boutique yoga studio – Frozen Spaghetti

It’s been about three weeks that I have been owner of OM Old Orchard, a boutique (read: small, stylish) yoga studio in a thriving lifestyle (dining, shopping) district in Webster Groves, Missouri.

My vision for owning a yoga studio has always been to have a clubhouse, more or less. Yes, some quality mind + body practices that make you feel strong and centered and connected but also like – time to be yourself, in community with other people being themselves, with opportunity to create, offer your gifts, contribute your ideas, pray.

I want to say I am fascinated with how “cut throat” the studio world is – but I’m not. I am not surprised by the competition and the ferocity of wellness providers wanting to seed another tangent to their offers. I don’t mean to sound whiny or ungrateful for people interested in hosting their offers here, but navigating the new loneliness I feel “as an owner” while at the same time being some what sought after is a key part of this season of shifting. By the way, if you are also experiencing a lot of shifting in your life – you are not alone.

Yesterday was particularly hard for me. I teared up a little bit on a drive home from dropping off a casserole in my sister’s fridge. (A demonstration of the type of community I want to lead, foster and encourage.) There is so much to do and my life is a little unorganized at the moment. I need to merge calendars and put away some papers and settle into a new routine.

I felt stress in my body that was not normal. If there is one thing I know, it’s that stress or anxiety are invitations to the present moment. The present moment shows you what is really right in front of you. The present moment is your place for clarity.

I left my house and headed up to the place that has changed my life. Like a tired mother of a newborn who loves their baby but wants to sleep, I went to the studio tenderly, like how that same tired mother is when changing the diaper – looking at baby’s eyes and sweet face – and remembering how delicate these days really are…

As I settled into the studio, I felt the nudge to breakdown the massage table, clear the front room with the windows and lay on the floor. I did. I opened the windows. I laid out a mat. I lit a candle. And right there, a domino of my life shifted and I felt the room become something new. It’s a place for prayer. An intimate place holding. A floor for conversation.

About an hour later, Jules arrived to the studio before her chanting night was to begin and we sat on the floor in this grounding room and had a conversation about our ancestors, the power of prayer and the depth of our practices came through.

Any competition in the yoga world is rooted in money, in fear, in left brain analytics to make ends meet. And though a successful small business needs numbers to matter, when I settled into the energy of the present moment I remembered the seeds of OM: my belief that self care is spiritual, that partnering with the breath is essential, that your body is the first gift given in this life and that community is wellness.

I feel good today, better than ever. Remembering that this yoga studio is not meant to be what you know, but a place for you to be known. To give generously and receive thoughtfully. For your gifts to have a place to thrive, connect and grow. And for all of us to experience when things come full circle.

And with all that being said… I have a spring calendar of events to figure out. If you’re in Saint Louis, find me on the socials or come by the new studio and say hi! http://www.omoldorchard.com

I shared on my IG a couple months ago a stream of consciousness doodle about how growth isn’t about arrival but about progression and how the fragmentation you may see or recognize in yourself is actually the art of being whole.

The past two weeks have involved a high level of change for me. My basement study, adorned by a water heater and directly below one of the kids’ bathrooms (making for excellent water sound effects in meditation recordings, let me tell ya) evolved to a study in a neighborhood boutique yoga studio, OM Old Orchard.

With an exposed brick wall and space for two chairs, a microphone and a yoga mat, I moved in on Friday, starting a new chapter of assuming the growth / arrival / progress combo. Of being there and not yet here.

I think it is important to remember the balance of alignment. The sanskrit term “samatva” is about an even state of the mind regardless of what is going on around you – it’s not about indifference, but about stability. I have found myself very aware of this, this past week.

Part of the reason is because – like most people – the courage to take creative freedoms & initiatives rarely comes without at least one darkish night of the soul where you feel the failure of the work you were enthusiastically calling your mom about the day before. If not that, you wonder who are you to do this work – you see other people with similar work and think they know more, they have already done and given the world what you were thinking about. You could stop.

And so evenness / stability of the mind in this sense requires the self control to recognize this is a pattern of the mind, this is a survival (risk averse) technique of the mind and to take all of the energy relative to being forlorn or lost and assume it right back into the root belief that powers the inspired thought. And to have an evenness / stability of the mind in such case also requires one believe in their work regardless of what transpires. The notion that you cannot be wrong unless you’re trying to be right comes to play here. Be authentic.

Be authentic.

So – one of the deals I am working out right now is how to take some of my innovative ideas for how to offer restorative yoga to people and test them out in OM Old Orchard / from my new study. Already, we have hit brakes and gas / gas and brakes and I could feel a sense of need for control rise up. The need to explain. The need to convince. The need to protect. The need to establish.

Sattva. Evenness of the mind. I think it is so easy to be in something new and recognize that it is not what you thought without really crediting the fact that it needs time to grow. How many times I have seen folks in the yoga world give up on an idea or a model because it didn’t seem successful right away, when the seed was definitely in fertile soil, when the listening was nourishing iterative change & positive growth.

I recognized the need for control and threaded it into the integrity behind the ideas. Remembered that the only control needed was self control. To be thoughtful about what I felt God has put on my life. To listen well. To iterate wisely. To suggest. To tend to. To direct, ultimately – and to offer.

“Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will be established” Proverbs 16:3 was a key for me this past week and will continue to be so… we only get like this one shot and being who we are, where we are and how we are. We only get one life with these stories, these parents, these people.

Using the body to notice our intuitive voice & align our actions and interactions with a motive we willingly surrender to be examined I think is the one thing I have learned that gives me peace of mind every single day. Every single freak out. Every single clutch of “will this make money”. I go back to the body.

Back to the breath.

Back to my yes. My no.

And proceed.

Till next time. Thanks for listening :)

PS: Enjoy these pictures from move in weekend. That is my dear friend Jan, who did not know she was coming to my new study but had serendipitously brought me a gift of a singing bowl & perfect fall leave & bundle of palo santo. One of the first projects is to bring the recording of Words that Rhyme to completion!! Praying for that because Lord knows I have been dilly dallying.