A yoga studio located In Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, called JTown Hot Yoga, was founded in October of 2015 and is a popular yoga studio in the area.
The owner and instructor, Stephanie Weinstein, explains her background before finding her love for yoga and her studio.
Stephanie explains that before finding her way into yoga classes, she had high-functioning anxiety and was taking anxiety and blood pressure medications. However, that after 6 months of practicing yoga five days a week, she was off of her medications for good.
She says that it is when she realized that more people should have access to it.
“I wanted to find it and it kind of just happened through circumstance. It felt more like a conduit kind of operating to get me here. So, I feel like it’s our studio, the students and myself. I just so happen to be the ringleader of the circus," says Stephanie.
As said by Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, researchers speculate that yoga may be able to help calm an anxious nervous system by turning on the relaxation response via the “vagus nerve.” This belief proposes that yoga’s mixture of slow movement and paying attention to breathing launches a calming response in the nervous system.
Stephanie shares that two of their classes, Yin and Buti yoga, are un-heated while every other class is either a type of warm or hot yoga.
Hot yoga is a 90-minute class that involves of a sequence of different standing and stretching poses. The poses entail lengthy, powerful, and supported ellipses of all major muscle groups. The insistent temperament of the poses and the heat are intended to increase one’s heart rate and exercise one’s muscles, according to mayoclinic.org.
Stephanie says that to her, the difference between yoga and hot yoga is a “super high-way” to healing. “Do you have to have the heat? No. To me, does it add layers of benefits? Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Yes. We are here for a good time not a long time. We have kind of pasteurized the way yoga is practiced, from eastern ways to the way we do it now.”
Stephanie shares that with hot yoga, the results you get, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually are faster and long lasting. “For 90 minutes, you focus on my words, the parts of your body, and the heat. So, you focus on breathing. You learn how to be uncomfortable. Most of us don’t get uncomfortable and sit in our discomfort. We get you to be still and be okay sitting in your discomfort.”
Stephanie shares that in the beginning of taking hot yoga class, it would sometimes stir up her anxiety, but she knew that she was in a safe place. She says that she learned how to manage her anxiety by managing the way it was coming up in the hot room and that she was able to take that and translate it to life outside.
Stephanie expresses that no matter what race, color, ethnicity, socioeconomic background that you have, that her studio is a safe, interesting, dynamic, kind of melting-pot of a place where someone can come and just be on their mat.
Individuals can find more information about JTown Hot Yoga, such as class schedules and benefits, events and training, pricing, location and contact, and much more on their website. People can also follow their social media platforms on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
