Remember," said Anita Soutendam, addressing four students who sat cross-legged on yoga mats. "These are devotional scriptures and should not be read in a bored fashion."
After all, there were no Tibetan monks or Sanskrit scholars among the stretch-pant-clad Torontonians who had dropped by the studio for an evening workout - and wound up uttering 3,000-year-old phrases, such as tasmimstajjane bhedabhavat.
"Kind of a tongue twister," said Rhondda Smiley, a mother in her 30s, after the 75-minute session at the Union Yoga Centre. The class included 10 minutes each of meditation and Sanskrit study before anyone tried a downward dog.
In a surprise reversal of the hyper-modernization of yoga in recent years - think punk rock yoga - instructors such as Ms. Soutendam say courses in Sanskrit and ancient yoga philosophy are emerging as the latest must-have addition to the contemporary yoga class.
Old yoga, it seems, is the new yoga.
Courses and workshops in yoga philosophy are being offered at select studios across the country. Sanskrit scholars are fanning across the globe to teach in cities including Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa. Recreational yogis ranging from musicians to lawyers are spending hundreds of dollars to learn to chant, pronounce and decipher Sutras spoken in ancient Asian cultures.
"It feels like a renaissance," said Thea D'Alvia, director of the School of Sanskrit Studies in New York, who teaches workshops in meditation, yoga philosophy and Sanskrit in Canada, Europe and the United States. "People are turning back to the classical forms."
The trend comes at a time when yoga has become ubiquitous and studios are springing up faster than Starbucks outlets, offering everything from chocolate yoga to naked yoga. There is specialized yoga for Christians, infants, dogs and scuba divers - not to mention hybrids, such as yoga with a spinning workout mixed in. Laughing yoga is now taking India by storm.
Yet experts say a small but growing number of people are turning away from these trendier yoga varieties, which tend to be more physical, and are exploring yoga's spiritual and philosophical roots.
Ms. D'Alvia, known in the yoga world as Monorama, is one of several Sanskrit teachers who report they've noticed a growing interest in yoga traditions, boosted mostly by the exercise genre's ballooning popularity over all. An estimated 18 million North Americans now practise yoga, compared to 100,000 four decades ago. And the longer those people practise, experts say, the more curious many of them become about the discipline's historical and spiritual foundations.
"It's the tip of the iceberg to think of yoga as some sort of calisthenics or Asian jumping jacks," said Brian K. Smith, a professor of Sanskrit studies at Arizona's Diamond Mountain University, and former professor of religious studies at the University of California.
"People who are interested in a more full version of yoga are now getting more interested in the philosophy and also Sanskrit as a sacred language behind it."
Four years ago, Dr. Smith, an ordained Buddhist monk and author of two books on Sanskrit materials, helped found the Yoga Studies Institute in Arizona. Since then, thousands have flocked to courses offered by the non-profit educational centre in cities across North America, he said.
The Institute is working to establish a satellite office in Toronto in response to demand from Canadians.
Most people who register for the courses are yoga instructors, Mr. Smith says, but increasingly the institute is seeing regular people "who've been doing yoga in their hometowns and have realized that yoga is a lot more than the postures."
Next week in New York, a sellout crowd of 150 people will begin a 10-day, 30-hour course on the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a 500-year-old Sanskrit text that outlines the physical and spiritual path of yoga.
Sanskrit, which is made up mainly of vibrational sounds, is believed to be more than 3,000 years old. But over time the language has survived mostly in the form of old texts, and now remains a holy language for Buddhists and Hindus. Many of those texts also form the philosophical basis of yoga.
Yoga practitioners say that meanings of Sanskrit phrases are derived less from their literal translations than from the feelings they evoke when spoken. Om mani padme hum, for example, evokes the feeling of compassion although it literally means "the jewel is in the lotus," Dr. Smith said.
Still, for many people, chanting can be a hard sell.
Tim Bermingham, a 47-year-old partner at a major Canadian law firm, enjoys yoga mostly for its physical benefits. Three times a week, he settles into a studio with dimmed lights, candles lit, and a sense of calmness that differentiates it from his job in Toronto's financial district.
"To me, it's just about right," said Mr. Bermingham, who tried yoga four years ago and was quickly hooked. "It is not heavily loaded with the spiritual side."
Most yoga instructors accept that chanting can be too far out for most people - and that's just fine.
"I know, it looks weird," says Vanessa Kennedy, a yoga instructor and director at the Jivamukti Yoga School in Toronto, of the Sanskrit text.
But she encourages people to try the chants anyway. "Because you know what?" she said. "We're going to say it three times and you're going to know it."
