How Mel Champion is building community at Life Yoga Goulburn

Raised Christian, Mel married her childhood sweetheart at 19 and had her first son at 23.

By age 25, Mel and her husband realised they no longer aligned with what they had been taught and made the difficult decision to leave the religious community they had grown up in.

ALSO READ: Signature Training opens Goulburn branch

"We lost our whole community of people that we spent time with, friends and family even," Mel said.

"My circle went from all of these people to a very small circle."

At the same time, Mel had been teaching yoga casually using school halls and club rooms.

"I started teaching because I was at home with a baby and a toddler and I wanted a job," she said.

"I got to be an adult and talk to other adults, I got to be me as opposed to just being 'Mum'.

"It was a sensible decision but it's turned into something so much bigger than what I thought it would be."

Mourning the loss of the church community, Mel founded a new community through yoga.

"In that transition period when we left I thought, 'how do I assimilate all this stuff I've learned with yoga about acceptance and love with the rules and fear and obligation that came with what I was taught'," she said.

Mel decided she wanted to bring together a group of people who genuinely cared about each other in a space free of judgement.

ALSO READ: Golfers take to course for hit and giggle and charitable causes

Not one to force things, she happened upon the opportunity to have her own studio space in the same way she originally "fell" into yoga teaching.

Mel took a group of yoga students to Bali on a yoga retreat which happened to include the owner of Gehl Garden Centre, Sally Nelson. During the retreat, they discovered aerial yoga.

"We wanted to bring it back to Goulburn," Mel said.

Upon their return, Sally and her husband Shane quickly went about renovating the garden centre's back shed into what is now the Life Yoga Goulburn studio.

Offering a combination of flow, aerial and meditation classes, Mel's main aim is to make the studio "feel like home".

However, it hasn't been a smooth ride. After the studio's official opening in October 2019, five months later Mel was forced to pause teaching as the country was thrust into the first wave of lockdowns.

"We were closed for probably 10 months out of the first two years we were open," she said.

"But the hardest part was not having community and not seeing people.

"There was a core group of students who stuck around and it was nice to come back to familiar faces when we reopened."

ALSO READ: Spoilt for choice: Feast of entertainment draws big crowd to park

Next year Mel plans to bring something new to the community and her students, offering local Yoga Teacher Training.

Through the training, Mel hopes to provide her students with the chance to learn a framework through which they can not only teach yoga but also "do life better".

"Having other teachers at the studio also gives me the space to sit back and think bigger," she said.

Mel said her yoga community had changed as she had developed herself and honed in on exactly what she wanted the studio to look like.

"People aren't just coming to do some exercise, they're coming to a place where people care about them and people accept them and it doesn't matter what size you are or what your background is," she said.

"Community is just so important, people spending time with other people, and if you don't have church or you don't have sport, where do you go?"

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content:

Make sure you are signed up for our breaking news and regular newsletters