....................480 Adams Street, Suite #208, Milton Massachusetts, USA • 617.696.7758
 
 
 
 

Dee Lyon Learns Yoga from ‘Real Life’ Lessons

By Kathy Kurtz Ferrari
Staff Writer
9/30/10
Sometimes there’s more in a name than meets
the eye.

Take Real Life Yoga Studio, the new wellness center at 101 Adams St. in Quincy. Owner and yoga instructor Dee Lyon tapped experiences from her “real life” to change things for the better.

After a 15-year career in corporate construction, she found herself laid off and examining options in her life. Little did she know that it would transform more than just her career.

“It was devastating,” Lyon said, of the career interruption. “I was saying, ‘What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’”

To release the stress, she started working out, becoming an exercise instructor, even performing as a clown for several years. But she knew there was something missing in her life. After observing the calmness of a yoga instructor at the health club where she worked, she had

an awakening.

“I’d never taken a yoga class before I went for the certification. I just knew,” she explained. “I said, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to do yoga.’ …I just knew there was something in my heart that I wanted to share with others.”

She opened her first studio in Weymouth in 1998 – “when yoga wasn’t even popular,” she said. After a few relocations, she decided to move to her new location, just a couple of miles up Adams Street from the Milton line, in Quincy.

Her sleek, newly designed studio opened in June, and offers a variety of yoga and wellness classes, ranging from heated hatha, vinyasa and restorative yoga, to meditation, accupressure and reiki. There’s even a Friday-night belly dancing class. Tai Chi classes are also offered. Yoga classes are available at a drop-in rate of $12 per class.

“What I wanted to try to do is make the schedule as eclectic as possible, so that I can draw in anyone, from a child – because we have kids’ yoga – right up to seniors,” Lyon said.

A number of her clients have followed her from location to location, and some have been so moved by yoga that they have even become instructors themselves.

“It’s been so awesome to see the growth in the students themselves,” Lyon said. “Spiritually, too, and emotionally, just from the release that the poses give you.”

Real Life Yoga Studio offers beginner yoga classes, as well as advanced classes for both men and women.

And one of Lyon’s favorite classes will be meeting Oct. 10, when she will hold her next session of “doga” – yoga classes for dogs and their owners. The class allows up to four dogs and their owners, and it will be held in the fenced-in back yard of her studio. She has held four sessions in her new location already, and she has been doing yoga with her Portuguese water dog Lexi for years.

“We do a lot of massaging. It’s therapy for the dogs,” Lyon said. “And at the end we do the belly-rubs, which they all love. We do meditation and breathing with the dogs. It’s really calming.”

She admits that it does take a dog with a certain personality to get much out of the doga class. She needs to meet the owner first and know the temperament of the dog before the class.

“Of course it’s not going to make an aggressive dog calmer,” she laughed, adding that the classes are really more for socializing, for both the owners and the dogs. “It’s just a way to enjoy the dog in a different way.”

Yoga has become a way of life for Lyon. And the transformation it has offered her is a message she wants to share.

“It’s actually for everybody,” she said.

To find out more about Real Life Yoga Studio, visit www.reallifeyoga.com or call Lyon at (617) 285-5219.