F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are “no second acts in American lives” has been defied countless times, but rarely so spectacularly as by my friend Debby Kaminsky, the founder of Newark Yoga Movement (NYM).

Debby’s first act was in advertising; for years, she was a high-flying senior agency executive. (One of her favorite accounts? Grape-Nuts cereal.)

“I had a really great career,” she remembers. One day, on the advice of an admired older colleague, she took a yoga class.

“And then I’m in this yoga studio, sweating like crazy, using muscles I didn’t even know I had — and it helped everything. My stress level, my focus at work, my recovery after tennis. Physically, emotionally — just everything.”

She became a devoted practitioner, then a certified yoga instructor. One day at a class, she says, she felt “a shift” and realized that she vastly preferred being in the yoga studio to being at her job.

“I had the title, the budget, awards — and I just realized that I don’t need those pats on the back anymore. We are all so much more than our jobs. I was so much more than an advertising executive,” she says now.

“And I was afraid to leave my job, because I didn’t know who I would be without it. But yoga is super at confidence building. So I left the world of advertising and became a yoga teacher, because I wanted to help people,” she says. “Until you try rolling up your sleeves and giving back, you don’t realize its power.”

Debby’s version of giving back wasn’t simply to open a studio of her own. Instead, she made it her business to spread what she’d learned about yoga — about the confidence, strength and ability to manage stress and anxiety that she found in practicing both yoga poses and the discipline’s emphasis on regulating one’s breath — to as many people as possible, and especially to those who needed it most.

“We can’t control so much of what goes on around us. But we can choose how we respond. When we’re stressed, we can take a breath. Instead of reacting in that moment, we can breathe, take that pause and then we can respond in a different way,” she explains. “Science backs this, too. That breath is like a shock absorber, and you can take it into any aspect of your life.”

Her organization’s first goal: Teach yoga, and the social and emotional regulation it offers, to Newark’s school children.

“I remember reading one day that graduation rates in Newark were lower than those in the rest of the state. And I thought: ‘Breath and yoga could really make a difference there.’ So I started a nonprofit.”

That was 16 years ago. She launched NYM by reaching out to then-Mayor Cory Booker, offering yoga classes to kids at public and charter schools — initially at no cost to the schools. She started teaching at just one school. Over the years since, her organization has reached tens of thousands of students, from kindergarten kids through high schoolers, with a crew of fellow teachers.

Debby herself taught most of the classes at first, in small classrooms where she had to demonstrate poses on desktops because there was nowhere else to stretch out, and in high school gymnasiums where she mastered the art of demonstrating poses with a microphone in one hand so students could hear her. She taught 5-year-olds to do yogic breathing by tracing the outlines of their hands — inhaling when tracing up one side of a finger, exhaling when going down the other side.

“Yoga teaches you to have a flexible mind, not just a flexible body,” she says.

Today, after 16 years of classes and workshops, NYM has taught yoga to more than 50,000 students and 6,000 teachers in more than 60 Greater Newark schools. The organization offered special yoga practices for high school athletes (“The Shabazz football team said it was the hardest thing they’d ever done,” she remembers), and for students with disabilities. (She still joyfully recalls a nonverbal 6-year-old who spoke his first word after six weeks in an NYM class. The word was “happy.”)

She knew she was reaching some kind of critical mass when, on her way to teach a class at Malcolm X Shabazz High School, she had to make her way past a huge group of students having a water fight. In the midst of this, one of the students spotted Debby, pointed to her and called out “Hey – namaste!”

Namaste — a Sanskit word that means roughly “I see the good in you, you see the good in me, and we see the good in each other” — is a ritual greeting exchanged by students and instructors at the end of a yoga class.

“I just thought that was so great,” Debby recalls, laughing. “We put ‘Hey — namaste!’ on T-shirts.”

The organization expanded, teaching yoga to seniors, to people who are incarcerated and to 600 members of the Newark Fire Department. NYM then started offering yoga classes to workers in the corporate headquarters that crowd downtown Newark — and even free yoga classes outdoors in Harriet Tubman Square then Washington Park.

Today, NYM offers community yoga classes at Bethany Baptist Church, at The Newark Museum of Art, in schools and even virtually. With the recent appointment of yoga teacher and former public relations executive Lisa Sorensen as NYM’s new Executive Director, the organization plans to expand its offerings further, with more community classes and programming kicking off in the fall. Debby’s particularly excited about its newest offering, Breathe, then Read™, a program designed to strengthen reading comprehension by preparing students to learn with five minutes of guided breath work before they open their books.

You can get a glimpse of NYM’s work during North to Shore Festival Welcomes the World, when NYM will bring back its much-loved Brick City Solstice — a free community wellness event celebrating the longest day of the year, when participants are invited to perform 108 repetitions of a sun salutation, a classic yoga sequence.

This massive, free yoga and wellness class will be held from 10AM to 1PM on June 20, on the Arts Center’s newly redesigned Chambers Plaza. There will be meditation, teachers who speak both English and Spanish, guided breath work — three full hours of recentering and welcoming summer.

Now, 108 is a lot of sun salutations — but if anyone could get me to do that many plank poses, it’s Debby, who always exudes a warm and wonderful energy.

“Yoga really can be life-changing,” Debby tells me. “If you’re feeling anxious, down — this gets you off that treadmill in a minute. That’s why our newest slogan is ‘Got a Minute, Breathe.’ When people start doing that breathing, they feel completely different. That’s the power of it.”

Come see for yourself on June 20. I’ll be there.