Finding Balance

HOW YOGA HELPED DONNA PONDER ACHIEVE HAPPINESS, SUCCESS AND A LITTLE BIT OF CALM IN A DEMANDING WORLD

ARTICLE BY MICHAEL DEVAULT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY KELLY MOORE CLARK

Donna Ponder is a busy woman. In addition to being a mom of three, she’s also an entrepreneur, the owner of two yoga studios in Monroe and Ruston. It’s a delicate balance, keeping all the balls in the air, but Donna makes it seem almost effortless.

Almost.

“I like getting up in the morning,” she says. She admits it’s a struggle to keep a business open and running, but she loves what she does. Her students make the effort worth it. “I enjoy the people.”
Donna opened her first yoga studio in 2012. But manifested the studio, as she calls it, five years earlier in 2007.

“That’s when I started writing and thinking about it,” she says. It was a long journey from her roots in north central Louisiana, but it’s a journey that helped shape her into the entrepreneur she would eventually become. Owning yoga studios in Monroe and Ruston is a far cry from her days at Campti High School in Campti, Louisiana. Then again, entrepreneurship kind of runs in her family. And that’s the beginning of her story.

Donna’s grandmother owned a small grocery store in their community. Her parents and other family members helped run the business. It was hard, rewarding work in a community that valued a good day’s work and quality merchandise.

“They’d cut meats and sell canned goods and produce,” Donna says of the store, which was situated on College Avenue, across from Northwestern State University. “People had accounts, and they’d come in, buy what they needed, and then pay their tabs at the end of the month.”

By the time Donna was five, her parents had opened a second business, this one catering to people in the arts and education. They sold high-end art supplies to the thriving community of artists in Natchitoches. They also provided teaching aids, school supplies, cards and gifts.

“They catered a lot to the university and to area schools,” Donna recalls. Between the grocery store and her parents’ second business, she spent a lot of time in retail. “I just grew up in that environment.”

Donna worked for the family business and learned the importance of paying attention to the business. She graduated from Campti in 1987, and by the time college rolled around, she had caught the retail bug. She majored in Fashion Merchandising with minor in Business Marketing, at Northwestern State University, in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

“When I was young, I enjoyed clothing,” she recalls. “Clothing, to me, is a way to express yourself. You can be different every time you walk out of your room.”

With the study of fashion, she was able to pull together a lot of threads of interest. In addition to her retail experience and entrepreneurial spirit, Donna’s studies also enabled her to explore other passions, such as textiles.
“I also enjoyed sewing a lot,” Donna says. “Fabrics and textile arts interested me at the time.”

She graduated and headed off to an internship in Dallas, working in one of Dillard’s flagship stores at NorthPark Center, a high-end retail hub situated inside the Loop and at the heart of the posh, north Dallas community. A billion-dollar shopping mall, NorthPark Center is home to more than 200 shops and is one of the nation’s top-performing shopping spaces. It’s also where she began to realize that her future was not going to be in retail.

“The fast pace of retail was fun and exciting, but I realized the hours were not conducive to having a family.”

At the same time, she felt the tug of domestic life calling. She knew it was time to make a change and begin growing her family. Doing so would require a change, though what that change would be she wasn’t sure. But she knew she liked kids, so that seemed like a good fit.

“For a bit of time, I went back to school and started a graduate degree at Texas Woman’s University,” Donna says. “I studied early childhood development.”

During an internship, she realized that working with a small group of children is very different than working with a group of 25 children. “A teacher of small children must have the utmost love, patience and a high tolerance for chaos.” After an observation-based internship, she decided to change course.

“I got my feet wet fast, and I was able to decide very quickly it wasn’t the work for me,” she says. But staying at home still wasn’t an option for Donna, so she returned to where she was most comfortable. Donna accepted a position at Casual Corner.

“I worked there, in Dallas, at a high-volume mall and moved up with them quickly,” Donna says. “I was promoted and eventually got my own store.”

It seemed like retail would be where she made her career. But Fate intervened. Her husband accepted a job in New Orleans, and there wasn’t an equal opportunity to transfer into in the New Orleans market. If she decided to stay with Casual Corner, she’d have to take a tremendous pay cut.

So she struck out in search of a new position and was quickly snatched up by Gymboree, the children’s clothing store. Blending her retail experience and her love of children, Gymboree made a good home until she had her first son.

“While I was pregnant, I decided I was going to stay at home for the pregnancy,” she says. She never returned to Gymboree. Three months after her son was born, the family relocated to Ruston to be near his grandparents.

Two years later, a second son was born, and four years after that, her third son came into the world. Three boys in north Louisiana took a lot of energy and effort. At the same time, family life with small children can be stressful, even for the most seasoned career woman.

“Right after my youngest son was born, I took my first yoga class,” Donna says. “When I chose my first yoga class, it was really interesting how it made me feel. I can articulate it and explain why–now. But at the time? I just knew it made me feel really good.”

With life centered around her family, she knew she had not been tending to herself the way she needed to. She wasn’t centered, and like many moms, she felt herself lurching from activity to crisis to engagement over and over again.

“I knew I had to do something to get myself back in order, so I joined my local gym and started working out,” she says. “But I’m really not an athletic person. I was never into dance, sports or any of that.”

Yoga combined the physical effects of a good workout with an inward focus that she found fulfilling. She wanted more. So she began consuming everything she could find on the subject. Over the next few months, she read books, magazine articles, dove into the subject on the Web and attended workshops. At every opportunity, Donna sought to expand her horizons to learn more about the subject.
“My yoga practice woke me up,” she says. “It made me aware of the things I did for other people just to keep peace. It’s not that there’s anything bad in doing that, but you can end up compromising who you are. Practicing made me aware of that and made me have less fear of going after the kinds of things I wanted.”

One of the most important components of the transformation was the focus on breathing and meditation. Breathing is key, Donna points out, to finding your center. Now that it’s her job to help people discover their personal center on a yoga mat, she explains it much better than she could have when she was just starting out.

“In this inner war with the ego, it’s always, ‘Which one’s going to win?’” she says. “That’s your battle, not mine. But I’m going to be there to coach you through, reminding you about breathing calmly as we move through all this stuff.”
In 2007, Donna began her 200 Hour Registered Yoga Teacher Training with Baron Baptiste and completed this training in 2009. Donna has also trained in anatomy with Leslie Kaminoff; detox sequencing and community activism with Seane Corn; Advanced Teacher Training with Stacy Dockins; Spirituality with Philip Urso; Life Coaching with Deborah Williamson; etc.. Blue Sky Yoga/ Donna Ponder, is a registered Yoga School with the Yoga Alliance. Teacher trainings occur yearly at Blue Sky Yoga.

She opened the first Blue Sky Yoga Studio in 2012 in a small space tucked near the back of a retail strip on Tower Drive. Two years later, she opened her Ruston studio. Along the way, she’s added instructors and practices, expanding both the kinds of services they offer and the variety of classes students can take part in. She tries to offer something suitable for everyone, whether it’s a Hot Yoga class or chair yoga.

“If you’re not an athletic bird, a gym can be uncomfortable,” she says. “Maybe you don’t know how to use the machines or you’ve never really done that kind of thing before.”
Then there are the mirrors, the bright lights and the constant focus on everything you’re doing. All of that’s missing in Blue Sky Yoga.

“There are no mirrors in my space,” she says. “I find that there’s a freedom in telling people that the only thing that matters is that you control your breath during the class.”
Whether it’s moving between poses or holding a pose longer than you think might be comfortable, Donna emphasizes it’s all about air supply. Learning to breathe calmly can be one of the most challenging aspects of the practice.

“Most people in our culture can’t sit and meditate, nor do they practice it,” she says. “Living our lifestyle in our culture, it’s important to start with paying attention to breath, because that really anchors you to the present moment.”

After just a few weeks of practice, Donna says people begin to see repeated actions and how those actions can affect outcomes.

“You become aware of these patterns, and if you don’t like the outcomes of the things you’re doing over and over again, when you have a practice that allows you the time and space to focus, it allows you to observe how you react,” Donna says. “Just being in that pose a little longer gives you a different viewpoint and helps everything stop, so you can observe.”

In that observation lies the key to the practice, to finding center and ultimately to achieving the balance so many people seem to be searching for. That’s how it was with Donna.
“Today, I lead a love-based life, not a fear-based life,” she says.

That focus was challenged earlier this year when she decided to vacate her original studio in favor of a larger space. It was challenging, but she faced it with the courage and tenacity of someone equipped to take one step at a time.

The new space on Forsythe Avenue in Monroe was almost 3,600 feet, but it needed a lot of work. She learned to do as much as she could, from dealing with state inspectors and building permits to grouting floor tile, painting and running wires. “Anything I could do, I did,” she says.

Even this challenging experience proved to be rewarding. Now she has space for multiple classes simultaneously, and her practice has a better space with better energy and, most importantly, better visibility. The practice is growing, and it’s still true that there are no mirrors. After all, yoga is all about you.

“As humans, we look across the room and want to do what they’re doing,” she says. “But that’s not what yoga is about. You have to focus on you and what’s on your mat.”