How Studio Owner Carly Connected with Yoga and Why She Hopes Reformer Pilates Can Do the Same for You
Carly worked as a counselor in non-profit and private settings for over twenty years before she started teaching yoga. But in 2016 when she was a new mom struggling with post-partum and her own mental health, she started going to yoga classes.
“When I discovered yoga, it was kind of like my mind blew open,” she explains. She thought “wow, I need to offer this, I need to find a way to offer this to my clients.” Carly explains she very quickly became passionate about incorporating yoga into her therapy practice . She did her yoga teacher training in 2018 and then quit her job in 2019, as she puts it, “to pursue a partnership with somebody who was more aligned with body work and connecting the mind and the body”.
Postpartum yoga has been suggested to decrease the risk of postpartum depression, as well as other benefits such as increasing energy, calmness, and relaxation. Yoga in general also brings mental health benefits such as reduced anxiety and depression. These sorts of benefits are the kinds of things Carly would be able to bring to her clients through a counseling practice that incorporated yoga.
She started by bringing yoga into schools, including alternative high school programs, elementary schools, and high schools, before starting her own practice in the community. She received her five hundred hour yoga certification as well as a sound healing training.
“I’ve always loved helping people and I’ve loved working in non-profit and social services but I always knew within my heart that it wasn’t in alignment fully with what I wanted to do and what I wanted to offer,” Carly explains. She continues “and I’ve always been like a fit person so in terms of fitness that’s just always been a part of my life. I grew up playing soccer. I spent lots of time at the gym, had babies, kind of stopped doing everything and then came back into yoga and discovered this whole, like I said, it was like mindblowing what it could do for me, my mental health, and physically. Like noticing the ability to sleep, to manage stress and anxiety, it was just this like holistic like opening for me in my life.”
She’d also wanted to find a way to incorporate her professional world with her husbands because of her passion for yoga and the opportunity they both see to help the community. When her husband got laid off in 2019, they started questioning what their next steps should be.
“We contemplated moving away, moving out of town, opening a yoga retreat center,” Carly shares. “Thats when it sort of started percolating for us.” But at the end of the day, Carly and her husband decided they wanted to find a way to pursue this passion in their hometown so their son could continue to pursue competitive ju jitsu. “We know some friends who own Oxygen’s so then we got on a call and then i feel like the rest is history.”
The reason Carly and her husband chose Oxygen Yoga & Fitness to pursue their yoga dreams was the amount of support franchisees receive. Carly explains, “there’s so many layers to opening a business and so many unknowns. Even though I’ve been in this world for several years like you literally feel like your hands are held so its, i feel like it eliminates a lot of the backend work for us and allows us to focus on building our community and letting them know who we are and letting them know what to expect.”
Carly and her husband’s main focus right now is creating relationships with community members and doing our best to let the community know who they are, why they are doing what they’re doing and what to expect at their studio.
“We’re obviously excited to bring this to the community of Brookswood because there’s nothing there for the people so we’re so excited to have the opportunity to bring yoga, fitness, movement to the community.”
With a tentative opening date in January, Carly already has a clear vision of what she hopes members will take away from the studio.
“I envision our space being a space that people truly can come to and know that it is a space of safety where they’ll be seen and valued and honored and celebrated and know that just within that one hour they can come in, kind of set their external responsibilities aside and know that one hour is really for them to come in, to fill their cup, and go back into the world a better person so if we can be the space that can kind of cycle people through that then we feel like we’re contributing to a better community overall and a better society.”
One of the things Carly is most proud of in her journey with Oxygen Yoga & Fitness so far is the space they’ve been able to get for their studio, because of the options it will give the community. The Brookswood studio will have two studio spaces, plus a pilates reformer space. The pilates reformer space, a new addition to Oxygen Yoga & Fitness’ offerings, will offer the chance for even more community members to find the class they love in the studio and to take that time they need to focus on themselves and their mental and physical health.
While Carly herself hasn’t practices pilates reformer, she’s shares “I guess it’s like the way that I am about yoga, I feel like I live and breathe yoga and I know that people feel that way about reformer. I want to not only bring it in for those people but also for the rest of us who maybe haven’t had the opportunity to try it. I feel like our studio is unique and special in that it gives everyone the opportunity to try it, it’s not going to be this sort of exclusive thing that’s only available to certain people with certain memberships, it will be available to everyone so I’m excited for that, for people to have the option to try it.”
You can try Carly’s favorite classes, Freedom Flow at your local studio, and stay up to date with Oxygen Yoga & Fitness Brookswood’s opening on Instagram or Facebook so you can stop by and try a yoga, fitness, or reformer pilates class in January!
