When you walk into a Thrive Yoga Summit class or workshop, you’re in good company. The new Frisco wellness-based gathering space is busting down intimidation barriers and pulling together bodies of all shapes and ages.

Owner Mia Tarduno is building up studio cornerstones of community, awareness, compassion and kindness through niche classes like Yoga for Graceful Aging, The Stiff Men’s Club and Yoga for Mental Health. “It doesn’t matter what you look like, what clothes you wear or if you can touch your toes; anyone is welcome here,” Tarduno says.

The Frisco author, yoga instructor and life coach opened her locally owned Thrive Yoga outpost in July, marking the fourth Thrive brand studio in Colorado. The small, welcoming space focuses on vinyasa, slow flow and meditation, along with community-based events that include monthly women’s circles, sound journeys and yoga for menopause workshops.

Tarduno, 30, studied anthropology, dance and environmental studies at Hobart and William Smith College in upstate New York — a coursework trio she’s thankful to tap into on a daily basis. She began her yoga teacher training sophomore year of college and continued to become a 500-hour Registered Yoga Instructor, Certified Trauma Informed Yoga Teacher, Registered Restorative Yoga Instructor and Certified Professional Life Coach. Tarduno specializes in yoga for women’s health and cyclical living in her business, Move Create Radiate. Her classes and offerings blend the tools of yoga, ancient wisdom, breathwork, rituals, somatic movement and exploring vulnerable moments to help heal and nourish.

After landing in Summit County by way of Boulder and teaching yoga at the Silverthorne Recreation Center for five years, Tarduno decided to take 2019 to travel and further her studies. A stop in Bali and workshops surrounding trauma informed yoga resonated deeply.

“Trauma is anything that overwhelms the body’s ability to process a situation,” she explains. “This can be extreme stress or a traumatic experience, and when that happens, our brains disconnect. Trauma informed yoga reconnects the areas of the body that are severed during traumatic experiences.”

Returning from her travels in March 2020, Tarduno made a home in Frisco and taught private yoga sessions during the pandemic. In April 2021, she was teaching a women’s health yoga class at a Thrive location and noticed there was a Summit County location opening soon. She reached out to the brand owner and 35 days later, opened her own Thrive studio walking distance from her house, just off Main Street in Frisco.

Tarduno’s mission at Thrive is to create gathering spaces for others to share knowledge, express themselves and feel supported. Her yoga classes aim to reconnect people with their natural states of being to restore balance in their health, lifestyle, work and relationships.

“It was really important to me to welcome in people who haven’t felt welcomed in other wellness spaces before,” she says.

While hand-selecting Thrive instructors, Tarduno will ask them to share a hardship that they’ve overcome, seeking out a certain level of vulnerability and willingness to open up about their personal journeys.

“They understand that yoga has this deeper impact on their growth and lives and processing the things they’ve been through,” she says. “That it’s more than just moving their bodies and feeling good.” Look for Thrive Summit’s calendar to expand to offer book clubs, songwriters circles and other intimate gatherings centered around community and internal growth. 

101 3rd Ave., Unit C, Frisco, CO

970.455.8786

thriveyogasummit.com

Photos by Olivia Reed.