Business Profile: Simply Yoga

When Beth Graham tells you to broaden your collarbones, raise your heart, lift your hips and push down with your heels, you might be tempted to scratch your head in confusion.

But you can’t, because your head is hanging upside-down between your knees in a yoga position known as “downward facing dog.”

Graham won’t allow your body to be out of alignment, so you’d better not scratch that noggin. In her new Cockeysville yoga studio, called Simply Yoga MD, she moves among the students, touching them gently and adjusting their poses.

“What I like to do is move around the room,” Graham said. “I give a lot of instructions, and the physical ‘moving the body’ instructions. As a teacher, we can connect more with the students when we’re moving around the room. The practice then becomes about the students.”

Joy DiMenna, one of Graham’s students, travels to the studio from her home in Towson, bypassing several other yoga studios on her way.

“I went to some of the other yoga classes, and it scared me,” DiMenna said, “because I saw how far out of alignment some of these people were, in their poses.”

That won’t happen on Graham’s watch.

“Beth is amazing, she’s really fabulous. I’m glad I found her,” said DiMenna, who started coming to Graham’s studio just a few weeks ago. “My body’s changing shape. I feel like I’m building more stamina and muscle tone.”

Kieko Murphy, of Pikesville, is also a newcomer to Graham’s studio, and she’s a believer in the power of yoga already.

“Both my legs were kind of swelled, but after three lessons, it’s gone,” said Murphy, who comes to the studio every four or five days.

Graham is happy to share the credit with her employees, too.

“The teachers all have a very nurturing quality,” she said. “People want to come somewhere where they can be taken care of.”

Graham opened her studio in May, after becoming interested in yoga over 23 years ago when a car accident ruptured a disc in her neck. After living with a lot of pain, she turned to yoga and found relief within six weeks.

“My love of yoga grew and grew,” Graham said. She became an instructor 15 years ago, and today she teaches a style of yoga called Iyengar Hatha, but that’s only one of her studio’s offerings.

There are styles of yoga called Restorative Svaroopa and Vinyasa Flow, which are playfully scheduled against a class called Happy Hour Yoga. There are also Gentle Yoga classes, Yoga Workshops, and a couples’ class called Connections.

Despite their wildly different names, reflecting eastern wisdom and western culture, all of them revolve around the yoga poses. Some poses are gentle, some are strong, some are very still, and some seem to involve an athletic movement with each breath.

“In a yoga class, you’re going to do a number of poses, and some of the poses might be difficult at the beginning, but through time and practice you build strength and flexibility,” Graham said. “A pose that was once a challenge becomes easy. That translates into life. We get to witness ourselves on the yoga mat. It’s a process where we turn the gaze inward.”

Turning the gaze inward is a type of meditation, and the mental peace and relaxation are as crucial to yoga’s practice as are the students’ aligned poses—reaching up towards the sky while grounding their heels to the earth.

“We get a lot of yang from the heavens, and yin from the earth, so it’s those two energies,” said Graham, as matter-of-factly as though she were discussing the water cooler. “The masculine coming down, the feminine coming up.”

Graham is the kind of woman who can discuss things like chakras, uttanasana and sidhasana, until you wonder what language she’s speaking, and then chirpily comment in the next breath, “Happy Hour Yoga is fun! The first time my husband did it, he was like, 'What is she doing!'”

The studio’s payment practices are simple, in keeping with their “Simply Yoga” name. A $100 card buys a student 10 classes—any 10 classes. A student can vary the hour of the day, the day of the week, or the type of yoga class being offered. There is also an $8 drop-in class available on Sunday evenings.

Graham likes the buffet-style of her studio’s offerings. She laughingly quoted one of her teachers, who said, “It’s Burger King yoga—have it your way!”

For the students who don’t buy into earth energies, spirits and chakras, Graham can speak quite plainly.

“When the body starts to feel more ease, then the mind does as well,” she explained simply. “People are looking to feel good and to enjoy life, and that’s what they can begin to get with yoga.”

Simply Yoga MD is located at 10151 York Rd, Suite 118, in the Cometa Wellness Center, which is part of the Crestridge Corporate Center, directly across York Road from Walmart. Click here to view the website.