A hub for outdoor recreation, the Verde Valley can be an outdoor enthusiast’s playground. From hiking and mountain biking to swimming holes in and around the area, the list of outdoor marvels goes on. And moving its way up on that list is yoga.

In recent years, yoga studios have been popping up around the Verde Valley, along with yoga retreats and festivals, such as the Sedona Yoga Festival. Tera Klymenko, a trauma-certified yoga instructor at Red Mountain Sedona who has been practicing yoga since 2001, can vouch for that.

From yin yoga, which is a slow-paced style of yoga that focuses on postures and is more for beginners, to Vinyasa yoga, which involves synchronizing the breath with a continuous flow of postures, to Hatha yoga, meaning force, which is more physically demanding, Klymenko noted that the practice does not discriminate, allowing people young and old to participate.

Whatever the yoga practice, Klymenko said the mental and physical benefits of yoga are countless. Some benefits derived from yoga include increased flexibility, increased muscle strength, improved respiration and energy, weight reduction and management, cardio and circulatory health and more.

Klymenko said what also makes yoga a sought-after practice is it can help people manage stress and anxiety, which is a main reason why she practices.

“What yoga really does to your brain is it brings us out of any state of mind that isn’t rest and relaxed,” she said. “Yoga tells our parasympathetic nervous system to turn on so that we can breathe and find the space within our bodies to move and let go of the heavy things that we have been carrying with us.”

Some of Red Mountain’s clients are people who are seeking out yoga to work through conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, eating disorders and more.

According to Jennifer Richards, owner of Sedona and Cottonwood Hot Yoga, many individuals who come to her studio are also working through similar conditions.

Richards is also passionate about offering yoga for addicts, and has a partnership with Steps to Recovery to offer free yoga classes to addicts through her hot yoga studio.

“Addicts are habitual, so coming to do something every day and creating a different habit with your life and a different way of accessing those parts of the brain and that brain chemistry and then all the other benefits that yoga does to heal,” she said.

Richards’ own life serves as a testimony to what yoga can do for one’s health. She took her first hot yoga class in 2008. At first she didn’t know if the practice was for her, as she said she was clumsy and could barely touch her knees.

“I used to be very heavy, just under 200 pounds, and as a result of the weight and poor lifestyle, I got bulging discs in my spine that were causing me a lot of pain,” she said.

She said she didn’t let these obstacles deter her from the practice and chose to persevere. Today, she is a devotee to the practice. “I went from 200 pounds and diseased to 130 pounds and incredibly healthy and happy and joyful,” she said. 

“I don’t even know how to describe what it does for you mentally, but they say that whatever goes on in your body is reflected in your mind.”

To a beginner, yoga can be intimidating, and though the practice does take work and discipline, Richards and Klymenko said it is a rewarding and liberating activity.

In regard to hot yoga, Richards said like any activity, it requires participants to come prepared and ready to practice. Richards recommends that participants do not have a large meal right before a hot yoga session, and that hydration is key, noting that the more hydrated one is, the more one will sweat and the more the body will detox.

Participants should also bring two towels, a towel for one’s yoga mat and a towel for one’s face, as the temperature during a hot yoga class can be around 102 degrees.

Whether it is hot yoga or any other yoga practice, Richards advises people to go at their own pace.

“The main advice that I give people is to go very slow and take a lot of extra breaks,” she said. “We live in a society where ‘push hard’ and ‘you can do it’ are the philosophies, and those are great philosophies, but often times when people push themselves so hard, especially in a heated practice, they overdo it, and they don’t like it. My best advice is to do a little bit of yoga a lot, which is better than a lot of yoga once. Doing it consistently a little bit every day, three or four days a week.”

For those who feel that hot yoga is not the practice for them, like Klymenko, people don’t have to dismiss the practice of yoga entirely.

Klymenko recommends that beginners study the spiritual aspects of yoga and to let the physical aspect of yoga be secondary to the depth of spiritual study around it.

“I would recommend that people ask around to their friends for a recommendation for a studio or a teacher,” she said. “Find a teacher that is gentle, a teacher that has your heart and your mind in their mind.”

Looking to the future of the yoga community in the Verde Valley, Richards and Klymenko expressed a similar sentiment in that it is a tight-knit community that will continue to grow, and they welcome newcomers with open arms.

“I think that it will continue to become more popular and the people that really resonate with it will stick,” Klymenko said. “There are a lot of little seeds being planted.”

Makenna Lepowsky can be reached at 282-7795 ext. 126, or email mlepowsky@larsonnewspapers.com