Susan Smedley admits she was surprised when she first walked into a yoga studio nearly 15 years ago. The owner seemed like a normal person.
Smedley expected to be greeted by a woman who wore crystals around her neck, had the body of an elf and could tie herself into a bow fit for a Christmas present. She expected to hear New Age music, smell a weird perfume that claimed to be from some ancient, magic Peruvian tribe and see sweatshirts with “Namaste” stitched on the front.
Despite growing up in a family of nurses, Smedley was open to alternatives to Western medicine. Chinese medicine and acupuncture saved her life by helping her beat lung cancer at age 32, she says. In fact, she arrived at the yoga studio to ask for a donation for the lung cancer organization where she worked.
Yoga didn’t seem to be for her body type—she believed all instructors were skinny minnies. Yet Smedley connected with the owner, a former social worker like herself, and once she realized that a working, no-nonsense single mother of two such as herself could fit in, she joined the studio.
She tells this story on a couch in her own studio, Resilient Soul Yoga, tucked away in a back alley in downtown Loveland. Hot tea is always available, and you can buy herbal mocktails, homemade soap, a body ache bath blend, candles, sustainable apparel, chakra sprays and, of course, crystals. There are more plants than a Rainforest Cafe, and branches and raptor feathers forged from wild properties fill nooks and crannies. Smedley hired designers for her studio and gave them autonomy, save for one concept: She told them she wanted the space to feel like a hike in the woods.
The irony isn’t lost on her: She knows these are the kinds of things that may have made her skip past a studio before. But in her studio, a place she’s owned for nearly two years, everything is intentional, she says, not mystical. Her offerings are meant to heal trauma, and everyone, she believes, carries some form of it. She once carried so much of it herself that she thinks that’s why she developed lung cancer.
Despite her studio seeming fit for fairies, Smedley hopes that everyone seeks out her space as a chance to manage some of the stress caused by daily life. When she sees people cross her entryway, they begin to breathe deeper, she says.
“We can’t just talk our way out of trauma,” says Smedley, who does believe therapy should be part of the process and has used it herself. “It doesn’t help our body to be in fight or flight mode all the time. You need to move it out.”
Marissa Nelson, instructor at Resilient Soul Yoga. Photography by Boho West Photo.
Sickened by stress
Smedley remembers feeling shocked at the cancer diagnosis. She thought she had fixed herself.
She emerged from the University of Wisconsin with a degree and a determination to eradicate rape from the world. She was a survivor herself, and all she wanted to do was help women through it or, even better, prevent it. She worked for a rape crisis center near Chicago, and in three short years, her ambitions were choking her.
“The ones who burn out are the most passionate,” she says. “I was constantly triggered by my job. There was no escape.”
She left the crisis center and tried traveling the country educating college students about date rape. But after a couple of years, she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue, a precursor, she believes, to the cancer. She refused the antidepressants her doctors prescribed her and moved with her husband out to a farm to start a pet grooming business.
It was then that Smedley turned to Chinese medicine as well as a “sweet little life,” as she puts it today. She had a baby, rescued animals and took walks in the country. Then she began coughing up blood.
Cupping, an ancient practice that uses suction to draw blood to the area and promote healing, irritated a tiny tumor in her lungs. It actually saved her life: Doctors caught the cancer in the earliest stage, meaning it hadn’t spread, and they could remove all of it through surgery. They cut away two-thirds of a lung. The news was good, but it came with a caveat: Doctors told her the cancer would probably return one day.
That stuck with her, and years later, after finding solace in her first visit to the yoga studio, she knew yoga was an answer to managing her stress so that it wouldn’t manifest in another tumor.
Smedley decided to train to become a yoga teacher. Her two kids rolled their eyes at her, telling her she would be old and weird and wouldn’t fit in. By then, she understood the stereotypes of yoga studios because a lot of them were true. She just never experienced them that way.
Group yoga with Resilient Soul instructors. Photo by Kirsti Pope, VanGirl Productions.
“Yoga was originally for warrior training,” Smedley says. “It’s just so interesting that it’s become so commercialized in the West.”
She did her best to shatter the stereotypes that yoga was “woo-woo,” bringing yoga to first responders and others “who would never walk into a studio,” she says. After moving to Colorado with her son in 2020, she felt called to open a yoga studio of her own that welcomed people of all walks of life, including those new to the practice. She had spent much of her adult life in Wisconsin but fell in love with Northern Colorado and the mountains after driving through them on the way back from helping her daughter move to Utah.
“Life is stressful,” Smedley says just days after the election. “Dealing with stress is more needed than ever, and so is a place of community.”
She builds community through her classes, and the items she sells are from 20 vendors with small businesses or hobbies that bring in extra money. More than a dozen, she says, are local.
Nichole Hill, one of the 26 instructors at Resilient Soul Yoga, says Smedley’s motivations are different from those of other studios where she’s worked. Smedley, who also teaches, really does seem to want to help people overcome the same kind of stress that almost killed her, Hill says.
“The emphasis in some other places is selling memberships,” Hill says, “but here, everything is curated for the intention of keeping this a calming environment.”
Smedley is 59, and life still challenges her, as it always will. She’s been through two divorces and helped her kids through life crises, and she recently lost both of her parents. Running her business isn’t always easy either. But she’s grateful for the way yoga has helped her navigate all of it.
The cancer, she says with a deep breath, hasn’t returned.