OK, let’s be honest — yoga and cornfields don’t exactly go together like peanut butter and jelly. Yoga in cornfields? Scratchy and itchy nightmare. Yet, in rural Iowa, amidst those rolling cornfields that are Iowa’s true poster child, yoga is happening.
I am a wandering yoga teacher who was trained in Kathmandu, Nepal and has spent the last year working at various resorts, hostels, hotels and wellness centers in Asia. I returned to northwest Iowa for the holidays and have had the pleasure to teach yoga at The Studio Yoga and Barre in both Okoboji and Spencer.
The community is small, especially in the winter when snowbirds leave and the surplus of vacationers are nowhere to be found. As the old adage goes, everyone seems to know everyone, and everyone knows everything.
When Amanda Jorgenson, The Studio Yoga and Barre’s owner, opened her Spencer studio in January 2016, she said the community responded with a mix of apprehension and excitement.
This part of the community acknowledges Amanda’s yoga studio as an asset, adding valuable diversity to the area’s offerings. Such words as “trendy,” “city-ish” and “cultured” were used to describe the yoga studio coming to Spencer.
However, there are two sides to the coin.
Amanda sees her yoga studio as a place of rawness and vulnerability, where pretenses can be stripped away. Just as Amanda insists that people should come as they are to church, she also encourages them to bring their authentic selves to the studio and never worry about judgment or facades. That is the yoga environment she has created, one she is immensely proud of and deeply connected to.
“There is love in the room for sure,” he added.