High in the Bel-Air hills on a...

High in the Bel-Air hills on a March Sunday, the scent of jasmine fills the air outside the Yoga House, whose heavy wooden front door opens on a threshold strewn with rose petals. From a brass plaque on the door, the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin gazes serenely down at a rack holding several pairs of pointy-toed women’s pumps.

Yoga may seek union with the universal soul, but devotees visit the Yoga House by invitation only. The white stucco building is owned and supported by producer and philanthropist Tara Lynda Guber and her husband, former Sony Pictures chairman Peter Guber. A practitioner of hatha yoga, Tara Lynda (she began using the Hindu name Tara about a year ago) built the center adjacent to her home as “a vehicle for the dissemination of material toward the human potential growth movements.” A 300-person mailing list of “friends and acquaintances” is regularly updated on yoga classes and lectures by New Age luminaries such as Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson.

At today’s event, several dozen shoeless, mostly female guests chat and sip water at a reception for model Christy Turlington, who offers beauty tips and goody bags while promoting Sundari, a new “holistic” skin-care line she has launched with two partners. Barefoot in jeans and sporting a multi-carat engagement ring from her fiance, filmmaker Ed Burns, Turlington curls up on a velvet pillow embroidered with Sanskrit words and urges “moving away from the standardization of beauty” . . . with creams, oils and cleansers selling for the less-than-ascetic prices of $30 to $125 at Barneys New York and Fred Segal in Santa Monica.

Outside as the afternoon winds down, the material world chugs along, with valets scrambling to retrieve BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Lexuses as women wait near the driveway, exclaiming over the event and rifling through their goody bags.