MIDDLETOWN >> DanceYogi is housed in a neat red building with a small collection of businesses on 175 west of downtown Middletown. “I drove by this studio for years because I was kind of intimidated by the name dance yoga. I thought ‘I’m just not really a dancer.’ And then I came to an open house and realized that it just felt wonderful. I was recovering from a heart attack, and I’ve been in the studio for a year. Heather has made such a difference in my healing … it’s a beautiful space,“ Jud Hodges recounted.
At the age of 5, Heather Christensen was taking dance, gymnastics and tap. Ballet caught her imagination and she focused on that until a cruel ballet mistress with a stick drove her away from the form she loved. She made her way back to ballet at 10 and moved on to study with Irina Kosmovska in Los Angeles. That training took her to Juilliard and the School of American Ballet (SAB) in New York where she trained and danced from ages 16 to 19. Coming from a health-minded family, the lives of dancers in the city in the 1980s concerned her. She looked west and danced with Ballet West in Salt Lake City, where she was eventually introduced to modern dance. Modern worked better for her at 28, after years of the small-muscle rigor of ballet. She returned to New York to study Eric Hawkins technique, a form more natural for her body.
After three years dancing with On the Edge in Virginia her body felt better, but she was feeling unfulfilled. Looking for a spiritual path she explored a Sufi community in upstate New York before finding her way to the Esalen Institute in the 1990s. Gabrielle Roth who held that, “Energy moves in waves. Waves move in patterns. Patterns move in rhythms. A human being is just that, energy, waves, patterns rhythms. Nothing more, nothing less. A dance.” Christensen explored the 5Rhythms system with Roth. “And so then, I came back into my own authenticity as a dancer, more of a healing aspect of dance.”
After delving into yoga and working as movement-based healer at Esalen she founded Laughing Mama, the first yoga and dance studio in Marin. “There was a time where I wasn’t doing yoga, I was just doing authentic movement practices and I felt like… I needed some sort of structure, some form. That’s why I like yoga with authentic dance because there’s a structure, a form and it’s a balance.” After a period of explosive growth in Fairfax, scheduling classes and instructors fulltime, Christensen sought a less frenetic pace and explored possibilities in the familiar healing waters of Harbin Hot Springs.
DanceYogi, her studio in Middletown, is her offering to the local community. An earlier version, Move Like You, opened just before the Valley Fire. It became the Harbin Hub for people displaced in the aftermath of the devastation. After nine months, Christensen decided to close it. Not one to allow her dreams to go up in flames, she re-opened as DanceYogi in 2020. Christensen is now director of the yoga/dance program at Harbin Hot Springs where she is a certified Master of 5Rhythms, Yoga + CMT (Concentrative Movement Therapy).
Diana Smith says, “I was just feeling something missing in my life. Winter came and I couldn’t work in the yard, so I just stepped out of my comfort zone and came one day, and I love it. It’s like my happy place. Heather is a gift to the world and to us.”
“I’m 80 years old and I was getting stiff and I noticed that after a week or so of the practice coming three times a week, that my stiffness went away and I was a lot more mobile. It was like a rebirth for me,” says Joni Stoneberg. Prem Haskett adds, “I’ve been coming to yoga here for at least three years, and I’m just feeling, as I get older, I’m getting more flexible. And I attribute it to the yoga and to this incredible teacher.”
Ashley Conn-Skarry was trained as a ballet dancer and needed to decompress her spine from years in corporate America. “This studio has been a godsend because I’m not from the area, and I was looking for something to shake off my stress, heal my body, and ground myself in this new community and I found a healing safe space…”
DanceYogi offers mixed-level world-class yoga classes and Esalen Deep Tissue Massage at 21248 State Highway 175, Middletown. (415) 553-0924
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