We're in the midst of a yoga boom -- wherever you turn these days you're likely to see classes advertised for Bikram or Iyengar and everything in between.
Its selling point has mainly been the ability to promote a sense of well-being and improve flexibility but now it looks like yoga might also be able to mend a broken heart.
That's according to David Cunningham, a yoga teacher from Galway, and Mark Da Costa, a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon from Galway University Hospital.
The pair have been in collaboration for the last 18 months and tonight they will reveal the fruits of their labour at a talk in Galway's g hotel.
What they hope to prove are yoga's tangible benefits as a form of medical therapy. The pair are convinced that the marriage of the two disciplines -- yoga and medicine -- will provide a healthier and more positive society.
This is an idea that has already begun to emerge in the US. "Yoga is no longer a singular pursuit, but a lifestyle choice and an established part of our health and cultural landscape," says Bill Harper, publisher of 'Yoga Journal'.
The magazine carried out research in 2008 and one of the significant trends that they noticed concerned the use of yoga as medical therapy.
Almost 14 million Americans (6.1pc of the population) said that a doctor or therapist had recommended yoga to them. Close to half (45pc) of all adults agreed that yoga would be beneficial if they were undergoing treatment for a medical condition.
Back here in Ireland, David Cunningham and his wife Laragh have been running the successful Yoga Shala school in the city for the last six years and, apart from teaching a wide and varied group of practitioners of all levels, are the official yoga teachers to Connacht Rugby and to the Galway hurling and football teams.
They have also been working with Croi, the West of Ireland Cardiology and Stroke Foundation, providing classes for all-comers, including some of the staff at Croi.
"The Croi people had been organising the classes and when Mark Da Costa approached their chief executive Neil Johnson looking for a yoga teacher he put him in touch with me," Cunningham says.
The pair hit it off and the cardiothoracic surgeon, based at Galway University Hospital, attended Yoga Shala classes himself before sitting down to devise a pilot programme for his patients.
About 70 of Da Costa's patients who had undergone heart surgery attended a one-month yoga programme, spending an hour at yoga three times a week.
"In debriefing sessions afterwards they talked about how they felt," says Cunningham. "The results really blew Mark away," he says.
"It resulted in blood sugars being reduced and cholesterol levels dropping. Their clarity of mind was also very obvious and they were less angry."
He explains: "There was a lot of anger among some people as to 'why did this happen to me' and it was poisoning some people. One guy in particular loved it so much and he had been very angry. He concentrated on breathing techniques and now he says that his life has begun all over again."
Cunningham has called it the 'Papillon' programme because it aims to bring about a transformation for those taking part in it.
"With people who have undergone such major surgery, it is a case of a load of drugs for six to eight weeks afterwards but then what -- is that it? Similarly, with people who have high blood pressure, if you tell them to relax, chances are they'll blow up at you.
"Rather than have people like this turn to something like alcohol to relax, yoga can help them to relax naturally. Just by having these people in the room made them more open to change and it kick-started a real change in their lives," he says.
Mark Da Costa needed little convincing. A close friend at home in Singapore runs a chain of yoga studios across south-east Asia and he had previously taken classes.
But he wanted to see for himself exactly how useful a specific programme could be to post-operative patients.
As the lead surgeon at the Cardiothoracic Department at GUH, he spends much of his time performing complex heart and lung operations, but found himself becoming more and more concerned about rehabilitation afterwards.
A lifestyle change was essential, with diet, exercise, reduction of stress and better control of risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, all crucial to a healthy life after surgery.
"The problem here is that we don't solve cardiac disease, we don't cure these patients. We go around their blockages like a ring road and we divert blood and get it flowing into areas it was previously prevented from reaching.
"But while I have done the operation, it then comes to controlling the risk factors afterwards and trying to ensure that they change their lifestyle."
After devising the pilot programme with David Cunningham and watching it over an eight-month period, he finally got to sit in on the debriefing session afterwards.
"We gave the patients a quality of life test and asked them to score themselves at the end. They had a better sense of well-being, were far more flexible and had a better range of movement.
"A lot of the older patients said that their thought processes were clearer, they had clarity of mind. Many people don't realise that if you undergo major bypass surgery, your cognitive function can be impaired for six to eight months afterwards, but we found that clarity of thinking returned much faster after the yoga programme," says Da Costa.
Now the plan is to refine the programme and develop it to even greater effect, both for post-operative patients and also for individuals in the high-risk category who haven't yet made it to the operating table.
"I want to include people from this group who haven't had surgery, but who have cardiac problems and are at high risk. If we can help them along the way, we will have achieved something worthwhile," he adds.
Renowned Australian yoga guru Simon Borg-Olivier uses typically blunt language in his assessment of the benefits of yoga to aiding a damaged body.
"If you are recovering from surgery, you have a damaged part of the body and you have to get rid of the garbage and fix up the broken bits.
"New building material will also have to be transported in to enhance the blood flow.
"It's a very important part of recovery," he tells me over the phone from his YogaSynergy school in Sydney, Australia.
A much sought-after speaker on the international circuit, Borg-Olivier specialises in the applied anatomy and physiology of yoga and lectures at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
His presence at the Galway meeting tonight is something of a coup for Yoga Shala. He will also teach some classes and conduct a number of workshops during his time in Galway, before heading to Spain where he is due to spend more time teaching and conducting master-classes. He rounds off his European tour with a stint in Budapest.
Repairs: So, exactly how do we get all those repairs to the damaged parts of our post-operative bodies? According to Borg-Olivier it all has to do with the energy within the body getting to the site of the problem.
"Energy within the body is transferred in 11 ways and the heart is only one way of doing it (heat, cold and massage are among the others) and it can't do it alone. To prove this, just stick your hand in the air and hold it there. After a while the blood drains away and you have to lower it -- the heart is not strong enough to do the job.
"Blood is one of the main energy channels and yoga enhances its transfer to the damaged part to begin the removal of the garbage and the rebuilding. Yoga also enhances the other 10 ways of moving energy within the body," he explains.
Borg-Olivier was introduced to yoga at the age of six, learning breathing retentions from his father, who was a famous sea-diving expert. He learned how to do things "in an easier way" as a result.