healthmedicinet

“Drop the pubic bone!” she ordered, teaching class during a five-day women’s retreat last month at the Amansala resort in Tulum, Mexico, the long golden hair flowing over her shoulders calling to mind Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” “This is going to give you the perineal energy we’ve been talking about so much.”

Another, almost Vreelandesque command: “You can’t let the arches of your feet collapse. The collapse of your arches is the collapse of your sex life.” And another: “Open the groin. The groin gets soft.”

“I thought you said, ‘The lights go off,’ ” muttered one contorted participant.

Thick with estrogen and incense, buffeted by warm Caribbean breezes, the room was indeed dim. But Ms. Saidman Yee, whether perching beatifically in full lotus position before 40-odd prone bodies or prowling among them like a jungle cat, emits at 53 her own curious, almost celestial incandescence. Since marrying Rodney Yee, one of the most popular practitioners of the discipline (which he prefers to call an art form), in 2007, she has brought to it glamour, sensuality without the creepy overtones of recent yoga scandals, and unapologetic commercialism, endorsing wine and posing for Vanity Fair.

“Oh, my God, I’m so not pure,” said Ms. Saidman Yee, a longtime model who favors a line of yoga togs cheekily called Sweaty Betty and sometimes pads to class in gold sequined Uggs. “I never want to be called a guru. All I want to do is guide women into their own bodies so they can be more content.”

The Yees may not be gurus, but they are yoga moguls, oxymoronic though that term may seem. They are directors at Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Integrative Therapy program, lithe Florence Nightingales working with the designer to bring yoga and meditation to hospital patients and disaster victims, Ms. Saidman Yee having refined her caretaking skills alongside Mother Teresa’s disciples in the late 1980s.

“I mean, who wouldn’t want Colleen at their bedside?” asked Ms. Karan over the phone from Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos, one of the many exotic locales where the Yees host coed retreats that can cost participants upward of $4,000 each (not including airfare).

More democratically, the couple collaborate on DVDs for Gaiam, the wellness behemoth with which the tawny, muscled Mr. Yee has partnered since 1998. And they are in talks to open a Manhattan outpost of Yoga Shanti, the studio in Sag Harbor, N.Y., where Ms. Saidman Yee has taught Russell Simmons, Christie Brinkley and the literary agent Esther Newberg. It is a move that could be seismic to a tight-knit if perennially (and perineally) relaxed community of instructors and their acolytes.

“I can’t wait,” Ms. Karan said. “To see her evolve as a yoga teacher with Rodney has been one of the most beautiful movies.”

To some, though, it might seem more “Kramer vs. Kramer” than “Royal Wedding.” The felicitous but messy merger of the Yees, who met when she took his teacher-training class, broke up each of their previous marriages. (The couple now have six children and stepchildren between them.)

Ms. Saidman Yee has also severed ties with a longtime business partner, Jessica Bellofatto, who helped her build Yoga Shanti but now has been exiled to East Hampton after a legal tangle. (“I could not be happier,” Ms. Bellofatto wrote in an e-mail.)

Despite prevailing in this conflict, and though her marriage has burnished her personal brand, Ms. Saidman Yee said she still struggles sometimes with asserting her voice. Indeed, this was a theme explored, with “journaling” and tearful dialogue exercises, throughout the gathering in Tulum, formerly an invitation-only affair organized in part by Mary Richardson Kennedy, the late ex-wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that this year was open to anyone who Googled it. “Women’s retreats are about finding that what you have to say is worthwhile and needed,” Ms. Saidman Yee said.

Recently Gaiam released her first solo video for the company, “Yoga for Weight Loss,” a title she dismissed as a sales ploy about which she had no input. “Any way to get a woman on the mat,” she said with a shrug.

And during a March appearance on a “Fit Minute” segment on “The Couch,” a local CBS morning show, Ms. Saidman Yee expressed frustration that the producers wanted her merely for a mute demonstration of the poses her husband was describing. “Just another blonde doing Warrior Two,” she wrote in a weary-sounding e-mail afterward.

But Colleen Saidman Yee, the middle child of seven in a Catholic family raised mostly in Bluffton, Ind., has stood out from the moment she was born.