After a series of injuries forced her out of competitive sports while she was studying at Harvard University, Westbank resident Ashley Hartley began looking for a physical activity that would keep her fit and healthy.

What she found was her passion and her future career as a yoga instructor and yoga studio owner.

“I thought, ‘I have to find something else that is not going to injure me.’ I had heard of yoga,” Hartley said during an interview at her studio, Empower Yoga, 1611 W. Fifth St. “As an athlete, I had a whole lot of ideas of what yoga might be. I thought that it would be weird, that it would not be challenging in the way that I wanted physical exercise to be challenging.”

Her experience at a yoga studio during her freshman year changed the course of her life.

“It was the right balance of challenging and also peaceful,” Hartley said. “And the biggest thing that I was finding was that I wasn’t having injuries. It was keeping me healthy, it was keeping my body aligned safely. I was getting stronger, more flexible. It affected my ability to deal with life’s challenges calmly.”

At the same time, the psychology major became interested in the relatively new field of positive psychology, which studies normal-functioning people and looks at what makes people happy. Yoga was actually being studied and talked about at Harvard.

“What they found was that yoga does significantly lower depression, anxiety and stress levels in its practitioners,” Hartley said. “At the same time that I was starting my own yoga practice, in the psych studies that we were looking at, we were reading about the effect that this has on people’s ability to move through life happy and stress free.”

During her senior year at Harvard, Hartley joked that she had to make the choice that all Ivy Leaguers are faced with: investment banking or other. She chose other and hasn’t looked back since.

Hartley, 26, got her certification as a yoga instructor and, after graduation, she and her husband, Justin, moved to the Westbank. After teaching at other studios for a few years, Hartley said she wanted to open her own studio because of her “desire to make yoga accessible and approachable for everyone because of all the good it had done in my life, and I wanted to share that with people.”

She procured a small business loan, leased a space in the Commons at Fifth development and opened Empower Yoga seven months ago. The number of clients has been growing steadily since then.

Sure, she was nervous about opening a new business in the middle of one of the worst recessions in decades, but taking on challenges calmly is a goal and a benefit of practicing yoga, Hartley points out.

“With the economy, it’s been a really neat endeavor for me; it’s really stretched me,” she said. “It hasn’t been like I opened my doors and there was a line of people waiting to walk in. Not one moment of this process has been easy, but it’s been worth it, and it’s been fun.”

On a recent afternoon, Hartley walked between rows of her students who were at her sunny studio for a lunch-time class. As they practiced a position called downward facing dog, Hartley adjusted heels for an optimum stretch and moved a student’s hips to achieve the right angle.

Vinyasa yoga, the style that Hartley teaches, links breathing and postures or asanasto achieve physical fitness, flexibility and emotional and mental peace.

“When I’m holding Warrior 2, and it becomes challenging physically, mentally there’s a dialog of voices that comes in,” Hartley said. “We all know that dialog. ‘Maybe not today. Maybe it’s too early. Maybe you’re too tired today.’ Yoga teaches me to relax my mind and relax my heart and stay there with that challenge peacefully.”

Learning to deal with those challenges peacefully, she tells her students, allows them to problem solve more effectively at work and in life, because they can remove stress from their thinking.

Hartley has also picked up a high-profile student, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, who might know something about a stressful work environment. A representative from his office confirmed that the Dewhurst takes yoga on doctor’s orders after an injury he sustained while riding cutting horses.

To those who are curious about yoga and are unsure about it, like she was once, Hartley said, “If you are out of shape, inflexible, not sure about yoga, then you make up the majority of people who ever step into a yoga class. Most people are like you. It doesn’t matter where you are physically.

“Yoga is for everyone.”