April 2012 – April 2016
Menominee, MI
In January 2011 I moved to Michigan because my (now) ex-husband accepted a job in Menominee. When I arrived in town, I felt like a stranger with no place in the community for me to meet people like me: there was no yoga studio, no health food store, no hippie-dippie store. There was no community for me.
At the suggestion of my mom, I began yoga teacher training at Every Body’s Yoga (EBY) in Green Bay, Wisconsin. For 9 months I trained and taught yoga at EBY, driving the hour to school sometimes 2 and 3 times each week. In Menominee, I began teaching weekly yoga classes at Victory Physical Therapy, the YMCA, Dew Hill Coffee Shop and Tri-Force Martial Arts.
In March 2012, one of my popular teaching locations in Menominee was no longer available for me to use as a teaching space and my students encouraged me to seek a dedicated teaching space. With the help of many students, I opened my first space on April 2, 2012. I called it The Yoga Place.
I taught for nearly a year and started feeling the pinch of too little space as my following grew. During this time, I created my own teacher training certification program, wrote the book for it and trained yoga teachers so that I wasn’t the only one teaching at The Yoga Place (which I renamed “Wellinspire” when we moved into our larger space).
At Wellinspire, I had massage therapists and yoga teachers and a fitness instructor. I taught over 1,700 hours in the classroom, hosted workshops, coaching programs, online courses, weekend retreats, and more.
I managed the social media accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and Linked In, and wrote awesome content for our E-newsletters, and networked with local business.
Instead of capping at 9 and 10 students, like the first studio did… we could fit close to 20 students in our studio space.
When we got so large that I couldn’t do it all on my own, I hired a Studio Assistant who later became my Operations Leader.
In April 2016, I taught my last class at Wellinspire and we had a goodbye party called the Celebration of Wellinspire. I showed a black-and-white movie in the background and we listed to Beirut over our speaker system and came together in celebration.
I regret closing down the studio’s Facebook account, as the comments and memories went back to our first days.
Reviews
Group yoga class at The Yoga Place in Menominee, MI (2013) 
Group yoga class at The Yoga Place in Menominee, MI (2013) 
Second group of yoga teachers-in-training (2013-2014) 
Yoga teachers-in-training during retreat weekend (2013/2014) 
Child’s pose – balasana (2012) 
Private yoga using props at Wellinspire (2015) 
Life coaching is person-centered (2015) 
wide-angle seated forward bend – upavistha konasana (2012) 
Private yoga lesson using Mr. Bones (2015) 
Tree pose – vrksasana (2015) 
Half lord of the fishes pose – ardha matsyendrasana (2015) 
Cobra pose – bhujangasana (2015) 
Yoga for scoliosis flyer 
Yoga for the chakras flyer (2016) 
Yoga retreat at The Christine Center (2015) 
Group workshop at Wellinspire led by guest teacher (2015)