Guber says that she still likes to shop and dress up but that she doesn’t define herself as much by what she owns. “I don’t derive pleasure from the eternals the way I do from what’s inside,” she says. “The major changes for me are that I have more self-esteem and authenticity. I care less about where I fit inside a social circle.”

Thirty-four-year-old Jennifer Greenhut may hail from New York, but she came to yoga to escape the surface-oriented bustle of Los Angeles. The daughter of producer Robert Greenhut (who’s produced 25 Woody Allen movies, among many others), she moved west to audition during pilot season in 1995 and never left. The 5’2 1/2″ Greenhut admitted that she initially tried yoga out of vanity.

“I thought it would make me taller!” she says with a shake of her blue-dreadlocked head.

While she didn’t grow in inches, her posture – and life – immediately improved, she says.

“I was always kind of a depressed, miserable, I’m-not-good-enough person,” Greenhut says. “I was in therapy for like 10 years and nothing really changed. Yoga changed me because it changed my body and my mind was forced to change along with it.”

Greenhut teaches a flow-style yoga class from level 1 to level 3. It’s the theories behind yoga that she’s most eager to pass along.

“I realized through yoga that life is short and we’re meant to be happy,” she says with a smile. “I just want everyone to know that.”

That might be easy to say if you’ve got a cushion to land on when you jump off the fast track. But in fact Greenhut didn’t. “I had money and comfort and something was still missing,” she says. “When I first made the transition into teaching yoga, I couldn’t afford to do some of the things I’d done before so I made some changes. I started eating 7-11 sushi instead of going to my favorite sushi restaurants and maybe going to bargain matinees instead of nighttime movies. But I had a sense of inner peace that was never there when I could pay my bills.” She continues: “I knew everything would work out. And it did.”