When I'm practicing yoga by myself, I am able to let go of all of the other things that bother me on a daily basis that make me uncomfortable, stressed, worried.

It's just me and my body and my breath.

And it is this moment to pause and to reset and to stop focusing on outward things and to focus inward.

It's this just kind of intimate connection that is so valuable and so needed.

My name is Briana Kidd and I am the founder and owner of High Country Yoga here in Boone, North Carolina.

I was 23 when I opened High Country Yoga, and we've been operating for seven years now.

I wanted to be able to provide a space for people to come together and leave all of their drama at the door and just be able to come and breathe and move together.

And I knew that feeling at home and grounded in the mountains was really the reason that drew me to open a yoga studio here in Boone to kind of parallel that groundedness that the practice brings you, and also that this area brings to me.

I was a gymnast growing up.

Through gymnastics, I have really honed in this mind body connective concept that has stuck with me.

Yoga is this way of really you have the same focus that you would if you were doing your gymnastics routine.

But there is this sense of nurturement that the practice gives you, that gymnastics that was just more of like a competitive kind of fun activity.

But I think it really shaped me into being able to appreciate yoga for being a practice that just makes me feel more grounded.

I had always been teaching yoga through college, and so whenever I graduated I said, okay, I'm going to keep teaching yoga regardless where or how.

And so I feel that yoga is is definitely my calling.

I when I think about what else I would be doing other than teaching yoga, I have no idea.

I think a lot of people come to High Country Yoga for this feeling of stretching and moving the body once they take even just one class or 5 minutes of the class, they realize that it's a whole lot more than just putting our body into different poses.

The practice brings us all together in a sense of a nonverbal connective way, and so we we come together and the practice can kind of speak for itself.

And it's a shared vibration.

It's a shared energy.

I love practicing yoga outdoors because yoga brings you into this state of present moment awareness, and there's all sorts of little magic outside in nature that you can connect to.

Being outside makes me feel like me.

Those moments that I take just to be outside and to pause are probably the most special moments that really help me to feel healed and harmonized in who I am as a person.

I think High Country Yoga is really unique to the mountains here in Boone.

I don't think that I would want to take the studio and put it anywhere else other than where we are right now.

Boone has offered this sense of wholeness for me.

It's really carved out who I am.

In the past ten plus years that I've lived here, I feel like High Country Yoga is this way of me being able to give back to this community because it's done so much for me.

I feel like there's this exchange of energy that happens that it's not just me sharing practice with others, but others sharing inspiration with me.

And so I really love that connection.

Boonies is made possible by the Watauga Economic Development Commission.

Also by First Security Insurance.