Balance Yoga Therapy, a business that combines the physical and mental effects of yoga with emotional well-being through counseling, is moving into a larger space in downtown Plymouth to keep up with a growing number of clients and services.
Owner Patricia Kozlowski, a licensed professional counselor and certified yoga therapist, is a believer in the positive effects of yoga and physical fitness on relationships and mental health. She designed her business around that connection.
After 20-plus years as a counselor and six years as a yoga therapist at various studios and fitness facilities and for youth hockey teams and health system employees, she has also seen how yoga therapy can end chronic pain. It was yoga that finally cured her severe back pain following a car accident. Through yoga she began to see the parallels between yoga and physical and mental health.
"I started realizing that the things I had learned in medical school I was learning in yoga," she says.
After several years of counseling and teaching yoga around Southeast Michigan, she decided to open her own studio and counseling center in February 2012. She still counsels at a separate center in Northville, but was not able to incorporate yoga therapy so she decided to open Balance Yoga Therapy in February 2012.
In just over two years she outgrew the 12-mat, 500-square-foot space in downtown Plymouth. On Aug. 1 she moves into a much larger spot with room for 60 yoga mats, a separate pilates studio, and counseling rooms.
The interior will be calming, painted in colors of the sea, decorated with Spanish tile and bamboo and come with "revolutionary, state of the art flooring that you can't find within a five-state area from here," Kozlowski says.
The new, larger studio opens at 589 South Main Street a few few blocks from the original location at 292 South Main. Kozlowski will celebrate the opening with a day of free yoga on Aug. 10. Go to
Balance Therapy Yoga to register.
The success of her practice, she says, is "the authenticity of the message I send to people. I genuinely live what I speak…It's absolutely addictive…never yelling..always encouraging, loving them through the process…very physically demanding…And it's so rewarding to work with a family with a child who no longer wants to commit suicide or to get a person through anxiety that's keeping them in bed all day and missing life. I feel so fortunate to meet and work with so many amazing people, and even though the days are long it never feels like work."
Writer: Kim North Shine
Source: Patricia Kozlowski, owner, Balance Yoga Therapy
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