Gretchen Mills, the owner of High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda, breathes through Dhanurasana — commonly known as the bow pose — in the studio in Lake Placid on Tuesday, April 25. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

LAKE PLACID — Gretchen Mills took a deep breath on Tuesday, April 25 in her new yoga studio on Main Street, High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda, followed by a long exhale. She hopes to breathe new life into an old yoga business by breaking down common misconceptions that meditation, yoga and Ayurveda are religious, difficult or require a special outfit. Healing the mind and body with these practices, she said, can be as easy as inhaling and exhaling.

“As long as you have a mind and a body, you are going to benefit from meditation,” Mills said.

Tucked into a second-floor suite in the High Peaks Cyclery building, High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda — or HPYA — was previously known as High Peaks Yoga Tree, which was founded and owned by local yoga instructor Robin Shaver. But like many other local businesses, the Yoga Tree experienced shutdowns and business losses after the coronavirus pandemic swept through Lake Placid in March 2020.

Though Shaver offered some Zoom practices and even filmed a yoga video for YouTube, the studio itself closed and opened several times throughout the pandemic, according to HPYA instructor Joan Kelleher. Meanwhile, Mills, a yoga instructor and Ayurveda practitioner who moved from Key West, Florida, to Lake Placid during the pandemic, was looking for a yoga studio to settle into.

Mills, 42, moved back to her family farm in West Chazy, formerly known as the Black Sheep Farm and Gardens, after the pandemic hit. She’d owned a yoga studio in Key West for about 11 years, and though she continued teaching yoga over Zoom during the pandemic, she wanted to find a local yoga studio to get involved with. After finding a home of her own in Lake Placid, she found another spiritual home in the High Peaks Yoga Tree. She inquired about teaching classes at the Yoga Tree in the fall of 2021 and started there once a week. Then, this past summer, Mills said Shaver wanted to relinquish ownership of her business to Mills.

The entrance to the High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda studio can be accessed from the side of the High Peaks Cyclery building on Main Street, Lake Placid. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

At first, Mills said no. But a week later, Shaver said the studio would likely close if Mills didn’t take the reins. That’s when Mills began to think of the studio as a community asset rather than a business she was taking over. She didn’t want locals to lose access to the benefits of yoga and the studio, and she accepted Shaver’s offer. Now, she’s looking to rebuild the business with more students and offerings.

Because she has more than a decade of experience in owning a yoga studio — where she held yoga classes, workshops and instructional courses, much like she does now at HYPA — Mills said making the transition to owning HPYA was a smooth one.

“It’s felt like second nature to come into this business,” she said.

She said it’s easy to promote her studio because she’s passionate about her work and what it does for her customers. However, she said it often feels like there’s not enough of her to go around; on top of teaching and building her curricula, Mills also does her own marketing and other business-focused tasks. Right now, she has just two other instructors at the studio — Sarah Chien and Kelleher. Ideally, Mills said she’ll be able to build her student base and, in turn, build her staff team at HPYA so she could focus on curriculum-building and teaching. But first, the relatively new Lake Placid resident wants to introduce herself and her studio’s new offerings, especially Ayurveda, to the community.

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Sarah Chien, an instructor at High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda, sings in Sanskrit while playing the harmonium at the yoga studio in Lake Placid on Tuesday, April 25. Chien teaches restorative and gentle yoga practices at the studio, as well as Kirtan classes — she leads call-and-response-style chanting and singing while playing the harmonium or guitar. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

Ayurved-

Over the last 10 months, Mills has folded her skills as an Ayurvedic practitioner into the studio’s preexisting yoga focus. While yoga places emphasis on the mind-body connection, observing how the brain responds to physical poses, Ayurveda looks at how a person’s diet and lifestyle supports this connection.

In the context of Ayurveda, the word “diet” isn’t used in a typical sense — the traditional medicinal practice, which originated in India thousands of years ago, isn’t necessarily about losing weight. She said the practice examines how a person’s lifestyle and the food they eat support, or don’t support, their well-being. Then, natural medicines, like herbs, along with physical practices are often used to improve whatever ailments or tendencies make up someone’s constitution — herbal teas could be used to treat anxiety, and morning practices like tongue-scraping and mouth cleansing can be used to complement the body’s natural detoxification process over the previous night.

A big part of Ayurveda is keeping the body in tune with the natural cycles of the seasons, according to Mills, who brings this focus to HPYA, helping students shift from winter to spring, from fall to winter. Along with meditation and yoga classes, Mills is offering Ayurvedic consultations, and she’s starting an Ayurvedic spring community cleanse at HPYA on May 2. She also just finished leading a 200-hour yoga teacher training. But even though she’s in her 25th year of being a yoga teacher and is set to become an Ayurvedic doctor by the end of the year, Mills and Chien agreed that the yogic learning and healing process never ends.

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At left, Sarah Chien — an instructor at the High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda studio in Lake Placid — leads a call-and-response Sanskrit song on the harmonium, which studio Owner Gretchen Mills echoes in the studio on Tuesday, April 25. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

Taking a breath

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Mills first practiced yoga as a college volleyball player per a coach’s recommendation. As an athlete used to fast-paced action, she thought yoga was boring at first — she’d fall asleep in Savasana, or corpse pose, which instructs students to lay flat on their backs.

“Which is probably a sign that I was relaxed,” Mills laughed.

But when she found vinyasa yoga, a more physical type of yoga, she hit her stride. Then, Mills realized that yoga and meditation were more than a hobby for her — they were a healing practice.

Gretchen Mills, the owner of High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda, meditates while in the Viparita Karani yoga pose — commonly known as the legs-up-the-wall pose — in the studio in Lake Placid on Tuesday, April 25. (News photo — Lauren Yates)

Mills has Supraventricular tachycardia, or SVT, a heart condition that can cause someone to experience periods of abnormally fast heart rates. In her previous 10-year career as a behavioral science biologist, she’d often travel to remote places. When SVT episodes would strike, sometimes spiking her heart rate to 200 beats per minute, she felt like she was going to die alone in the rainforest. Doctors couldn’t do much for her. But with some deep breaths and yoga practices, Mills felt more at ease, and she grew to appreciate the meditative aspect of yoga. When her fellow biologists started asking if they could practice yoga alongside her, Mills realized she had a passion for teaching and sharing her yoga practice with others.

Since then, Mills has traveled twice to study yoga and Ayurveda in India, meditating for 12 hours straight under the sacred Bodhgaya Bodhi Tree — the tree under which Buddha, an ancient spiritual teacher, is said to have achieved enlightenment. Now, Mills says yoga, meditation and Ayurveda continue to be an integral part of her life that help to keep her SVT in check.

“I feel like it’s foundational to every aspect of my health,” she said.

She still wants to share the healing effects of these practices with others, especially those who might have medical conditions or trauma.

Life is busy and hard in today’s world, even in Lake Placid, and all that activity in the brain can have negative health effects, according to Mills. Though people today aren’t often used to having a quiet mind, Mills said breathing and yoga practices can bring much-needed peace to stressed-out minds and bodies. She wants people to know that being able to touch your toes isn’t a prerequisite to practicing yoga, and meditation can be as easy as taking some intentional breaths.

Many of Mills’ classes at HPYA feature gentle and beginners’ yoga practices, and she’s open to holding specialized classes and workshops if someone has a specific ailment or barrier to physical practice. .

To show the community what the new High Peaks Yoga and Ayurveda has to offer, Mills is holding a free day of yoga for the community on Sunday, April 30 with seven classes taking place between 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. The day will highlight HYPA’s offerings, starting with a community yoga class and followed by Mandala vinyasa, intro to breathing, intro to Ayurveda, intro to meditation, restorative and live music, and Kirtan — a call-and-response-style chanting and singing practice set to guitar or the harmonium, an organ-like keyboard instrument. For more information, visit highpeaksyogatree.com.