Monday morning, 8:30 a.m., and where else could you be but in The Berkshire Breathing Project’s new yurt on the outskirts of Great Barrington?

The room is crowded, surprisingly so for a weekday morning yoga class before the summer season begins. We’re lined up facing each other, subway style, with still more mats down the center. A fire is roaring in the pellet stove, and steam is beginning to fog the windows. It’s one of the last cold mornings of the spring.

Not only is it warm in the yurt but it’s downright hot and a bit scary in the body too, for this is the belly-churning pose: right leg bent, heel to buttock, left hand gripping right instep. Left leg outstretched, right hand gripping the outside edge of the left foot. Lying on your side, shoulder blades pressed to the floor. Got that? When this pose is done properly, you look (and perhaps feel) like a toppled, flattened sprinter. Silence in the yurt, as we all discover how this pose got its name.

Teacher (and head of the Berkshire Breathing Project) Uma Elizabeth McNeill hovers over me and gently presses down on my shoulder and thigh. Pause. “...and breathe,” she says conversationally. But how? She makes it sound so easy. Sometimes (and the belly-churning pose is definitely one of those times) one good deep breath seems like the hardest thing to accomplish. But what choice do I have? I could clutch tight in claustrophobic panic, instinctively squeezing my guts like a colicky infant, but any adult who has ever held their breath and frozen up in an attempt to battle fear and discomfort knows that it just doesn’t work.

“Many of us retain that primal squeezing strategy into adulthood,” says Leslie Kaminoff, yoga therapist and founder of The Breathing Project. “Whenever something uncomfortable is happening we squeeze in, tighten the diaphragm and push down, as if we’re going to the bathroom. This is a very effective strategy if you’re an infant. It’s not so effective if you’re a grownup.”

Inhale, exhale. Repeat. Sounds simple enough, and the average person gets about 27,000 chances over the course of 24 hours to get it right. However, the vast majority of us are content to fill our days with shallow, unconscious washes of breath that do little to nourish the body, mind or spirit, turning our life force into the respiratory version of fast food.

Most of us know that conscious breathing is beneficial for everything from hypertension to meditation, but Kaminoff also maintains that its benefits go far beyond mere physical health and the yoga mat. After all, the Latin “spiritus” means both “soul” and “breath.” Not only does conscious breathing “short circuit our stress responses,” but it also teaches us on a metaphysical level: “It’s shape change,” he says. “It’s how the chest and the abdominal cavities change shape. If they can’t change shape, you can’t breathe. So when you understand how the changing shapes of these cavities affect each other, you’ve got yoga practice. If your breathing mechanism isn’t adaptable enough to be comfortable in all these changing shapes, you’ll know it right away. We challenge people’s patterns.”

But how do we convert a nation of fast-food breathers?

“In my therapeutic work with people I try to reframe their experiences,” Kaminoff explains. The most common exercise he uses changes the office phone from a constantly ringing source of stress to what he calls a “breathing alarm.” Instead of reflexively reaching for the phone every time it rings, Kaminoff suggests taking a conscious inhalation, exhaling, inhaling again as you reach for the phone, and saying hello on the second exhale.

“Any recurring stimulus in your life that you might associate with stress you can very easily reframe,” he says. “You can also mentally tattoo the word ‘Breathe’ on your boss’s forehead. It’s like a little meditation: ‘Ok, I am going to consciously alter my experience with this person.’”

For The Breathing Project, which also has a studio on 26th Street in Manhattan, McNeill and Kaminoff have trained other yoga instructors extensively in anatomy and in what they refer to as the “ABCs”—the Application of Breath-Centered yoga. “The main mission has been to increase the educational standards in both the way we teach to the public, and most of all, how we teach to the teaching profession,” Kaminoff says.

Most yoga instructors don’t know very much about the mechanics of breathing, even though it is the very essence of yoga practice.

“A lot of the information out there is pretty inaccurate,” Kaminoff adds. “Or it’s just not applicable. If (the instructor) gets real fancy, they say the full yogic breath involves the ribs and the chest as well, and they leave it at that. But how any of that plays into the actual practice of yoga—what you’re doing on a moment-to-moment basis as you’re practicing—that’s what we specialize in.”

The pair are truly teacher’s teachers, and they are pioneers as well: Kaminoff’s yoga therapy sessions—truly individualized one-on-one classes—challenged everything I thought I knew about deep tissue bodywork, injury, sadness, alignment, Ayn Rand, Marilyn Monroe, breathing, and the condition of my lungs. At one point, Kaminoff had me inhale, and skidded the blade of his hand down my sternum on the exhale. My mouth bloomed with the taste of cigarettes I had probably smoked 10 years before, and it was humbling. I went to him with tight shoulders and I left with respect and awe for the common miracle of breathing.

McNeill, meanwhile, was playing Led Zeppelin and Metallica in her classes as early as 1990, back when yoga was still being monopolized by New Agers with sitars and hairy legs. “It wasn’t hip,” she laughs. “Not by a long shot!”

“She was the first to steam up the windows in her classes,” Kaminoff says proudly.

McNeill’s method of teaching makes for a class that is both gentle and challenging to students of all levels, and although the Monday 8:30 a.m. class was crowded, every student was made to feel like McNeill was giving them her undivided attention.

“You have to have this kind of liquid ability to float in and out,” she says of her method. “In the advanced training course I taught last year, that was one of the things people wanted me to teach them how to do, and I can’t teach it. I can only show it.”

McNeill and Kaminoff are both committed to tailoring their teachings to each individual, and have so far avoided “cocktail party answers” when asked to brand their particular style with a moniker that’s glib and instantly recognizible. “You won’t find us under any particular style anymore,” Kaminoff says. “And that’s where we want to be.”

McNeill thinks the cookie-cutter mentality of many yoga classes is alienating. “It has become so impersonal,” she says. “Even in the Berkshires, you’re in a class of 25 people, and the teacher has no hope of establishing a connection with you. I just can’t imagine what it would be like to go to this big class and know you’re never going to be known.”

“In a way,” Kaminoff jokes, “we’re just lobbyists for breathing. Someone’s gotta do it. There are special interest groups for everything else, so why not one for breath?”

“It’s one of the most difficult things to lobby for,” McNeill adds. “People come to yoga and they think it should look like this or like that, and when a class doesn’t fulfill their formula, they’re puzzled. Breathing is the most important thing. Everything else is just icing on the cake.”