THREE flights above the rumbling traffic of the Avenue of the Americas, well-sculptured women and men rushed into Dana Flynn's Sunday yoga class just before noon. Within minutes, they were lined up on mats, legs crossed, backs straight, being led in chant as they stared at mandarin and fuchsia walls.
"Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm," Ms. Flynn intoned.
"Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm," her students responded.
This was Sunday soul yoga at Laughing Lotus on West 19th Street in the Flatiron District, or, as Ms. Flynn calls it, "Sunday morning revival." For some New Yorkers, this sanctuary is as close as they will ever come to church. Ms. Flynn is O.K. with that.
"People don't want religion, but they want yoga," she said the other day after a session in which she melded vinyasa, an ancient flowing yoga, with gospel hymns and sermons inspired by the music. "It just feels natural. All of it is to exalt us."
The class had begun with the sound of "Amazing Grace" by the Blind Boys of Alabama flooding the studio. Soon, 45 students were sweating through warrior poses and upward and downward dogs. Within minutes, the 16-foot windows were steamed over.
As students wobbled slightly in a tough pretzel-like position, their eyes gazing skyward, Ms. Flynn raised the volume of the stereo. "Let the music fill you with emotion!" she shouted. Bob Marley responded by crooning, "Thank you, Lord!"
Ms. Flynn leads by example. Students have called her the drill sergeant of love and the Janis Joplin of yoga.
"Dana has a way of reminding you of the greatness of life," said Nancy Hess, a guitarist with the rock band Stereovision and a class regular. "That's why people go to church on Sundays, to be reminded we're all part of something."
Ms. Flynn, who is 44, came to yoga-as-church from Wall Street. In the mid-80's, she left her job as a stockbroker at Smith Barney to open Trixie's, a Hell's Kitchen hotspot that featured drag queen waitresses and an amateur night at which Madonna was a regular. In 1999, she and Jasmine Tarkeshi, her partner both at home and at the office, opened Laughing Lotus.
At the Sunday morning session, Ms. Flynn delivered lines from the Sufi poet Hafiz, and then some words of her own, with all the fervor and emotion of a fiery preacher from the pulpit: "You've heard people say, 'I been saved?' Well, yoga saves you — from living the wrong life, from a bad attitude, from negative thoughts that don't express who you really are."
The students stood on their heads, then rested on their backs like corpses. The voice of the rocker Patti Smith wafted over them: "Everything is holy. Everybody's holy. Everywhere is holy."