fitting assessment because for the rest of the day, I felt unusually energized. My body felt limber and my mind felt sharp and I didn’t forget to breath a single time.

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