SHARING THE POWER OF YOGA STORY BY ANNE REED

The Chiodo family celebrates Joyful Yoga & Spa’s 15th anniversary as they take instruction virtual.

ifteen years in Southwest Florida time seems like forever. In a land filled with seasonal residents, recent transplants and what seems like a new gated community every month, anything that survives here for a decade is rare. It takes patience, care and, in this current COVID-19 climate, flexibility.

All three things one can find through the practice of yoga.

Joyful Yoga & Spa in Bonita Springs is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. Led by family matriarch Tess Chiodo and her two daughters, Jacqueline Chiodo and Emily Cioffi, Joyful Yoga is one of the oldest yoga studios in Southwest Florida. In the pre-shelter-in-place world, the beautiful, light-filled studio had the quiet bustle of students and teachers arriving for classes or sessions. Now? Tess, Jacqueline, Emily and their staff have gone digital, offering classes first through Facebook Live and now through Zoom and sharing articles on the benefits of meditation and more through their social media pages.

That willingness to change, to change and meet the needs of the people around them, is something that started 50 years ago in Southern California.

“I was a Catholic schoolgirl and got into yoga as my thing,” Tess says. After marrying her high school sweetheart, “he went off the rails. I found out TM was being taught at a local community college in San Bernardino.”

TM is transcendental meditation, created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the mid1950s. It became popular in the 1960s and 1970s as celebrities embraced the practice, which involves using a silent mantra to meditate for a period of time daily. It is taught by certified teachers and is used as a method for stress reduction, self-development and relaxation.

Jacqueline, Tess and

Emily

Tess began meditating and studying TM.

“I’ve been on a long journey with that, starting in early 1969,” she explains.

She has a background in entomology and was living and working on a beneficial bug farm in California.

“It was hippie-landia back then,” Tess says. “But that kind of fell apart and I became an insurance agent and met my current husband.”

When the two married, they moved to the East Coast. She was still practicing yoga, having used it as part of her daily health and healing while working through the trauma of her first marriage. When they relocated to New Jersey, she decided to devote herself to yoga and began teaching in 1980 in an old schoolhouse while raising her daughters Jacqueline, Chelsea and Emily.

Emily was 17 when the family made the move to the East Coast.

“Growing up, there was this idea of yoga just as a natural part of life and play,” Emily says. “I remember being in Shoulder Stand as a child, not realizing it was a yoga pose… We would see mom doing yoga and practice it with her. It wasn’t a discipline.”

In college, yoga became more of a discipline for Emily and she started teaching yoga.

“I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t yoga,” Emily says when describing her own yoga journey.

“My own path, I did deviate to some degree,” she says. After she had her daughter, Ella, in 2003, she noticed she had gained a significant amount of weight and was using food to self-soothe. “Immediately after having her, I knew I had yoga and it would be my tool and my remedy.”

Emily also struggled with panic attacks and anxiety and hinted at other things she used to selfsoothe or self-medicate.

“I knew that I had to lose all this weight and I couldn’t go back to using substances, so yoga and meditation became my tool to lose weight, get in shape and become more sound of mind and body. It was really powerful,” she says.

Yoga and meditation did more than heal Emily; they also provided the impetus to go back and pursue her master’s degree in clinical and mental health counseling, including yoga and meditation in her list of healing modalities.

Tess and her husband moved with Jacqueline to Fort Myers in 2004 with the intention of starting a yoga studio. They had already decided on a name — Yoga Joy. In 2005, they saw an advertisement in the back of a yoga journal for a tiny studio in Fort Myers that was for sale called Joyful Yoga. They contacted June Denison, the owner, and arranged to purchase the practice.

“It was like a seed,” Emily says. “The perfect

little seed to water and grow.”

Tess and Jacqueline taught several yoga classes a day in the small studio space in Fort Myers. By 2007, when Emily made the move to join her family, Joyful Yoga had outgrown its space and moved to Bernwood Plaza in Bonita Springs. The new studio featured a larger space for classes and four rooms for spa treatments.

“It changed our business in a lot of ways,” Emily says. “We grew exponentially.”

They moved to their current space near Pelican Landing in Bonita Springs in 2011; it features two yoga studio spaces where almost 50 classes are offered each week. The spa provides a variety of services, including massage therapy, reiki, ayurvedic treatments, hypnotherapy and EMDR therapy, which is led by Emily.

“It is really more like a holistic wellness center at this point,” she says.

Joyful Yoga & Spa has a large staff, including: » Jacqueline, co-owner, ayurvedic lifestyle coach, chakra yoga specialist and integrative yoga therapist » Tess, co-owner, yoga/meditation/ayurveda teacher and TM teacher certified in Primordial Sound Meditation Instruction » Emily, co-owner, licensed mental health counselor, ERYT-500, RYS-200, yoga and meditation Instructor and certified Buti Yoga instructor.

Chelsea, who lives in Austin, is also part of the studio and visits to instruct students in their teacher training program regarding prenatal yoga and how to modify yoga for pregnancy.

“We have a large staff,” Emily notes. “It feels very much like a family… We are all different in the ways we teach. We have our own style and our own qualities and that inspires people. People love the fact that we are a family.”

Emily teaches a few classes each week, a change from when she started and she would split the bulk of the teaching with her mother and sister. She describes her mom as “the queen bee. She is an encyclopedia of yoga.” Her sister, Jackie, is in her eyes “a local guru. She teaches many classes during season and does our teacher training program. When she isn’t in town during season, she does yoga retreats in Costa Rica.”

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, Joyful Yoga & Spa was looking forward to its 15th anniversary and planning a ceremony with the chamber of commerce. Instead, they’ve made the shift to teaching digitally and working to find the platform and plans that best fit their students, teachers and studio. It was a quick shift, as many already saw digital classes as part of the future landscape of yoga.

“With this health crisis and moving to online platforms, yoga will continue to grow,” Emily says. “It will become more accessible for people. And that’s exciting. It’s been on the backburner for us, and this is our push.”

Offering classes digitally also helps the studio stay in touch with its seasonal students and allows them to continue their practice no matter where they go.

It’s all part of the growth of yoga, something Emily and Tess have been watching over the last 10 years.

“It seems like every month there is a new studio,” Emily jokes. “There is more than enough yoga to go around.”

One of the tenets of yoga is aparigraha, which Emily explains as meaning non-grasping.

“Yoga is not just a physical practice,” Emily explains. “There are also the yamas and niyamas, and those are the moral codes of conduct and personal observances of yoga. And so that’s also what you practice besides and beyond the breathing and meditation.”

That includes making room for all teachers, studios and students — sharing space with all the yoga studios in Southwest Florida.

“We want to spread yoga because we know it is a powerful practice,” Emily says.

“We have so much power,” Tess adds. “So much more power than we even know.”

Tapping into that power, especially in times of trouble, is just part of who they are, the journey they’ve been on from bug farm to Fort Myers, the energy and talents they have shared and continue to share as the studio celebrates its anniversary.

“We always look for the potential out of any sort of darker time,” she notes. “We can always look for a silver lining, and this may be it. The pandemic is scary, and there are also good things. Maybe people will discover yoga, reconnect with family — and so many beautiful things can be born from this.”