It wasn’t just for the exercise when Dwight Stevenson signed up for yoga class in 2008, the same year he was working at a bar and attending community college.

“To be honest, I thought it would be a great place to meet girls,” said Stevenson, who is pursuing his master’s degree in secondary social studies education and is president of Phi Delta Theta fraternity at Syracuse University. “About a couple months into it, I fell in love with yoga.”

Stevenson is among a growing number of students who are enrolling in yoga classes, both at SU and at local yoga centers. This month marks National Yoga Month, made official by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2008.

Stevenson’s typical week is no piece of cake. He teaches United States History to 11th graders and economics to 12th graders five days a week from 7:40 a.m. to 3 p.m. He has to get up at 5:30 a.m., leave home at 6:30 a.m. and get to work by 7:15 a.m.

And it doesn’t end there — Stevenson spends at least 15-20 hours per week on his Phi Delta Theta duties.

“Yoga strips all of that away,” he said. “It strips all of the external stimuli away. It allows you to relax with just yourself.”

Yoga helps with carpal tunnel syndrome, flexibility, asthma control, muscular strength, deeper breathing and relieves stress.

Any stress caused by yoga class comes more from enrolling than participating in class.

“My yoga class for credit is for 50 students,” said Donna Acox, an adjunct instructor in the Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition. “I’m always over-enrolled. Students are always wanting to get in.”

Acox said that students take yoga for a variety of reasons, from lowering their stress levels to increasing their flexibility.

“They want to become stronger, they want to become more physically balanced,” she said. “A lot of them are saying that they would like to be able to handle stress better, and life in general.”

She asks her students to find and critique two scholarly articles — one explaining the corporal benefits of yoga and another on the noncorporal effects.

Katrin Naumann, an energy healer and certified yoga instructor at CNY Healing Arts, has noticed a similar spike in the number of students signing up for yoga, particularly in the last five years. She said yoga serves as a mirror for people’s bodies.

“Yoga means ‘union,’ so it’s an alignment of the mind, the body and the spirit,” Naumann said. “Traditionally, it’s ultimately a pathway to union with your higher self.”

Yoga instructors, Naumann said, try to help students figure out their needs and do their best to make them more aware of their bodies.

Danielle Ciccone, a fifth-year architecture student, discovered yoga after taking a yogilates class last year. She said that she wanted to take a class that would permit her to exercise during the week.

“It’s a good way to start the day,” Ciccone said. “It helps wake me up.”

For others, yoga has translated into their day-to-day activities. Diana Siegel, a junior mechanical engineering major, said that yoga helps her keep track of her tasks.

“My attention to my bills and keeping my space clean at home has been a lot easier, and I just generally feel good,” Siegel said.

The yoga that people practice today is radically different from the yoga that was practiced more than two decades ago. When Saraswati Om, owner and director of the CNY Yoga Center, started practicing yoga 21 years ago, yoga mats did not even exist — they practiced on cutout pieces of carpet.

People have attempted to modernize the discipline, she said, but to no avail.

“People try to change it and modify it all the time, for sure, but it’s already perfected,” she said. “That’s the ego, and yoga is about destroying the ego.”

Chelle Jozefczyk, co-director of CNY Yoga, said that yoga has changed her at every level.

“I feel younger and healthier and happier from the practice,” Jozefczyk said. “It’s just really given me a complete sense of peace. No matter what’s going on in the world or my life, I feel really centered.”

There is no common story for how ordinary people start practicing yoga — Naumann said she did sun salutations in an acting class without realizing she was practicing yoga, and yoga helped Om deal with teen angst and depression — but their reasons for staying are pretty much the same.

Said Stevenson: “It’s not really what sort of brings you into the door, but what keeps you coming back.”

Published on September 19, 2012 at 12:08 am

Contact Madina: matoure@syr.edu