Durango Main Mall’s new business Mind Body Soleil hopes to create a strong wellness community through yoga, massage and other fitness activities.
“My goal is to create a community space where people can come and tell us what issues they’re having, and we can try to find the right fit for helping that person,” said Mind Body Soleil owner Marie Soleil.
In her effort to create a new kind of space in Durango, Soleil hopes to hire other wellness teachers and practitioners and also invite others in the community from that field to share techniques and other insight.
“The best way to learn is to collaborate; I can’t learn alone. So I want to have a community. I want to have a meetup with massage therapists so we can share and learn with each other,” she said.
Soleil said she titled the yoga class Yogi or Not because it takes a yoga-style approach with stretching, but can often incorporate other types of fitness.
“Yoga is just another tool in the toolbox,” Soleil said. “When I teach a class it could be a fusion of anything from Kung Fu or cardio depending on what the flavor and the mood is. So you’re not just doing the same thing all the time.”
Soleil has worked as a massage therapist all over Europe and the United States, and practices a style of Chinese massage known as Tui Na. However, she has been trained in a number of different massage styles, and has developed her own massage style.
“Tui Na is very rough, with a lot of jostling. I take Tui Na, which is a lot of technique, and I slow it down. I also incorporate a lot of trigger-point therapy,” she said. “I use a little bit of everything, and I’m constantly trying to learn more.”
Part of the reason Soleil said she hopes to build up a network with local wellness practitioners is because everyone has their own style, and some styles might work better than her own for certain people.
“I think every therapist has their own style,” Soleil said. “I want to be an inclusive place where we have a multitude of teachers, and we network and refer out. We don’t all do the same thing, we’re all different kinds of healers.”
One of the biggest things Soleil teaches her different wellness classes is posture, she said.
“I feel like posture is so huge,” she said. “I want to ‘un-contract’ Durango. I want people standing up straight and taking deeper breaths, because when you take a deeper breath you get more oxygen to your brain.”
Besides her own studio, Soleil said she holds high intensity training classes at the Durango Community Recreation Center and is working on offering paddleboard yoga in the pool at the rec center.
“The process for paddleboard yoga has been a little slow because aquatica at the rec center has been really busy,” she said. “In the summer, we’re going to do paddleboard yoga at Lake Nighthorse.”
njohnson@durangoherald.com
