In a culture like ours – saturated with fads, trends and fitness influencers – wellness and exercise can feel intimidating. Especially for the anxious among us, booking a workout class brings a wave of vulnerability: Am I wearing the right clothes? Am I flexible or strong enough to keep up? Will the teacher call me out for not doing the exercises correctly, and I’ll look like an idiot in front of the rest of the class?
The River Yoga strives to exist outside of those pressures. Instead, they offer something much rarer: a sanctuary removed from judgments and hustle culture where individuals can focus on their inner world.
The River Yoga is a yoga studio and wellness community that infuses each class it offers with mindfulness. Since the very beginning, the team behind The River Yoga has focused on cultivating a place for Denver to combine approachable wellness and open community.
Its owner Danielle Barbeau has led The River Yoga team for 14 years this October. While Barbeau never set out to be a yoga instructor (or the owner of a yoga studio, for that matter), as she sees it, The River “chose her.”
After moving to Denver, Barbeau reached a point in her career trajectory where she was considering a change. When a connection started a yoga studio (then called Golden Triangle), Barbeau began teaching one day a week. From there, she slowly got more involved in the studio’s operations, and The River was born.
“It was this baby baby studio,” Barbeau shared. “And so I started raising my hand and saying, I can help with this.”
Fourteen years later, The River continues to hold community and self care at the center of its mission. And for Barbeau, that mission is especially important in a culture that seems to offer an endless list of habits to perfect and benchmarks to meet.
In her eyes, The River can offer a much-needed reprieve. Yoga at The River strips down wellness to its purest form with course offers that span from deep breathing to hot mat pilates. Whether the class is still or sweaty, each course is built on the basic principles of asana yoga practice. But that’s not to say “basic” means outdated: while The River keeps up the modern yoga industry, it’s also a solace free from trendy language and unrealistic wellness standards.
“There’s just so much information out there that says in order to be well – in order to be healthy – you need to optimize this and you have to do that,” Barbeau explained. “For me, yoga helps bring it back to very basic principles: get some rest. Be kind. Make sure you move. Take a deep breath. And there’s other things you can do, yes, but at the end of the day, if we take care of ourselves and we do a better job taking care of the people who are right next to us, we can make sure people feel like they matter before we start telling them to do more.”
In practice, the physical poses are a starting point for The River’s members. Rather than treating yoga as a skill to protect or an athletic accomplishment to conquer, classes at the studio are designed to fit into the larger yoga practice. For Barbeau, that means offering classes that leave those in attendance feeling more grounded, both in their body and as they move through the world around them.
“We offer things that are not going to stress people out by telling them they need to do things better, different,” Barbeau shared. “One of the things I love about yoga is that often the movement is the gateway, right? And then once we start to feel some things in our physical body, then we start to notice our breath. Once we notice our breaths, it starts to become this lifestyle where we have a little more awareness, a little more of a pause when we’re faced with a stimulus, or we’re faced with something challenging.”
That philosophy is woven into the fabric of The River: modernizing ancient yoga principles for approachable wellness that empowers members to show up as they are. In a culture that often turns wellness into a checklist of habits to perfect, Barbeau hopes the studio can offer a simpler, less intimidating place to begin.
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“I like to think of yoga as a set of guidelines for how to live life well. And when you really break it down, it’s: move your body. Make sure you’re breathing and know that you’re breathing. Work on your concentration, try to stay present, try to be here,” Barbeau shared. “They’re really simple tenets when you translate into a more modern way of understanding the lineage as it applies to us now.”
One of those simple tenets is learning to be a good steward to the people around you. As a result, the sense of ease that The River instructors infuse within their classes becomes the foundation for community. Each member, whether new or familiar, is greeted personally and welcomed into the space. During classes, attendees can participate to their comfort level, with instructors offering alternatives for differing body types and strength levels.
For Barbeau, when people feel seen, valued and comfortable, they’re able to be themselves and form real connections. It’s a vision that Barbeau has strived for since the beginning, and one that the team at The River won’t soon abandon.
“I just saw this community forming and an opportunity to create a space where – if you know the show Cheers – where you walk in and everybody knows your name,” said Barbeau. “That has always been what I was most interested in: how do we create these third spaces where people can be together and share ideas and shed their work hat or their home hat and just be themselves? That’s really the impetus for who The River was and who we continue to be now.”
Particularly now, where so many in Denver work remotely and so many conversations occur through screens, our culture facilitates a lonely paradox where interactions are easy to come by but sometimes shallow. With third spaces becoming rarer, The River offers a place to practice individual mindfulness surrounded by real people with a shared goal.
“The River is a place where you can step away from technology: you just walk into the room, someone says hello and they’re genuinely happy to see you,” said Barbeau. “Those faces just feel essential to who we are as humans. That’s at the core.”
Now, as The River celebrates 14 years of business, Barbeau and The River team are celebrating, fittingly, by reflecting on how they can continue to keep up with the needs of Denver’s yoga community and maintain an environment of comfort and mindfulness.
For now, that mission means ensuring every member of their community feels valued – from the instructors and members to the cleaning staff. It means fostering trust and confidence in the next generation of yoga instructors through their comprehensive teacher training and educational programs. And, of course, it means collaborating across Denver to, in Barbeau’s words, “do things that are really good for real people.”
In Barbeau’s eyes, Denver is the perfect mix of down-to-earth coolness and collaborative spirit to make that vision a reality – a city she describes as “a little Midwest nice with California Cool.”
“I’ve always found Denver to be a very collaborative city. It’s not a city where if you’re not on the list, you’re not invited,” Barbeau explained. “It’s a city where people turn to their neighbors and say: what are we going to do together?”
In some ways, Denver is the ideal spot for a studio like The River to thrive. And if Barbeau had any say in it, the future of wellness in Denver would be just as collaborative and just as balanced. As the team at The River plans to roll up their sleeves for the next 14 years, Barbeau leads them with balance at the forefront: balance between Midwest nice and California cool, between ancient wisdom and modern simplicity – and between care for your body and care for your soul.
“It’s easy to get caught up on the next shiny thing, and feel like ‘if I’m not doing this, I’m missing out.’ There’s such a turn towards things like bio-hacking and longevity, ” Barbeau shared. “But let’s also not miss out on the opportunity to stay up a little late with friends on a Tuesday night, because that’s good for us, too.”
The River Yoga is open Monday to Friday from 6 a.m to 9 p.m. and Saturday to Sunday from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. with locations in Suunyside, Five Points and Golden Triangle. Locations and class schedule for the River Yoga can be found here.
