She began attending five days a week. And she got the results she expected. Shye-Woods was looking for something to help her with her problems. She found that the answers were inside herself.

"Yoga focuses more on you listening to your body and more on the stress level that you need to address," she says. "The emphasis is going inward and you getting to know your body; pushing yourself beyond your limitations but not to the point of injury. "The breathing helps your heart rate and slows you down. You leave everything that's not you on the outside and take that hour and 10 minutes and focus on you."

She found the quiet time spiritual, even resembling what she experienced in church. "A lot of the things we do (at church) are the same as yoga. We meditate at church." The change: While she attended yoga class mostly on lunch hours, she also did yoga on some evenings and weekends. The changes showed everywhere in her life. Most vividly, she said her frustration at work turned into creativity.

"What yoga did as well was to help tap into my creativity as a teacher," she says. "It's hard to explain. Because I feel so much better physically and I have so much more energy, I can take more risks and try things I probably wouldn't have tried before." An example involves teaching a class segment on the civil rights movement. In the past, she'd done it by the book, from the book -- rigidly. This time, after teaching the lessons, she had the students write a play about what they learned. "It was very effective. I don't know that I would have tried that before yoga."

Life goes on:
Her daily life still involves the segments of the past, but "it's changed tremendously," Shye-Woods says. She still shows up for work at 7 a.m.; she still teaches English, writing, social studies, reading. What has changed has been her. "I'm on a spiritual journey. I just am," she says. "So it's a combination of things. I think when you get older, too, you start just being. "When you go inward, you're really able to tap into creativity you didn't know you had. Yoga is just a tool to help you do that. I always thought that all the education that you need is on the outside and you feed it to yourself. But through yoga and through meditation, I found out that all that stuff is in here, and it just needs to come out."