WHARTON — Stephanie Konvicka’s inhale is so deep that she has to sit taller and push her ribs outward to make room for all the air. That’s the point, she tells the 16 women watching her from the grid of yoga mats laid out for this Wednesday morning class. You’re supposed to make room for your breath - feel it, and listen to it, she says.

She inhales again. “Big breath into your chest,” she says, sucking in air around her words. “A little more air into your ribs.” A pause. “A little more into your belly.” Another pause. And just when her pursed-lipped students look like they can’t possibly accommodate any more oxygen, she nods. “Exhale.”

A loud whoosh sweeps through the room as 16 bellies deflate like a giant bouquet of untied balloons. Then they inhale again, finding new air crannies.

“There’s a way to be strong without being rigid,” Konvicka tells this class of mostly new students in her fledgling yoga studio in Wharton, 60 miles southwest of Houston. “And that’s what we’re looking for in our practice. Can we harness our strength, but still be soft in our bodies at the same time?”

This quest for strength through flexibility is more than just yoga talk. Here, in this charming red bungalow tucked into a Wharton city park, there’s no sleek, inner-loop athleisure wear with its lululemon logos and triple-digit price tags. In this space, the budding yogis wear simple yoga pants and the kind of cotton T shirts given out at fun-run finish lines.

Here, yoga isn’t a luxury. Konvicka believes it’s a necessity that can save her struggling city.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: The Houston community saved her after Harvey. Now she’s paying it forward.

* * *

When Hurricane Harvey pulled up to Houston for a five day sit-and-spin that unleashed more than 50 inches of rain in August 2017, Wharton was already vulnerable. Many of the city’s 8,723 residents were still recovering from other major flooding events.

Some of these disasters, like Tax Day in 2016 and Memorial Day in 2015, had been experienced in parts of Houston. Others, like the May flood of 2016, during which the portion of Colorado River that snakes through Wharton’s west side crested at 47 feet, didn’t even register in the big city.

For Whartonians, the events compounded. In came the water. Out went drywall. Cabinets. Residents.

Hope.

“When you look at what we call the west side of the city, it’s just been tormented by these floods,” says City Manager Andres Garza Jr., who has led Wharton for 26 years. He remembers the flood of 1998, which destroyed 400 homes in that corner of the city, where incomes are low and poverty high — even for Wharton, in which 23.1 percent of residents live below the poverty line, compared with 14.6 percent nationally.

“It’s one thing to have a flood like this once, or to have it twice,” he says. “But to have it in ’98, to have it in 2004, to have it in 2015, twice in 2016 and again in 2017? Not only does it affect us financially, but it also affects the citizens emotionally.”

Konvicka saw this first hand, as the youth director at Wharton’s First United Methodist Church. In the height of the 2015 flood, she patched together a rescue team from members of her youth group, armed with cattle trailers to help residents evacuate. In 2016, her battalion already knew which residents needed medicine, who would decline to evacuate, and who would need the most help. Her detailed notes became a resource for the city’s police department. And Konvicka earned a reputation as a walking encyclopedia, brimming with intel on the city’s most vulnerable residents.

But her group of do-gooders wasn’t immune to the hell. One of Konvicka’s students lived in a big house near the San Bernard River. It flooded.

“She just went on lockdown,” Konvicka remembers. It’s the kind of reaction Konvicka has grown used to in recent years - blank stares, tight faces, a total freezing up. The teenager knew her parents didn’t have enough money to fix her house, and she didn’t know how to deal with the anxiety and uncertainty. Konvicka visited the girl, promising that her youth group would help her rebuild.

“When you get a bedroom again, we’re going to buy your bedding for you,” Konvicka told her. The child fell into sobs.

“Thank you,” her mom whispered to Konvicka. “She hadn’t cried yet.”

The youth group rallied around their friend. They bought supplies and logged obscene hours, working on that house and others. By the middle of August 2017, the family finally had a working kitchen. A week later, Harvey swept in, and ruined the house once again.

Konvicka spent that week pulling cabinets they’d just hung in another house, as it flooded. She responded to calls about children on the edge that stick with her, even now — especially the memory of one girl who had just relocated to a new, dry house.

“I remember one night, looking at this one girl who was completely falling apart, and thinking, ‘We’re going to lose her,’” she says. “And everyone thinks she’s fine because she lives in a safe house now.”

Konvicka knew she could fix cabinets again. She could buy new bedding. Replace clothes and refill refrigerators. She’d done it before, and she could do it again — as many times as it flooded. But what was the use?

“We’ll just have a bunch of repaired houses with broken people living in them that are more vulnerable for the next disaster if we don’t build resilience,” she says.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Repeat flooding has residents asking, 'is Houston worth it?'

* * *

Lisa LaDue is a Colorado firefighter and licensed clinical social worker who has spent decades parachuting into disasters. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she spent a month at the Pentagon, and in the wake of the tsunami in Thailand, she was dispatched to work with a team that specialized in physical reactions to trauma.

When LaDue came to Wharton through the disaster response organization Americares during its Harvey response, her first question was: “What do I need to know about Wharton?”

“You need to find this woman named Stephanie Konvicka,” she was told. “She’s the one who can tell you what’s going on.”

The women formed an instant connection. LaDue is a social worker; Konvicka is training to be a licensed professional counselor. They both believe that trauma is more than mental. It has physical aspects; and sometimes when the mind locks away painful memories, the body still knows they’re there.

They talked about the hopelessness strangling the city. Konvicka told LaDue about neighbors who couldn’t talk about the flooding because each conversation re-traumatized them. And LaDue nodded along.

“It’s not like I won’t talk to people about how they feel. But at a certain point, it’s not accessible to them,” LaDue told Konvicka.

“The body is truly holding the memories,” she explains. “The body experienced everything we went through. But it didn’t get processed. And yoga allows the opening of these places and the release, and you don’t even have to talk about it.”

They conspired: What if yoga could help heal Wharton?

“If you can’t do anything else, do yoga,” says LaDue. “Because the number one thing that needs to be done is that we have to feel safe in our bodies. And once you get there, the other stuff might just work itself out.”

* * *

“Angela! You made it,” Konvicka calls out on a Tuesday evening in early September, as Angela Williams walks into the Hesed House wearing a bright blue t-shirt and a pair of cropped leggings. Her face is all twisted up with stress. “Your face says you need yoga.”

Williams lets out a puff of air. “My face is putting it mildly,” she deadpans. It’s been another long day, balancing the heft of her job in the special education department of a local school and the ever-present stress that comes with her housing woes, which are still ongoing two years after she was flooded in Harvey.

Williams and Konvicka have known each other for a lifetime. In high school, Williams would hide behind Konvicka’s sky-high late-’80s hair when she sat a row behind her in algebra class, dodging the teacher’s questions. Now in their late 40s, they have found each other again here at Hesed House, where Williams has taken up yoga as a way to decompress.

To Konvicka, Williams is a perfect case study in yoga’s success at helping her neighbors find a renewed sense of hope and purpose. Like many of the (mostly) women in the class, Williams had never tried yoga before Hesed House opened its doors. After her first class, she said she’d never come back. It was harder than she thought it would be, and her body burned from the workout. But she liked what it did for her mental state, so she tried one more time.

“Now it’s my happy place,” she says. “I like the way I feel afterward.”

On a typical, yoga-free day, her mind feels like it’s constantly whirring, trying to play catch up with competing demands. But then she finds a spot in the living-room turned yoga studio - at the very back, where she hopes people won’t be watching, or listening as she grunts through the class - and sinks into the slow, easy flow.

“There’s something about Stephanie’s voice,” she says. “I pay attention. I’ve started coming more often, and at work, I catch myself sitting behind the computer, shallow breathing. And I’ve learned to pay attention to that. That’s the thing here, I’m paying attention to the moment. Paying attention to what I need.”

She listens intently as Konvicka leads the class, beginning with a blessing and following up with silky-voiced motivational words throughout the hour-long session. Williams’s face tightens a couple times when things get hard.

“We haven’t done a lot of arms lately, and I want you to think of me tomorrow,” Konvicka says, smiling at the front of the classroom as she instructs her yogis to place a block between their elbows. “Some of you already know the suffering that is to come,” she teases.

She leads the class through a complicated series of moves that she promises will help them find strength and looseness in their necks and arms. Williams is not the only one grunting. But Konvicka wants to offer everyone a chance to work even harder.

“If you’re like, ‘That’s super easy,’ just keep walking your knees back,” she says. “And it just gets harder and harder. But you get stronger and stronger.”

The class follows her commands, and when the series is over, a wave of sighs passes through the room as everyone exhales with exhaustion.

“Congratulations,” Konvicka tells her yogis. “You just got stronger.”

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Among countless losses to Harvey, a few treasures saved

* * *

Konvicka and LaDue’s yoga approach isn’t exactly evidence-based, though LaDue has seen plenty of anecdotal success to support her theory. Still, she acknowledges that it sounds “a little woo-woo,” and it’s unlikely to be greenlit for federal dollars, especially when southeast Texas needs so much funding for more concrete flood programs, like Wharton’s $73 million levee.

“People are barely surviving,” Konvicka told her then. “Who’s going to spend money on an art canvas or a yoga mat?”

But as the clouds from Harvey lifted, Konvicka found a silver lining: Resources showed up for the little city in Houston’s shadow.

The organization Rebuild Texas Fund asked Konvicka, “What would you do if you could do anything?”

“I said I would do what had worked for me when I was traumatized: We’d go back to basics. We’d do art and movement and just be in our bodies,” she said.

She wrote up a proposal and received $50,000. Then Americares hired LaDue, and wrote a $200,000 grant to the Matagorda Episcopal Health Outreach Program, which brought Konvicka onto their payroll for the experiment.

Konvicka began teaching yoga classes at her church, but it soon became apparent that she needed a more neutral, secular space where every Whartonian would feel welcome. So she went to Garza at the city to inquire about the rickety red bungalow called the Hesed House on the edge of Wharton’s Dinosaur Park (so named for a massive dinosaur statue).

It was a perfect location - on the informal line between the city’s downtown and its beleaguered west side. To Konvicka, the building itself felt like a metaphor for Wharton - a little worse for wear and tear, but resilient. A survivor. Built as a private residence in the early 20th century, it was reborn as a dance studio for Wharton’s upper crust to hone their ballroom dancing skills in the 1950s and ’60s. Eventually it was deeded to the city, finding new purpose as the home of the Wharton’s art league.

“And then it just sat empty,” says Konvicka. “A vacant property in a park on the edge of town - you can just imagine what this park was becoming.”

The city leased it to Konvicka for $1 a year. And armed with a band of volunteers, Konvicka gutted it, finding stacks of art from its previous incarnation, which she hopes to donate to the city’s museum if and when it ever reopens after being flooded in Harvey. She painted the walls a breezy light blue, and transformed the house from a blight to a light, airy sanctuary. A place for thrice weekly yoga, art classes, counseling sessions and the home of a new, soon-to-bloom community garden.

Families are coming back to the park, pushing kids on the swing set out back, bopping babies on the porch, and piling paper plates high with macaroni-and-cheese and fresh-baked cookies during monthly potluck dinners.

* * *

On the second Sunday of every month, Hesed House hosts a gathering. People from every corner of town, who worship at various churches — or none at all — gather for prayer, blessings and a potluck. On the second Sunday of September, the typical yoga crowd, made up of women of a certain age, is replaced with 30-or-so men, women and fresh-faced kids with their hair pulled back in brand new back-to-school scrunchies. They’re blessing a garden tonight, one built by local high school senior Josh Sangalli as part of his Eagle Scout project.

The garden doesn’t look like much yet, Konvicka notes, as she stands in front of the crowd, explaining the meaning behind the patch of dirt that will soon give way to new life. But it’s a symbol, she says: Of resurrection. And hope. Of the bounty that can be reaped when a community comes together.

Debbie Cenko nods along in the front row. A Presbyterian pastor in Hesed House’s revolving stable of faith leaders called upon to lead Second Sunday services, she sees parables in this garden — and in Hesed House as a whole.

“The brokenness here in Wharton, that’s very real,” she says after delivering a garden blessing that harkened back to the book of Genesis, in which God walked through Eden.

She is standing in a long line that wraps around a plastic-clothed folding table, overflowing with a bounty of crockpot dishes.

“A miracle has happened here, this house being in the shape it’s in,” she says. “To have a fresh, rebirthed spot in town does give people hope. They can come in here and let it all out. They can be angry. They can be pissed off. They can be whatever. And they can come in here, into this thin space, and start feeling their souls.”

Cenko looks down at her plate, then up again, taking in the crowd of Whartonians. A mom is pacing the edge of the room, burping a fussy baby. Konvicka is chatting with Tammy Sangalli, the mother of the Eagle Scout who built the garden. In the far corner, Williams is laughing about her son’s recent play action in Friday night’s high school football game. There are faces Cenko knows. And many she doesn’t.

“This really represents new life. And that’s important to everybody in our community because we have been so depressed since Harvey,” she says. “So depressed. So every little light that comes into this town is important. And this is huge, for people to see creation happening. Newness. Freshness. Rebirth. New hope.”

maggie.gordon@chron.com;

twitter.com/MagEGordon

STAY IN THE KNOW: Get caught up on what's going on around Houston. From sports to news and entertainment, check out the newsletters we're offering.