After the office, hit the mat

More professionals, from small business owners to brokers on Wall Street, have been turning to the ancient practice of yoga to help relieve the stress of their work day.

While people are coming to yoga for different reasons - stress relief, building strength and flexibility, learning to breath - 'Everyone comes back for the ‘ahhh,'” said Sayde Alexandrescu, a yoga instructor at Illuminations Studio in the Cherry Building in Cedar Rapids.

'The feeling you have after class will get you to return.”

Alexandrescu's practice, Soundness with Sayde, focuses on Vini yoga.

'The breath is an integral part of the practice, not just for the meditation but for the transitions and poses,” she explained. 'But I also add my own flavor to each session based on the time of the year.”

She said yoga can be a great stress reliever, especially for those who work desk jobs day in and day out.

'Most of us carry a lot of stress, whether environmentally caused or otherwise. There's something very unnatural about the way we work. And so yoga allows us to reconnect,” Alexandrescu said.

But she cautions beginners that it may not be love at first class.

'People come in so keyed up,” she said. 'Yoga is so counter to what you do all day in the office. It's not necessarily fun the first time.

'It's a change of channels to go from your work day which can be hard to do at first.”

Lovar Davis Kidd, a certified yoga instructor teaching at SOL Studio, also in the Cherry Building, agreed.

'The real reason for doing yoga should be to quiet our mind so we can work toward self-realization,” he said. 'This eliminates suffering and allows you to discover your true self.”

Kidd teaches Adamantine Yoga. This style is based around the concept that the traditional group-led classes don't work for everyone.

'Instead we use a guided self-practice approach to make yoga personalized for each student,” explained Kidd, who teaches AcroYoga, which blends in acrobatic elements.

'I believe that in the near future we will start seeing more Acro and Aerial yoga classes,” Kidd said. 'These are two styles of yoga that are big on the East and West coast and are starting to show up in the Midwest.”

'I've heard there was a statistic that there are as many yoga instructors in Cedar Rapids as there were in bigger cities like Chicago and Minneapolis,” Alexandrescu said. 'And I think Blue Zones is helping people to realize the importance of meditation and yoga, I always have new students.”

Betsy Rippentrop, a licensed psychologist and owner of Heartland Yoga in downtown Iowa City, knows first hand that yoga can serve as stress reliever for busy workers.

'I started practicing yoga for stress management, with no idea that it would become my passion and my future career,” she said. 'I started teaching about six years ago.

'I was a psychologist in practice, and decided to pursue yoga teacher training to learn more about the healing aspects of yoga to integrate into my work with clients.”

At Heartland Yoga all classes are generally Hatha yoga classes, but teachers are trained in a variety of styles, she said.

It also offers Kundalini yoga, in which the focus is on kriyas, or patterns of movement, with an additional focus on meditation, chanting and breath work.

'Students ask me all the time what style they should try, and I tell them to find the teacher with which they most resonate,” Rippentrop said.

'I love to see the absolute transformation that people experience in their bodies in terms of strength and flexibility, but more important in their minds,” she added. 'People walk out less stressed, more open hearted and more joyful.”

Because of her background, Rippentrop is especially interested in the research on yoga, which has greatly expanded in the past decade, she said.

'Broadly speaking, data is showing that yoga can improve mood, sleep, fatigue, anxiety and depressive symptoms, reduce stress, and improve memory in both clinical and non-clinical populations,” she said.

'And in some of the most cutting-edge research, findings show that yoga is actually changing gene expression, altering how quickly we age, and creating new neuronal pathways in the brain.

'Research is showing you don't have to practice for years to see results. Many of the beneficial changes show up after just eight weeks of meditation and/or yoga.”