HOULTON, Maine — An Aroostook County woman started teaching yoga in a small studio in Houlton’s Emporium Building more than two decades ago. Now, seven moves and hundreds of students later, she will celebrate her 25th year in April.
Linda Rowe came to Houlton in 2000 from her grandmother’s home in Wells to teach yoga, and was uncertain how long it was going to last.
When she first started her Houlton business, yoga was still new to northern Maine. Her business grew mostly through word-of-mouth advertising and posters with a row of tear-off phone numbers on the bottom.
Her initial small downtown space was the first full-time yoga studio in the area. And with her belief in the healing power of yoga and her desire to share it with others, Rowe brought the practice of yoga in the County into the forefront.
“I was just going to serve the community through the lens of yoga and ayurveda,” she said. “There’s been enough people to support it and value it and that blows me away. It feels very good that I followed my heart to Houlton for the right reasons. And it’s where I still need to be.”
Through her business lindāyurveda, Rowe offers yoga, Thai yoga and Ayurveda healing in her 16 Market Square space, the Santosha Yoga Room. From one decade to the next, the numbers continued to grow. Now, more than 600 people have come to her classes and several area yoga instructors began their training with her, she said.
When she first started, yoga was on the fringes with many people believing it was a religion, she said. Although yoga classes were offered quietly in small pockets of The County including Fort Fairfield and Presque Isle, as well as summer retreats with Donna Amrita Davidge at Sewall House in Island Falls, there were no full-time instructors. She was the area’s first.
But keeping a small rural business afloat in a rural town, especially one that offers something relatively new to the community, can sometimes be a tough go. And there were plenty of times over the past 25 years that Rowe felt she was just going to shut the doors, she said.
Still, she stuck to it, waiting out slow spells until business picked back up again.
“It was a bit fearless. I just trusted my heart and it came through for me in many ways,” she said. “My business model was to keep it as small as possible. I’ve been able to make it work because it’s been only me doing my thing.”
Twice Rowe and a handful of other healing arts practitioners tried creating a healing arts center that included massage therapists, a tai chi instructor and yoga.
“We got together and pooled our money to create a space where we had these multiple things going on,” Rowe said. “It was hard, much harder to maintain and keep everybody going. I went back to just being on my own.”
Rowe’s connection to yoga came about quite by accident. She initially believed she wanted to be a massage therapist.
She was working at a university in Connecticut when she got a job at a New York State University and moved to New Paltz, New York. She had planned to study massage therapy while there.
“I could have sworn there was a massage therapy school there but there wasn’t,” she said. She began taking yoga classes and was hooked from the start.
Her personal yoga practice came out of Kripalu and Iyengar teachings and initially she taught a blend of the two. But in the last 15 years it has become “Linda yoga” as she made it her own, she said.
In addition to her six-day-a-week online and in-person classes, she has taught at other locations such as Cary Medical Center in Caribou, The Quest Center (a martial arts studio in Presque Isle.), several area schools, the Orient town office and at Loring Job Corps.
Additionally, Rowe is a Level II Reiki practitioner, a Thai Yoga bodyworker and is in her final semester of study at a Boston-based Ayurvedic doctor program.
Ayurveda is a personalized approach to prevention. It focuses on guiding people to a deeper level of self-awareness and pays particular attention to digestion and daily and seasonal routines, Rowe said.
The Ayurveda aspect of her business is slow in coming, because it means people have to change things about how they think and eat, she said, adding that it has a powerful healing ability.
She offers tools to help manage stress and improve the body that make everyday movements feel easier. Ayurveda and yoga together are a powerhouse, she said.
“You are more aware of what you are feeling, digestion can be impacted, anxiety is impacted, blood pressure, heart rate,” she said. “The body and the mind will respond.”
Rowe offers private work at $55 an hour, a subscription at $55 a month for unlimited access to classes and recordings, a class card that is $72 for eight classes and is good for three months or individual classes at $15 a class.
Rowe believes people come back because it works for them.
“The proof is in the practice,” Rowe said. “I create the space and they do the work themselves. I guide them and make sure they are going to be safe. It’s their time for themselves and I think it is a big part of my longevity here.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the Santosha Yoga Room.
