The story you’re about to read isn’t really about oranges.
It's about what becomes possible when we stop waiting until we're ready and start taking the next step.
Grow Yoga exists because of that lesson.
Courtney Schlotec, Grow Yoga founder + ownerThe Orange Story
The first person to ever find Grow Yoga on Google was named Clementina.
I had never met a Clementina before.
In fact, just a few months earlier, the name had entered my life in a completely different way.
But before I tell you about Clementina, I need to tell you about a yoga teacher training, a six-hour drive, and a bowl of oranges.
A few years ago, I graduated from my 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training.
At the time, I had no plans to open a yoga studio. I hadn't even considered that yoga could become my work. I simply knew that the training was changing me.
What I expected to learn was how to teach yoga.
What I didn't expect was that it would teach me how to trust myself.
Like many people who enter a teacher training, I found myself beginning to imagine possibilities I hadn't imagined before. Possibilities that felt exciting. Possibilities that also felt a little ridiculous.
One weekend, toward the end of my training, I finally said one of those possibilities out loud.
I told my teacher that I wanted to open a yoga studio.
What I didn't expect was that it would teach me how to trust myself.
Like many people who enter a teacher training, I found myself beginning to imagine possibilities I hadn't imagined before. Possibilities that felt exciting. Possibilities that also felt a little ridiculous.
One weekend, toward the end of my training, I finally said one of those possibilities out loud.
I told my teacher that I wanted to open a yoga studio.
She looked at me and said:
"You should. You've got a good head on your shoulders."
That was it.
No grand speech.
No elaborate advice.
Just a simple reflection of something I wasn't quite ready to see in myself.
The same day, I made a difficult decision to walk away from a path I knew was no longer mine.
I didn't know exactly what would come next.
I only knew that I couldn't keep pretending I wasn't being called toward something else.
On the six-hour drive home, I called my best friend Kali.
We've been friends for more than twenty years. She's the person I call when I'm celebrating, when I'm struggling, when I'm being ridiculous, and when I'm trying to figure out who I am.
As I told her about my dream of opening a yoga studio, she responded exactly the way a best friend should.
"Absolutely. What are you going to call it?"
At the time, I was considering a Sanskrit-inspired name.
She loved it.
A little later in the drive, I stopped at a travel center north of Birmingham. While I was inside, Kali texted me a photo.
Months earlier, she had saved a wallpaper design she loved. Her message was simple:
"When you open your studio, I'm wallpapering a wall with this."
I opened the image.
The wallpaper was covered in tiny oranges.
The moment stopped me.
Three days earlier, Kali had jokingly asked me to name her subconscious.
For reasons I still can't fully explain, I had chosen the name Clementine.
I never told her.
Now I was standing in a gas station looking at wallpaper covered in clementines.
Neither of us knew what to make of it, but we both felt it.
Something was happening.
The story continued.
As I explored names for the future studio, I eventually discovered that one of the meanings associated with the Sanskrit word I was considering was a small citrus fruit.
Again.
Oranges.
Again, it felt meaningful.
But it still wasn't quite right.
For weeks, I debated names.
One of those names was Grow Yoga.
One evening, while talking through the dilemma with my husband Joby, I explained all of the strange orange-related connections that kept appearing.
He listened patiently and then said:
"Well... the people who grow oranges are called growers."
And just like that, it clicked.
Grow Yoga.
That was the name.
Not because it was clever.
Because it felt true.
Over the next year, I continued my education, planned the studio, taught classes, and took the next step, then the next one after that.
Nothing happened all at once.
Most things happened slowly.
But they happened because I kept moving.
Eventually, Grow Yoga opened.
We started small.
Very small.
I taught the classes myself.
A handful of brave people showed up and believed in something that barely existed yet.
On the very first day, I placed a bowl of little oranges at the studio.
On the very first day, I placed a bowl of little oranges at the studio.
It felt like a small nod to the journey that had brought me there.
The next day, at one of our first classes, someone walked through the door.
She told me she had found us on Google.
She was the first person to do so.
And her name was Clementina.
Of all the names in the world.
Clementina.
I remember standing there completely stunned.
Not because I thought the universe was handing me business advice.
Not because I thought life was sending secret messages.
But because it felt like confirmation of something deeper.
That when we have the courage to move toward what is calling us, life begins to meet us there.
Not all at once.
Not with certainty.
But one step at a time.
People often ask me why I believe so strongly in yoga teacher training.
This is why.
Not because everyone who joins should become a yoga teacher.
Many don't.
It's because training invites us into a different relationship with ourselves.
It asks us to listen more closely.
To trust ourselves more deeply.
To stop waiting until we're completely ready.
To take responsibility for the life we're creating.
Teacher training didn’t give me grow yoga. It gave me the courage to build something more true to myself.
One of my favorite reminders is this:
Opportunity dances with those who are on the dance floor.
The steps forward matter.
The steps backward matter.
The uncertainty matters.
It's all part of the dance.
The only thing that doesn't work is refusing to dance at all.
🍊
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