Yoga positions itself as new Colony tradition

See slide show from Sunday morning yoga By Ron Hayes When the Colony Hotel opened on Atlantic Avenue in 1926, the dining room glittered with smartly dressed ladies and gents, come to winter in sunshine and style. They dined, they danced, and they smiled for the cameras. You can still see black-and-white memories of those colorful decades, captured in fading photographs on the dining room’s walls today. And then you turn around and, oh, how times have changed! Where the wine glasses tinkled and the dance bands played, the bare floor is a human mosaic of men and women bowing and bending, twisting and turning, spreading, stretching, squeezing and breathing their bodies into a series of startling poses. Instead of trombones and clarinets, the live music is echoes and drones from bamboo flutes and Balinese gongs, wood blocks and Tibetan prayer bells. Every Sunday morning for the past two years, between 70 and 100 men and women have gathered in The Colony’s dining room for 90 minutes of yoga to live music. “I look forward to this every Sunday because it just sets me up for the day,” says Nikki Dean of Boynton Beach, a devotee of the ancient Indian blend of exercise and meditation for eight years. “It gives me strength and serenity at the same time.” While the flutes drone and the gongs echo, the class is gently led through its poses by a soft-spoken, middle-aged man who picks his way among the students while speaking into a headset. “Take a big inhale like a lion,” he tells them. “Ahhhh! And let your body melt into the Earth, and send your love to the Earth while you’re there.” A student of yoga for 19 years, a teacher for 15, Keith Fox is the founder of YogaFox, which counts 4,500 students between Jupiter and Fort Lauderdale. A native of San Francisco, Fox had schools in Miami and Sebastian Inlet before finding Delray Beach in 2002. “It’s like Key West in South Florida without having to go south of Miami,” he says. Fox’s Sunday classes had been attracting fewer than 15 students until he added live music two years ago. Now there are never fewer than 70, and often around a hundred students spreading their mats side by side until The Colony’s floor resembles a hardwood beach. Cathy Rosenberg of Delray Beach, a student for 10 years, says the uninitiated mistake yoga’s slow routines for a lack of exertion. “The biggest misconception is that you sit around with your legs crossed and say ‘Om’,” she says. “The stretching is about getting into the pose, but the challenge is in the strength required to maintain it.” Indeed, by the time Fox brings the class to a close, most of the participants are glowing with sweat and inhaling deeply. “People don’t realize what a great cardiovascular workout this is,” says Catherine Bigatao of Boca Raton. “Banging on cement while you jog is bad for your joints.” As the gong echoes its long fade to silence, the students lie perfectly still, breathing deeply. And then, after an hour and a half of deceptively strenuous exercise, all together now … “Ommmmmmmmmmmmm.” For information, call (561) 703-1236 or visit www.yogafox.com.
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