New to town in Grand Junction, Colorado, emotionally raw and recovering from a failed 20-year marriage, I searched online for a yoga studio. Yoga has often served as my therapy, a vessel to excrete my pain  through my sweat. I found Half Moon Yoga, read founder Linda Jordan’s bio and signed up for a class.

Photos courtesy of Half Moon Yoga.

Assuming I’d be in and out of there, selfishly using the space for unconnected personal healing, I wasn’t prepared for the experience which, well, floored me. Owner, 40-plus year practitioner of yoga and 60-plus year practitioner of life, with a petite frame juxtaposed by a gargantuan aura, Jordan walked into the studio in an over-sized tee-shirt, with an over-sized personality, cursing and unabashedly setting a tone of both strength and vulnerability. She was nurturing, wise, self-aware, confident and bold. And she kicked our asses. The class was one hour of intense poses captioned by intense revelations summoned through her personal stories of fear, struggle, rebirth and rebuilding. During savasana, the final resting pose, where I would typically regain my breath and relax, I cried. Without the effort of facial contortions, full-sized tears filled my closed eyes, seeped out from the corners and streamed down my cheeks like ice melt. Her words and practice dislodged the trauma which I had stuffed away and tried to ignore.

That was her intention. She is no stranger to journeys which are fraught with seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. Her life has been molded by the euphoric ups of love, independence, trust and motherhood, shadowed by the gut-wrenching downs of abuse, rejection, betrayal and isolation. She’s teetered on both ends of success and failure — from living in a tent to a multi-million-dollar home; hitchhiking solo across the country to being a revered community business owner; leading others to heal in her studio to discovering a life-affirming path of her own healing in jail. She recognized the power of facing the bad with the good and allowing expression of heart, mind and body to coexist, whether in concert or in angst.

Jordan is uncompromising in her quest to ensure patrons sincerely and intentionally feel, inside and out, with ownership and understanding. “We’re given the wrong brochure to life,” she says. “We aren’t taught how to feel, how to discover our intuition.” She describes yoga as her toolbox, equipped with the practice of mindfulness aimed to “shake up trapped trauma” and allow “the dark shadows of who we are” to surface, where recognition leads to healing.

Her passion to unearth and preserve self-reflection, awareness and confidence has led her toward a new focus — teaching the practice to teens, at an age when they are innately closed off and green to contemplative expression. Raising her son, now 23, she discovered the benefit of what she describes as the “in living act” of encouraging him to connect with and share his feelings, allowing her to acutely respond to his needs. It seems simple enough and yet many of us grow to be twice his age before comprehending how damaging the reluctance to face trauma can be, as well as understanding how restorative introspective expression is.

Through her nonprofit, Teens in Training School (TITS), Jordan aspires to encourage teens who are searching for purpose, to find it within themselves through the stillness and clarity of meditation. For those lacking a sense of belonging, to find peer connections within their yoga community, rather than through the ever-growing and increasingly normalized coping mechanisms of media devices.

Jordan emphasizes the mission of TITS is to provide teens, especially those who suffer with depression, anxiety or isolation, with skills to “create healthy habits and mental resilience,” and “a pathway to connection.” A safe environment where students feel and connect with community, enabling them to recognize and receive unconditional love while inhabiting the physical, mental and spiritual practices of the 200-hour yoga teacher training (200YTT). The program was founded in partnership with Olivia Wight, an author, visual artist, and social and emotional intelligence coach whose work is reflective of her own struggles which now fuel her dedication to empower others.

Mentored and taught by local and internationally recognized yoga teachers such as Zeeky Vincent, national director for TruFusion, Michaela Wacker, a local community outreach coordinator, and Kristina Downing, an intervention specialist
at Mesa County Valley School District 51, the program will be an immersive experience to cultivate the self-confidence and physical ability required to achieve teacher training certification and develop leadership skills, enabling the students to teach the practice to their peers.

I connected with Jordan in that first class because I felt her words reverberate in my movements, creating a reciprocal empathy I hadn’t experienced since the onset of my traumatic event. She has a gift, a power to humbly accept you while inspiring you to accept yourself. She is passing that gift on by sharing her practice with our youth, where she’ll “provide an environment for growth, empowering the future leaders of our community and the world,” as she puts it, “to enhance their capacity for understanding, connection and love.”

In that endeavor, Jordan has always provided free classes to teens in Colorado’s Grand Valley and is now actively promoting TITS, working to raise $30,000 to cover costs for certifications, supplies and stipends.

+

Half Moon Yoga
2493 Highway 6 and 50, Unit 3
Grand Junction, CO
halfmoonyogagj.com

Roschelle Bulda
Writer
@robulda | flourishing-design.com

Originally published in Winter/Spring 2024-25  issue of Well.