YOGA AND STRESS

Twice a week, New York hedge fund manager Michael Karsch does a trade many financial professionals wouldn't attempt: He swaps his bank of computers for a blue mat, sweatpants and some 'sun salutations,' a flowing series of poses including forward bends.

Karsch is one of a growing number of bankers, traders and money managers who, in a time of market turbulence, are looking to the ancient Indian discipline of yoga in search of inner peace. From yoga, he knows to 'take a step back, have a breath and stay focused,' says Karsch, of Karsch Capital Management LP, a roughly $3 billion fund.

Yoga, of course, has been growing in popularity for years in the West. The magazine Yoga Journal estimates that about 15.8 million people in the U.S., or 7 percent of adults, now practice it.

Today, studios and private teachers in New York and London report increasing demand from financiers.

Allianz SE's Pacific Investment Management Co., D.E. Shaw & Co. and Karsch Capital are among the companies playing host to yoga classes.

Billionaire fund managers Paul Tudor Jones and William Gross both practice Ashtanga, an active form of yoga that involves flowing through a set series of poses.

Bond fund guru Gross, a founder of Pimco, does yoga five days a week and says some of his best ideas come when he is standing on his head, or sirsasana, supported by the forearms on the floor.

At Karsch Capital, about a third of the 33 employees take yoga classes at the company's 26th floor Manhattan offices each week. Still, hard core yoga on the job is a bit much for the boss. Since he's at the office, Karsch wears socks during class instead of going barefoot. And he omits some poses. 'I still feel like doing handstands during work is a little inappropriate,' Karsch says.

Karsch, 40 years old, started doing yoga three years ago on the recommendation of a fellow hedge fund manager, John Griffin, founder of Blue Ridge Capital LLC in New York. Blue Ridge Capital also holds yoga sessions at the office.

D.E. Shaw, a $39 billion New York hedge fund known for using complex computer models, recently started offering hourlong yoga classes at the office. About 80 of the company's 750 New York employees have signed up for the sessions, which have been so popular they often are oversubscribed.

'There's been tremendous demand,' says spokeswoman Darcy Bradbury, who attends the classes herself. At Pimco, Gross has prompted senior colleagues to start stretching, and the company holds morning yoga sessions during client conferences and staff retreats.

A CHANGING CLIENTELE

The yoga industry is adapting to and courting its new, wealthy customers. Yoga retreats in places like Malibu, which offer grueling regimens of several hours of yoga a day, have become popular destinations for the finance crowd.

Catharina Hedberg owns a yoga retreat called The Ashram in the Southern California hills near Malibu and says she has seen an increase in finance types attending over the past five years.

Now, about a quarter of her customers, who pay $4,250 for a one week stay, are financiers. The retreat offers a hard-core program of 6 a.m. yoga sessions with an alcohol free, caffeine free vegetarian diet that she says is popular with the Wall Street crowd.

'Every week you see someone from hedge funds,' says Hedberg.

Teachers say one key principle poses an implicit challenge to Wall Streeters: Value the process of hard work rather than the rewards it brings.

Finance 'is the antithesis of what yoga is about in terms of inner peace,' says Claire Missingham, a yoga teacher in London. But Missingham, whose pupils have included bankers and hedge fund managers, says it can be highly beneficial for them. Yoga traditionalists say practicing yoga should be about more than just gaining physical benefits: It's a way of approaching life, including work.

Some financiers are introduced to yoga by their spouses. Some turn to it after suffering sports injuries. Some endure teasing from friends. It's 'considered soft' by some, says Karsch.

THEY COME TO YOU

Michael Wald and his wife, Julie, run a business called Namaste New York that caters to the financial crowd. It offers private yoga lessons and group classes at the office, often scheduled for before or after markets close. Cell phones and BlackBerry devices are forbidden in class, though assistants occasionally interrupt a session. The largely female network of teachers are instructed to not wear anything too clingy. And, no chanting.

Namaste has about 20 corporations as clients, which pay as much as $65,000 annually, as well as roughly 60 individual clients paying about $150 to $225 per session. In recent months, as markets have gone wild, Julie Wald has noticed increased tension in the neck and back of her clients. Another sign of stress among her students: difficulty sitting still.

Luciano Cortese, a broad shouldered 48 year old hedge fund manager, says he used to bang his desk, throw things or yell at someone when his job became particularly stressful. But since starting yoga in January, he has been taking the stock market's jolts in stride, he says.

'I just say to myself tomorrow is another day.'

One morning recently, a barefoot Cortese gingerly moved through a series of forward bends, backward arches and twists on his yoga mat laid out in the television room of his Long Island, N.Y., home.

His personal instructor, Kirtan Smith, encouraged Cortese to focus on his breathing and helped maneuver him deeper into the postures.

At the end of the hour and a half long session, Cortese lay on his back for a few minutes of relaxation, or savasana. He dozed off, snoring lightly.

When he awoke, he bounded upstairs to check the market on his computer.

By CASSELL BRYAN-LOW

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