Telling Women's Lives

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.”

Moriarty “Unfinished Business” Reader Response

My greatest takeaway from “Unfinished Business” was the necessity of establishing a symbiotic relationship between competition and care. As a society, we view these two crucial pillars of existence as mutually exclusive. The runner who stops to extend a hand to a fallen competitor does not win the race; the fraternity brother who develops deep feelings for a girl is “soft”; the executive who steps down from a coveted White House foreign policy position is “leaning out.” But by allowing our mindset to continually be governed by praise for “winning” and scorn for “caring,” we are persistently underestimating the value “caring” adds to our society. My mother—a woman with business and law degrees from two top universities and former Wall Street Journal reporter—always used to say (half-jokingly, half-bitterly) during her days of commuting into New York that she worked two jobs. One as a lawyer for which she was paid, the other as a mother—both more time-intensive and taxing—for which she was not. Why do we continue to undervalue the act of caregiving—a field that is perhaps more demanding than any paying job and adds more value to society than any corporation, law firm or government bureau? “Behind every successful man,” as the saying goes, “there is a woman called mother.” In all of the tasks that we perceive as negligible—the late night algebra homework assistance, the midday runs to the grocery store, the loads of laundry, the cheers from the seats of a school auditorium– women are developing our society’s reserves of human capital. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a person cannot reach the ultimate goal of self-actualization until his physiological (food, water, warmth, rest), safety, belonging and love (intimate relationships/ friendships) and esteem (feeling of accomplishment) needs have been met. While male primary breadwinners may support this hierarchy of needs in certain aspects—earning they money to provide food and housing, for example—mothers disproportionately assume the brunt of the responsibility. Every 5:00 scramble to put dinner on the table, every intimate pre-bedtime talk, every post of an “A” paper on the refrigerator door—moves a child on his or her way to becoming the lawyer that puts a criminal in jail, or the entrepreneur with a new invention, or a doctor who discovers the cure to cancer. Reassigning value to the role of the homemaker rather than subordinating these equally vital responsibilities will not only acknowledge the reality of the sustaining factors behind our society, but also increase our respect for the “caregiver” so that men can feel as equally important in this role as they do in the corner office.

Moriarty- Farmer Jane Response

Of all the women in “Farmer Jane,” I found Gloria Decater’s life work particularly compelling. Decater, who runs the 40-acre biodynamic “Live Power” farm in California with her husband, aligns her business with nature—rather than against it—in order to succeed. The “biodynamic” approach to farming Decater has adopted uses microbes inherent to the soil to increase productivity and looks to the “cosmic and planetary rhythms of the earth” (Costa 50) for guidance.
I always find it ironic that so many of the answers to the “big questions” pressing our society—rather than calling for complex technological solutions–—can be found in going back to basics. The world is governed by inescapable rhythms—like the changing of the seasons—that establish the natural pace of our existence. While we may suppress them in our feverish quest to further our own shortsighted human agendas, all of us have a deeper instinct that tells us we are beholden to forces more powerful than ourselves. The crash-dieter—even while counting calories and pushing aside desserts—always knows she will eventually return to her baseline weight, just as the oil tycoon liquidating nature’s underground fuel wells must know the earth—even if he is no longer walking it when it does—will ultimately pay for his greed. The only enduring solution is to cease fighting for the upper hand against nature and instead live in harmony with its rhythms, which know the secrets to prospering on this planet far better than we do ourselves.

Neicy Myers & Leigh Moriarty: Concise Sentences

2. Ticket prices increased from last year’s $15-$20 to $20-$25 this year.

3. It is essential that she decide to make all her semesters at college—even her

first—productive.

4. On rainy days, the few indoor areas on campus are teeming with students.

5. This early scene is vital to our future understanding of the competing

personalities in Gollum’s head.

6. Marcel’s Café fails to stand out in Seattle’s long lineup of French restaurants.

7. Many students, especially those grappling with “test anxiety,” attempt to

impress professors by bolstering their sentences with unnecessary words.

Leigh Moriarty Reader Response

One of the points from this week’s readings that resonated with me is the tremendous power of a singular word: confidence. Reading Eileen Pollack’s article, I was infuriated to watch how the lack of affirmation and entrenched biases amongst the male power brokers within the science fields hindered intelligent, incredibly talented young women. Eileen and other women she spoke with both expressed that had they had just one male professor express confidence in their potential to move forward in the field, they would have. Confidence—that intangible yet invaluable magic juice—has the power to propel women straight through the barriers currently limiting their progress. Yet while this key to success appears entirely internal—these woman had the intelligence, drive, and work ethic to succeed—confidence is built as much from the energy the external environment a woman finds herself in as it is from her internal disposition. In failing to believe in our women we are discouraging them from believing in themselves, and consequently denying our society from sharing in the spoils of the gifts they possess.
Yet after reading the remainder of the material and viewing Dr. Mahzarin’s talk, I was forced to consider the reality that women, too, can also play a role in enforcing the biases against them. Sheryl Sandberg captured this reality in her Ted Talk “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders.” Often, as Sandberg expressed, women “leave before they leave.” If women are currently not receiving reinforcement from outsiders, then perhaps they must assume responsibility for creating the change they wish to see. If we wait for someone else to tell us he or she thinks we can do it, we are relinquishing our decision to succeed to the hands of another. There must first be a few brave women to believe they are enough—by themselves–before young girls can have the vital examples to turn to when they craft their visions and goals for their own future selves. Without the first snowflake, the snowball can never start its roll, producing a product far larger than its own meager being.

Moriarty Student Leader Profile

For my profile of a student leader, I will be interviewing Ivanna Martinez. Ivanna is president of Wake Forest’s own student-run fashion and lifestyle blog–WFU Style– and has been an elemental force in building the blog’s personality and following.

Leigh Moriarty, NYTimes Profile: Rawda al-Mazloum

Rawda al-Mazloum is a divorced Syrian refugee and mother of five daughters who has become a leading volunteer within the Bar Elias community center in Lebanon (the country she fled to), where she advocates for the empowerment and protection of female refugees.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/nyregion/a-displaced-syrian-woman-realizes-a-dream-by-aiding-refugees.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FWomen%20and%20Girls&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=18&pgtype=collection