From corporate America to her own yoga business

Laura Motel has traded in her desk chair for a yoga mat as she starts her second act in downtown Port Washington Monday with the opening of Port Washington Yoga, a yoga and meditation studio.

Motel, who last year retired from her corporate career, has practiced yoga for more than 20 years and is now bringing her love of the discipline to the city.

She’s opening with a full slate of 20 classes a week that encompass a variety of styles, from hatha and iyengar yoga to vinyasa and hot yoga, with Pilates coming in June. The classes will be taught by Motel and three other teachers.

Meditation and massage will also be offered at the studio, which is at 208 E. Pier St., above Pear and Simple.

  While financial stability, employee satisfaction, client satisfaction and quality are the general keys to creating a successful business — “You get those four things right, it works,” Motel said — she believes there is more to it for a yoga studio.

You have to create a community, be welcoming and, key to her, be someplace that’s fun, she said.

“I’m fun. I want to take that fun and infuse it into other people’s lives,” she said. “I want this to be a place where people are enjoying themselves. Everyone deserves to be happy.

“People sometimes get hung up on comparing what they can do to what others are doing. Everybody has limitations. You work around your limitations. This is yoga practice, not yoga perfect.”

That, she said, will help keep people coming back.

Yoga, once thought of as something exotic, has become more mainstream. While some people practice it to exercise their body, others look at it as more of a spiritual experience.

Motel said she started in the discipline while working in a corporate executive position at Computershare, a stock transfer company, when it opened offices in the U.S.

It was a stressful job that involved frequent travel and 60-plus hour work weeks.

“When you’re on a plane a couple times a week, your back starts hurting,” she said. “Your neck starts hurting. Your knees start hurting — you just start hurting.

“You ruminate. I realized I couldn’t shut my brain off at night.”

Her mother suggested yoga might help, so Motel tried it. It wasn’t easy, she said.

“I said, ‘I’m not getting this at all,’” Motel said. “I said, ‘I’m not good at this at all.’”

For someone who always strove for perfection, it was hard, she said, but then she had a breakthrough.

“I realized it’s about you being you,” she said. “It’s about how you can make yourself feel better. I started to make a little progress, and that little bit of progress put my in a position where I was calmer, I could shut my brain off at night.”

Those benefits make yoga ideal for anyone, she said.

“Why wouldn’t you want to do it?” she asked. “I don’t know one person who says, ‘I’ve got no back pain.’ This is a good, positive-spirited way to make the pain go away.”

When she retired last year, Motel said, “I had all these great plans. I was going to learn to cook — but it turns out I don’t enjoy cooking.”

She tried other things as well, but continued to do the one thing she truly enjoyed — yoga. And, as a resident of Port, she decided that opening a studio and trying to bring a little of the health benefits and joy she finds in yoga to people in the community was what she wanted to do.

“I thought, ‘I’ve started companies. Why not do this here and bring something positive to the place I love?’” she said. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be more,’ and this is my something more.”

She found the space for her studio and, with the help of her husband Tim, transformed it into a light, airy space ideal for yoga and meditation.

The studio, which has small side rooms for massage and meditation, originally was two rooms but the couple took down a false wall, removed cabinets and revamped the area, installing drywall, painting and adding lighting and speakers.

She has a second space that will become the reception and welcome area where clients can sign in, pick up needed supplies and hang out after classes.

If business picks up, she said, that room can be used as a secondary studio.

Port Washington Yoga is the only yoga studio within 15 miles, Motel said, noting the closest studios are in Cedarburg.

She plans to offer a wide mix of yoga styles, from hot yoga, which has a lot of flow movements done in a studio that’s between 90 degrees and 104 degrees, to vinyasa, or flow yoga that incorporates challenging flow movements, to hatha and iyengar yoga, in which students hold poses for several breaths.

She also will offer yoga 101 and tranquility yoga, a form of gentle yoga, as well as yin yoga, during which Motel said clients will hold a total of about four prop-supported poses during the hour-long class in order to relax and sink deep into the poses .

She hopes to expand her offerings in the future to include such things as paddleboard yoga and balance board yoga and perhaps hold retreats.

“I like to do fun and different things,” she said.

On May 8, she will hold an event for the new moon with yoga done to music on Pink Floyd’s album, “Dark Side of the Moon.” Motel’s studio will be open six days a week — it will be closed on Sundays — for people from 10-years-old accompanied by an adult through senior citizens.  People can attend individual classes and pay by the session or purchase a membership.

After the first six weeks, she plans to tweak the schedule to ensure she’s offering the right mix of classes for the area, Motel said.

  Motel will hold an open house at her studio from noon to 3 p.m. Sunday, April 21, complete with a raffle to benefit Tailwaggers 911.