That took its toll.

"Ifound it hard to sleep, hard to wind down," she recalls. "I was feeling stress immediately when I got up in the morning. Immediately, boom, I'd be stressed out before my day even started. It wasn't just her work that suffered. "I was carrying the stress home at night, too. Not being able to leave it; always having it with me. It was affecting my relationships with my friends, my husband."

In this sea of confusion, she'd found an island of relief. Once a week she attended a class at a local health club. One hour, one day a week. It was good, but it wasn't enough. That island was too small, and she needed more than once a week.

Finding help:
Shye-Woods decided to enroll at Marbles Yoga Studio in Lafayette Square.

"I found a yoga studio where I could do yoga all the time," she said. "I enjoyed it so much better than being on the machines" at the health club.

And she found more than she expected. "When she walked in she was very closed in ... she hardly looked at me; very quiet," says Karen Jones, owner of the studio. "She didn't say a lot. "I thought she worked at a prison. She gradually told me that she teaches high school." "I imagine I was really stressed out," Shye-Woods says. "But when I walked in I was hopeful that I'd found something that would work."