Saturday, The Folded Leaf celebrates the opening of its new location with an open house.
The yoga studio, now located at 1020 Bridge Road, will offer some free classes at noon, 2 and 3:30 p.m., with a reception featuring live music and refreshments around 5 p.m.
In some ways, it's a rebirth for the popular studio, though a troubled one.
Back in January, the Bridge Road business signed a lease for a new location just across the road from where it had been the last nine years.
"We'd always been successful," The Folded Leaf owner April Weston Woody said. "It's just that after nine years, people had no idea we were there."
This included people who lived in South Hills and shopped at the Bridge Road Shops.
The entrance to The Folded Leaf was located in the back. Yoga practitioners could try their luck at getting one of the handful of spaces there, or they had to park out front, climb the stairs and walk around to get to the entrance.
"We just weren't very visible," Woody said.
The new place is on the ground level, has more visibility and has better parking. It also offers some new opportunities - like the chance to expand on retail offerings - and maybe some new kinds of yoga to offer, like the very hot aerial yoga.
"Aerial yoga is great," Woody said. "It allows you to access poses in a different way and gravity can assist you."
The Folded Leaf has a Bodhi Suspension System, which Woody said has advantages over some other aerial yoga systems.
"There are just some things you can do on a Bodhi Suspension System you can't do with a TRX Machine," she said.
With better accessibility, Woody also said she thought they could offer yoga to people who might be intimidated by stretching on a mat on the floor.
"Like chair yoga," the yoga instructor said. "It really caters to people who have trouble getting down and back up off the floor. You receive all the same benefits of a yoga practice, even if you have limited mobility."
It's a good type of yoga for older practitioners or people recovering from injuries.
"Working on the floor is still an option," she said. "Maybe someone could do some things on the floor, but other things not."
Woody and her staff got the new building ready, hiring Angel Harless, a local artist, to paint a mural in the main studio.
A big open house was scheduled, but then Woody ran into trouble.
In 2013, Woody was diagnosed with breast cancer and spent two years going through treatment - surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
At the end of it, Woody said she looked into breast reconstruction, but said the kind of therapy she'd undergone didn't go well with implant replacement.
"The radiation fries the tissue and implants frequently fail," she said.
The other preferred method was using autologous tissue, usually muscle tissue taken from the back or abdomen, to replace the removed breast, Woody explained.
"But I make my living standing on my hands," the yoga instructor laughed. "I kind of need my back and abdominal muscles."
Another process involved using fat tissue and a kind of vascular surgery that's not available in West Virginia.
It took a while to get the paperwork through for her insurance to approve it, but it did and last year, Woody went through two treatments.
"The first surgery, I was in the hospital for five days and down for a month," she said.
The second procedure only required an overnight stay and just a few days of rest.
"I bounced back," she said.
But not really.
Woody overdid it, opened up the incision and had to start hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
"Cancer can suck it," she said.
The Folded Leaf's open house was pushed back to Saturday to let her recover. Now, Woody said she feels better, like she's finally ready to get past cancer and her studio is ready to start a new season.
Along with the new classes, which include yogalates (a mix of yoga and pilates), Kripalu yoga (described as "a yoga of self-acceptance and non-judgmental awareness") and yoga for kids and expectant mothers, the studio now offers spa treatments.
Woody said she planned to offer more community events, too, like spiritual movie nights and potluck get-togethers.
It made sense to her. Yoga is something you don't have to do alone.
"We're a big family," she said.
For information, visit TheFolded Leaf.com or call 304-344-9642.
Reach Bill Lynch at lynch@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5195 or follow @LostHwys on Twitter. Follow Bill's One Month At A Time progress on his blog at blogs.wvgazettemail.com/onemonth. He's also on Instagram at instagram.com/billiscap.