Gumucio | YTTP | instructor | Hillary Hayward-Thomas

“He just said, ‘I don’t know if your crazy thing is going to work, but I hope it does,’ ” Gumucio recalls. “In four months, we broke even.”

Gumucio says the amount of donations has fallen off some with the economic downturn, but still, there are those benefactors who seem to surface just to prove that karma really does exist.

After reading about YTTP’s mission, Zobha, a company that makes yoga clothing that is sold at some of the swankiest gyms in the country, donated $10,000 worth of merchandise to YTTP to sell at its studios.

And what YTTP has lacked in the quality of daily donations, it has more than made up for in quantity.

As many as 800 people attend classes each day at the Manhattan studios, and 150 a day come through the door in Berkeley.

“What’s amazing is that we started with three students in this room,” says Hillary Hayward-Thomas, an instructor who was one of Gumucio’s first students. “Now, it’s always full. That’s done by word of mouth. It’s done because people want to practice yoga. It’s inspirational.”

While the mass of students makes it possible to offer classes throughout the day, seven days a week, it also creates an intimate experience that may have a student sucking in her neighbor’s bad breath while focusing on her own breathing.

More than 60 people often pack into a single studio, panting, stretching, and sweating together. As the instructor ramps up the pace of the Vinyasa flow, the temperature skyrockets to tropical, and a stray foot may end up on another person’s mat.