"It's been said that you cannot remain depressed after doing sun salutes," claims Bunker. "They open areas of your inner self--your heart, your throat. It opens you up to many possibilities." The cobra, in particular, helps open up the spine, explains Bunker, where most people's tension builds up.

After a yoga class, the undergraduates, graduate students and University staff members enrolled in the yoga class say they are indeed more relaxed and ready to tackle Harvard's stressful atmosphere.

"We like it. It mellows us out," says Betty-Jo Matzinger, a graduate student at the Education School. Her friend, Naomi Dogan, also a graduate student at the Ed School, agrees. "It helps me with my breathing and working out the physical kinks I get from mental crunching," she says. "It is a great one-hour escape from the chaos of life."

For others, it was a less temporal yearning that brought them to yoga.

"I was kind of looking for a new outlet," explains Alexandra Cordero '92. "I was interested in doing something that was not just exercise, but something that combined the physical and the spiritual. What attracted me to it was I thought it would be a good way of getting in touch with my inner self."

"It's discipline. You learn a lot about your own physical limitations," says Cordero.

"I think that it strengthens your independence, and amazingly, with so many people in the class, it allows the person to have privacy in the midst of so many people," says Maya G. Evans, a staff member of the Latin American Scholarship Program.

Joe N. Betts '90, a graduate student in chemical oceanography at MIT, took yoga at Harvard for several terms as an undergraduate. For Betts, yoga has meant "learning to be comfortable in the place you spend all your time: your body."

Goodbye to 'Frumpy Old Ways'

Bunker, who has taught yoga for seven or eight years, says she began when a chiropractor recommended yoga as a way to alleviate her pain from a back injury. "I just started doing it as a physical enterprise," she says. But the yoga eventually made her feel better not just physically, Bunker recalls, but emotionally as well.

"What I kept finding, as I went along, was that I was increasing my endurance and just feeling better. I could sleep less. I didn't read anything, I just experienced it," says Bunker. "When I didn't do yoga I just fell back into my frumpy old way."

The philosophy of yoga was also enticing to Bunker. During the 1970s, she says, "I was going through a lot of the same searches that we were going through in the '60s. When I started feeling really good I looked at the philosophy." Western religions tend to involve a lot of guilt, says Bunker. She prefers the Eastern religions, which she says are largely based upon caring and understanding.

"It's a wonderful feeling...I don't know if language can deal with it," Bunker says of yoga. "We really are of one mind. It brings you back to feeling compassion for humanity."

"You suddenly become aware you're responsible for all your emotions. You're not a puppet anymore in the universe," she adds.

Her students say they value highly Bunker's experience in Hindu philosophy--but mostly, they say, it is the instructor's "calming personality" and ability to inspire that makes her teaching style so effective and endearing.