20-student limit for Maple View offering that starts Monday

WHAT: Yoga class

WHERE: Maple View Agricultural Center, 3501 Dairyland Road

WHEN: Instructor Lynne Jaffe hopes to begin classes in February, pending interest.

DETAILS: Eight-week foundational course, limit of 20 people

Introductory class: Monday, at the Agricultural Center

For more information, contact lynnedjaffe@gmail.com

By Erin Wiltgen

chh@heraldsun.com; 419-6654

HILLSBOROUGH -- Nestled on a winding country road, the Maple View Agricultural Center is bathed in red-tinged evening sunlight. As the sun sinks lower, rays pour through large open windows onto the floor.

The Agricultural Center, on Dairyland Road between Hillsborough and Carrboro, serves as a hands-on learning site, typically for school field trips. But longtime yoga instructor and local resident Lynne Jaffe has plans to expand the center's repertoire.

Jaffe, a yoga instructor since 1995 who currently teaches with the UNC Comprehensive Cancer Support Program, had entertained the idea of teaching in such a tranquil setting since the center opened in spring 2009.

It wasn't until Bob Nutter, one of Maple View Farm's founders, called her with a resident's request that she got the ball rolling.

"She's always walking on the property," Allison Nichols, Agricultural Center manager, said of Jaffe, who lives just behind the farm. "She's got such a wonderful personality. We thought she'd be such a great fit because she's in the community."

Jaffe, who also has taught at the Cornucopia House Cancer Support Center, wants to start with an eight-week foundational course limited to about 20 people in February and will hold an introductory class on Monday.

"The community has expressed a lot of interest," Jaffe said. "The idea of being able to have yoga out in communities as opposed to having everyone going to some central location in town seems to be having an awful lot of appeal."

And that aspect of community has played a huge role in the decision to start the class.

Bonnie Hauser of Orange County Voice, who asked about starting a yoga class, thought that it would serve to bring the rural residents together.

"There's really a wonderful community out here that's really unto itself," Jaffe said. "I think it's a wonderful way for people to get to know their neighbors. Any way you can generate a local community where people can know each other and come to a place and being able to support each other."

And it saves rural residents a 20- to 25-minute drive into town, said Susan Walser, who loves the tranquil, remote nature of living in the Orange County countryside

"For those of us who like that kind of living, being able to stay in the community is really important," she said.

But beyond just the logistics of convenience, Jaffe said that holding a class out in the country, especially at an agricultural center, fits with her style of teaching, weaving the elements and nature into the yoga practice.

"Every single one of us is some combination of earth, air, water and fire," Jaffe said. "Yoga offers a way of learning to listen in to our bodies and our hearts, to know ourselves and the biological creatures that we are. So being at a farm center, growing gardens is all about the elements."

For earth, Jaffe focuses on slow and steady movements that build strength in muscles and bones; for water she emphasizes fluid, flowing movements.

The air aspect manifests through yoga's emphasis on breathing, which brings relaxation and spaciousness into tightness and constriction in the body. More rigorous movements that generate body heat and increase circulation emulate fire.

Jaffe said it's easier for people to make these connections when they're looking through a window and seeing trees and a pond instead of a paved parking lot and man-made buildings.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for people to practice in the setting where they're not so far removed from nature and the elements," she said.

This organic aspect to her teaching hones in on the meditative aspect of yoga. While physical-based yoga is most well-known in America, Jaffe said, one essential quality of the practice is to make peace with seemingly opposing forces within.

"We each have a mind and an emotional life and how we embody our experiences," she said. "The more we can become consciously attuned to our bodies and to our breathing, the more we will be able to influence the quality of our health and well-being, of our response to life."