CityView Magazine

Right | Colleen Evans, far left, and Debbie Smith exercise at Fayetteville’s only Pilates studio. It has grown so quickly, owners Malinda Craven and Chris Cardona recently moved to a new location on Ferncreek Drive. Below | Sara Coleman works out at Pilates of Fayetteville. Bottom | Cardona leads a class. don’t need to be extra flexible or super skinny. You don’t even need to be able to sit cross-legged. “That’s OK,” Lofthouse said. Yoga positions can be adapted to suit each individual, and it is all about working with yourself, not competing with others. Many people seek yoga instruction in order to help with an ailment. Susie Godwin started taking yoga classes with Lofthouse when Breathing Space opened. She had been hearing for years that it would help with her fibromyalgia, a condition that causes severe, constant pain and fatigue. She found that it does all that she heard it did and more. She takes classes at least four times a week. “Most people are surprised at how good they can feel,” Lofthouse said, “that something they found was so simple could feel so good,” she said. Susan Franzblau was 52 when she took her first yoga class with Andres Josephs at the Fayetteville YMCA 13 years ago. “Then I just didn’t stop. That’s it,” she said. She liked the way she felt after yoga: stronger, more vibrant, more relaxed. Franzblau, a 38 | Oct • Nov 2008 professor of psychology at Fayetteville State University, calls herself a natural teacher. She loves to teach, so it wasn’t long before she transitioned from yoga student to yoga instructor. Franzblau bought a building and moved to downtown Fayetteville in 1997. There she realized she could take her love of yoga one step further. She opened Om Yoga Studio on the bottom floor of her building in 2001. She started with six students, all friends. “Now seven years later, we have hundreds of people a week,” Franzblau said. “It just became its own entity.” Yoga gets at every muscle in the body, Franzblau said, as well as the connective tissues, the joints and the lymphatic and digestive systems. But it is much more than a physical practice. Franzblau also said sometimes the simplest pose, Shavasana, or corpse pose, which is simply lying on one’s back, is the most difficult for newcomers because, as Lofthouse also said, it requires stillness. “With Shavasana, you are in the present moment, with your own breath, your own body,” Franzblau said, “without

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