Creating opportunity to bring awareness, mindfulness, awe and joy through breath and movement.

Yoga is a practice of mindfulness that only begins on the mat. It’s called a practice because it’s really just a place of study. We return again and again to the mat, to our breath, to our practice, gaining skill not only for the mat, but for capacity to love, to accept, to be strong and amazingly resilient off it too.

Each day, choose growth.

Dedicated to a lifelong health and fitness lifestyle, it was yoga I wanted to share the most and build community around. The power we hold inside our bodies, emotions, and minds are explored through yoga. In its practice, yoga is a mindful integration. We not only greatly benefit from breath and skillful movement in our physical bodies, but we heal. We experience love, permission for and acceptance in ourselves, which naturally and positively impacts our life, work and relationships.

Combining breath, movement and better alignment builds awareness in the body, strength, mobility, flexibility, and releases stress, tension and toxicity. We explore our own practice within our own unique skeleton and musculature, but we do it in community, sharing our energy and collective encouragement.

Life is not only about what we do, but how we do it and who we do it with that creates our expression and experience.

My name is Jill Milionis. I have lived, loved, and called Oregon home since 1979. Having always enjoyed a life-long love affair with physical fitness, much of it in a gym (gym-rat yep), I tossed around becoming a personal trainer for years.

Yoga however, hit different.

Yoga found me over 2 decades ago after the birth of my third child and the ensuing related back pain. Refusing a friend’s persistent invitation, aka constant nagging to attend a yoga class she believed would alleviate my discomfort and eventually growing weary; one fateful evening I lay on a borrowed yoga mat, in a makeshift yoga studio inside my gym, learning how to breathe. It was the beginning of a new awareness for me. Yoga began a transformation in the way I cared for my physical self and in the way I dialogued with myself, others and the world at large. My body found healing, my heart and mind found ease in effort. Thank God for relentless friends! I completed my 200 hour yoga teaching training, received certification and have been teaching since 2017. Years of dedication to both fitness, strength and yoga are my teaching foundations. While I particularly enjoy the physicality of yoga and exploring that on the mat, it’s the integration of mindful moving with breath and even in the stillness of sitting, where subtle finds notice and transformation begins.

Our yoga practice is a symbiotic union of awareness, breath and movement. It is both a self-study and discovery that only begins on the mat. Strength is more than we think, and we are far stronger than we know. We journey inward to outward and unwrap self-imposed limits. We are on purpose, made with love to live in fullness and yet can find ourselves living fragmented in our modern lives. Yoga kindly, gently, reminds us to wholeness.

My husband Todd and I, stay busy with our three awesome, active young adult children, one daughter-in-love, and our first grand baby, as well as our energetic Vizsla, Harper Ivy, who is my daily teacher and reminder to living mindful and present. I enjoy creating and eating healthy delicious, beautiful food, spending time with my family and friends, gardening, walking in the woods, traipsing through plant nurseries on rainy days, reading beautiful words, writing some, listening to all sorts of music and playing outside. I love dramatic rain storms, snowy days in winter and as much football as possible in the fall. I love the earth in the spring when life surges to new again and summertime for lingering long days and time in my garden or at the beach. I love dogs and people, laughing with both and as much as possible.

~ Jill Milionis