Building Her Own “Om Sweet Om” : A moment of meditation with Bonnie Phillips
On a crisp morning in late March, Bonnie Phillips tapped a quick note onto her iPhone’s screen: “I rode my bike over and grabbed a frozen yogurt. Just let me know when you arrive.”
We had agreed to meet for an interview at Winston-Salem’s new healthy-fare outpost “Village Juice,” but in this blue blurb that appeared in my inbox with a “bing!”, Phillips had, with concise exactness, already told me who she was: an ardently active woman who nevertheless makes time to pause and enjoy life’s sweetness.
As the owner of Village Yoga, now one of the leading yoga studios in Winston-Salem, Phillips dedicates herself to teaching others the art of finding stillness in motion. In a mirror-lined studio just two miles from campus, she offers a range of mindfulness-centered classes, taught by more than fifteen teachers, to four hundred students who regularly breeze through its doors.
“Yoga creates space,” Phillips explained. Not just in your body, with increased flexibility—it creates head space.”
To Phillips, there is no greater sense of fulfillment than in witnessing her students’ metamorphoses– both physical, into individuals with newfound strength—and mental, into individuals who relish in their newfound ability to sit still and listen.
One former student—a hypercompetitive Wake Forest student-athlete—wrote, years after attending her last class at Village Yoga, that Phillips was the first person who had ever given her permission to “just breathe.” They are still in contact today.
“When somebody let’s you know that you have impacted [him or her],” Phillips said, “That’s where the validation is.”
Standing before her tribe of loyal mat-unfurlers, it is hard to imagine a Phillips who once scoffed at the idea of “sitting in a room “breathing and rolling around.” But it was only the urging of her doctor that drove her—”a total type A,” as she describes herself– to her first yoga class in the early 2000s. An avid runner and part-time personal trainer, Phillips began to experience crippling back pain in the early 2000s. After her first few classes, Phillips was shocked to find that the pain began to subside.
“What I found” said Phillips, after sticking with the practice for nearly two decades, “was that not only did it sustain me physically… it sustained me emotionally.”
Though she could not have foreseen it during her initial years of flirtation with the practice, yoga would soon sustain her financially, too.
After a painful and unexpected divorce in 2004, Phillips was in crisis.
The 5,000 square foot home (complete with the Mercedes in the driveway) she once called ‘ours’ was now ‘his,’ and she became the resident of a new reality– —one characterized by the pressing need to support herself and her four children on her own.
“I had to find a job,” said Phillips, who hadn’t worked in years. “And I thought, well, what do I love?”
Her mind immediately turned to the mat.
When she shared her vision of opening her own yoga studio with her closest friends, however, almost all urged her to reconsider.
“It’s not going to be profitable,” they warned her. “You’ll never earn a living. Go back to school.”
But she would soon find three supporters that mattered: fellow yogi Lucinda Jones, and homeopathic medicine guru-brothers Jade and Keoni Teta.
Jones connected Phillips with the Teta brothers, who were looking for a “holistic practitioner” to occupy a spare room in the Reynolda Village office of their medical practice. But Phillips told them she was so hard up, she couldn’t afford the rent. She was stunned by their response: The Tetas offered to let Phillips teach yoga in that space and pay mere 10% of whatever she earned in her first month as rent, giving her infant business a fighting chance at life.
“I explained to them that I had no money to start a business, but I knew that I could build a business,” she said, “and they were remarkably generous.”
“Giving and expecting something in return is the opposite of giving,” Teta remarked on his initial decision to back Phillips.
So it was set: there, in a sliver of space only large enough to hold five people — “ten if we squeezed,” said Phillips — the first class at Village Yoga commenced.
Within a year, Phillips moved her budding business along with the Teta brothers to their new Reynolda Road location, where “Naturopathic Clinic” resides today. But Village Yoga quickly outgrew this new space, too. After eight years on Northwest Blvd., Phillips transplanted the studio to Coliseum Drive, only about a five-minute drive from campus.
“Business was just phenomenal during those years” said Phillips, who moved her flourishing venture a final time in 2016, to its current address at 710 Coliseum Drive.
Before “Village Yoga” grew into the studio mothers, teens, and college students alike frequent today, Phillips—quite literally—supported her business in a headstand, calling upon every ounce of her strength to ensure it didn’t topple.
Without the revenue to hire additional teachers, Phillips initially taught every Village Yoga class herself. Even with the exhausting class load at her own studio, she continued to teach at Forsyth Country Club, pursuing a crucial source of regular income that ultimately sustained her startup.
“Failing was not an option for me because I had four children at home that I had to feed,” Phillips said. “There was never a time when I said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ Ever. It was just going to work. And it did”
In the months following her divorce, Phillip’s business became her guiding force, helping her to heal as she showed the healing power of yoga to others.
“I’d be in my car, and I’d stop somewhere and scream,” Phillips said, “but then I’d have to be on the mat [teaching class].”
Having experienced a personal transformation through yoga firsthand, Phillips brings a level of passion and earnestness to the practice that has proven to be her business’s greatest asset.
“She’s a ‘meaning over money’ type of person, and I think that has helped her be successful, and help people get her authenticity and her caring,” Teta affirmed. “It’s really meaning first for her, and a money second.”
Yet Phillip’s greatest strength as an entrepreneur is, perhaps, her firm belief that no transformation is complete.
“Bonnie is never afraid to admit when she doesn’t know something,” said Jones, a friend for many years. “When she first opened her studio, she was afraid of headstands and being upside down. But not afraid to admit it.”
“What I love about yoga is that we don’t have a stopping point in mind,” Phillips said. “It’s a destination without an ending.”
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