WESTMINSTER • Within the warm, humid habitat of the Butterfly Pavilion’s immersive rainforest, more than a dozen yoga mats lay scattered along pathways.

Class begins and students sit in lotus. Gently, a white butterfly flutters and rests on the shoulder of a practitioner.

The class progresses, and a gray, striped butterfly briefly lands on the outstretched foot of another student, perhaps mistaking bright blue leggings for a tropical flower.

At the front, as the instructor stands to demonstrate a position with her palms forward, an orange butterfly climbs from her foot and dances on her fingertips.

For several years now, the Butterfly Pavilion has hosted yoga classes within the immersive rainforest exhibit. As students stretch and pose, they are surrounded by thousands of tropical butterflies native to rainforests around the world.

Each class has 30 spots available, which tend to fill up quickly, said adult programs coordinator Megan Schulz. The program is so popular, in fact, that the Pavilion tripled its weekly class offerings this year. Now, there are three classes each week: Saturday and Sunday mornings, and Wednesday evenings.

“Everybody says the same thing: the butterflies are the highlight, it’s so wonderful to see them flying around,” Schulz said.

The exhibit where the classes are held, “Wings of the Tropics,” is home to about 200 species of butterflies from the forests of the Philippines, Kenya, Malaysia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. At any given time, there are between 1,500 to 2,000 free-flying critters in the enclosure, said lepidopterist manager Shiran Hershcovich.

Butterflies will land on participants, especially drawn to bright colors and sweat. But even so, there’s no need to be too worried about accidentally hurting the fragile creatures, who tend to stay away from too much movement.

“If you’ve ever wanted to do yoga and feel like a Disney princess, this is for you,” Hershcovich joked.

The program is year-round, which means that even through the chill of Colorado’s winters, one can practice yoga in a tropical paradise — even if just for an hour.

“Wintertime evening yoga is really cool too, because it gets to be dark, obviously a little bit earlier in the nighttime,” Schulz said.” Not a lot of people get to visit the conservatory while the butterflies are winding down, getting ready for their evenings and starting to roost, which is their behavior where they hang upside down on trees, kind of like bats do.”

Instructor Kamala Viecelli, who has been teaching yoga for 25 years, leads several classes a month at the Butterfly Pavilion. Viecelli first attended the unique yoga class as a student, and quickly realized she would be back.

“I felt like we had gone to Costa Rica for an hour. … I knew that I wanted to make it here more often,” said Viecelli, who has been teaching classes at the Pavilion for several years. “Here, you know its going to be a really safe space to practice yoga and at the same time, you get to have the butterflies in this space landing on you and around you, and really getting in touch with nature.”

Hosting these classes is also a way for the Butterfly Pavilion to share its mission: educating people on the importance of insects. Often at the end of class, Hershcovich is met with questions about the types of butterflies in the exhibit — a positive sign of the program’s impact.

“This is something that helps get people acquainted with our animals, gives them a peaceful, calm experience, something that’s different than what they’ve had before — and I’m hoping that that ends up being a more inquisitive experience,” Hershcovich said. “Even though it’s really awesome to get to unwind and enjoy exercise at Butterfly Pavilion, our mission is to educate, inform and conserve invertebrates, and I think this program is just one step of many to ensure that we do that.”

It’s also a way to connect with ecosystems different from those in Colorado, Schulz added.

“Here in Colorado, we might feel a little bit disconnected from the tropical rainforest, which are the lungs of our planet; they hold most of the world’s biodiversity, and they create a big portion of our world’s oxygen,” Schulz said. “It’s being able to connect the Colorado community to the importance of the rainforest.”

Not to mention, there’s no other yoga studio quite like it in Colorado.

“Not a lot of people get to spend their morning with thousands of butterflies flying around you,” Schulz said. “So coming in and taking a deep breath, letting the butterflies land and fly around you, and just being mindful of the space that you’re in — I think that’s such a unique thing that we get to do here.”