BRISTOL — Phoenix Rising, the yoga-therapy training program on Mountain Street in Bristol, is planning to stay in town through the year’s end and possibly beyond. The business had announced plans last winter to fly the coop and move its location to Burlington.
But after a series of hoops and hurdles arose while planning the move, co-directors Kate Bentley and Jen Munyer decided to stay in Bristol for the time being — and they don’t sound the least bit disappointed about it.
“The Bristol community has been a big part of (Phoenix Rising),” Bentley said. “It’s an amazing town.”
Phoenix Rising specializes in training practitioners in its unique style of yoga — which takes a holistic approach to healing by considering physical, mental and emotional stresses to be linked — in intensive seminars that sometimes require students to be present at their local studio for trainings, which attracts visitors to Bristol from across the country.
The move to Burlington, according Bentley, was intended to give the organization space to hold individual sessions and group yoga classes at the same time as trainings for future practitioners. The space on Mountain Street has only one room, and the co-directors thought that Burlington may have offered a bigger market, Bentley said.
“We initially planned to move to Burlington to build and add to what we do,” Bentley said. “The current program is very focused on teacher trainings.”
But the ample challenges that surfaced while trying to find a new space and move the program to Burlington made Bentley and Munyer look twice at what they had.
“A big part of what we teach at Phoenix Rising is not to have an agenda, not to do something because it’s planned and one has to,” Bentley pointed out. “It made us think we were experiencing that lesson on a different level…We’re taking the opportunity to really listen”
Bentley says that “all options are on the table” moving forward, including staying in Bristol permanently. The news was met with enthusiastic response from Bristol residents, some of whom applauded the program for bringing customers to area businesses.
“We’ve got an amazing thing going here,” Bentley said.