‘Connect first with yourself’

Grounded Yoga and Movement opens along the downtown waterfront

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

There isn’t any better place for Mariela Rebelo to be than inside a yoga studio. After teaching her speciality of yin yoga in Sandpoint, Rebelo struck out on her own to open Grounded Yoga and Movement at 116 N. First Ave., located along the Sand Creek waterfront. With views of the mountains and lake, Rebelo and her instructors offer classes every day of the week that cover a wide range of practices, as well as pilates, fascia flow, barre and other specialties.

Grounded opened on June 15 and offers classes seven days a week, both inside the studio and outside on the back deck overlooking the water. There are even stand-up paddleboard yoga classes for those who want a bit more adventure.

Born and raised in Argentina, Rebelo remembers her first exposure to yoga when she was a young girl and her brother brought home a stack of books from a thrift store.

“I found this yoga book that was all in Sanskrit, so I couldn’t read a single word, but it had pictures of the poses,” she said. “My mom and I for a while would just sit down in the afternoon and copy the poses.”

Rebelo took her first yoga class at 14 years old and was immediately transformed.

“It was amazing,” she said. “I felt so good and then went to bed and slept really well. That kind of hooked me.”

As an adult, Rebelo began to travel and took more classes, exploring more of what yoga had to offer. She backpacked nonstop to more than 60 countries from 2012-2019, sometimes visiting Buddhist temples and learned their approach to the discipline. 

In Australia, she met a friend who owned a yoga studio and agreed to train her to be a yoga teacher in exchange for her teaching him Spanish.

“That’s how I got my first 200 hours of training,” she said. “A little bit later, I ended up in Bali and I took my first yin yoga glass and it was a real experience. The first pose that I was in, I said, ‘I need to learn more.’”

Rebelo said yin is the philosophy of stillness and patience. While many types of yoga are more upbeat and flowing, yin is more meditative and deep.

“Yin invites everybody to come take a look,” Rebelo. “Yin consists in maintaining the poses for long periods of time, so you can get beyond the muscles and get more into the deeper tissues, the fascia, the ligaments, the tendons.”

After so much travel, Rebelo never thought she’d end up living in the United States.

“I was traveling by land from Mexico down to Argentina and hitting all the countries,” she said. “By the time I made it to Costa Rica, I met who is now my husband and we traveled together for a little bit.”

After a brief long-distance relationship, Rebelo and her husband Edwin planned to move to Europe, but he called one day and asked her what she thought about moving to North Idaho because his business had taken off and he needed to be here.

That began a long journey of obtaining visas and ultimately led to her achieving U.S. citizenship.

“It was expensive, it was time consuming, but politically things had changed here,” she said. “My plan was to be on a green card … but I kind of saw the writing on the wall and I woke up thinking I needed more protection.”

Rebelo’s path toward citizenship was a good one, she said, but she lamented the reasoning behind it.

“It was just fear,” she said. “I was hoping that having citizenship would remove that fear, but it didn’t. Especially with the climate that we’re in right now. It’s a tough time to be a Latin-American person in the U.S. That led to me creating this yoga studio.

“The idea for this place was born out of necessity for a cohesive yoga space downtown,” Rebelo continued. “Something that aligned with the values of yoga. Basically, we are a place that practices what it preaches.”

Rebelo said she didn’t feel welcome at her former yoga studio, which inspired her to create a welcoming communal space that has no expectations. 

The studio is large and clean, with a communal room for students to socialize before and after classes. The interior studio has a barre along one wall and the other wall of windows, which lets in ample light and spectacular views. In the warmer months, classes take to the deck overlooking Sand Creek.

With 15 dedicated instructors each with their own specialty, Grounded has taken off. Classes include restorative yoga, yin yoga, fascia flow, slow flow yoga, functional mobility and yoga, vinyasa, power pilates, sculpt and strength as well as barre classes.

There are a multitude of membership options to reflect the diversity of her studio, she said. Students can sign up for a trial week for $50 and have unlimited access to all the 27 weekly classes to find ones that appeal to them. Unlimited access is $125 per month, while punch passes offer various numbers of classes starting at $95 per month. Drop-in classes are $22 and are open to all. Finally, Grounded offers scholarships of up to 50% off unlimited or eight-a-month memberships to help offset fees for those in need of assistance.

For Rebelo, yoga isn’t just a way to workout, it’s a way of life.

“Yoga teaches you to connect first with yourself and then with your surroundings, and usually your surroundings are other people,” she said. “If you practice that in your class, you practice that connection. You practice that feeling of belonging in a community of oneness, and if we lose that, we’re doomed.”

To learn more or to sign up for classes, visit groundedsandpoint.com.