A Big Tech employee moves to Missoula and opens a downtown yoga studio.
It sounds like a new Montana cliché, but there’s a twist.
The businesswoman—Tawney Hughes—is from Missoula.
She’s a fifth-generation Montanan who remembers going to see Santa at the Bon-Marché (now the Mercantile Hotel) and begging for chocolate-covered gummy bears at Butterfly Herbs.
Her mom Cheryl is a retired Sentinel High School English teacher.
Her father Stan is a painter whose mural decorates the Studebaker Building around the corner from the new studio.
Her own first yoga class was at the Missoula YMCA.
And now she’s leveraging her success in the tech world, where she manages coaching programs, to endow this brick-and-mortar business—Ritual, at 133 N. Higgins—which Hughes hopes will make yoga and other “self-care” offerings accessible to skeptical locals as well as the Lululemon-clad crowd.
“There’s something about being in downtown Missoula where people are walking by that might have thought, ‘Oh, I’m never going to practice yoga. Oh, I’m not interested in meditation or breathwork,’ but they pass by, they see the community that’s happening, and they see the beautiful physical space,” Hughes says.
The idea is, repetition plus attraction equals invitation.
“We want to say, ’Please come join us,’” Hughes continues. “We want this to be a place for people to come in and really figure out what it is that makes them light up.”
Roots
Hughes is only 31 years old, but has already been practicing yoga for close to two decades.
When she was 13 years old, she snuck into her family’s home in the South Hills with a VHS tape she had checked out in secret from the Missoula Public Library.
She tiptoed upstairs to the bedroom she shared with two older sisters, made sure she was alone, and then inserted the tape into the girls’ garage sale VCR.
For the next half hour, she twisted and turned between a clothes pile and her closet door.
The tape was a yoga instructional video.
Hughes laughs, remembering now.
“I thought that I was going to get in trouble because my parents were going to think that I was converting to some religion,” she says.
In a way, she was.
Hughes felt calm when she came downstairs for dinner afterward—“and calm,” as an adolescent, “wasn’t necessarily a state that I had experienced all that much,” she says.
She played the VHS tape over and over, mimicking the six included poses—still without telling anyone—for more than a year, before braving an in-person Y class.
Perhaps not surprisingly for a teenager whose secret vice was calf stretching, Hughes was a high school and college academic highflier.
She graduated from Sentinel with a perfect GPA, statewide extracurricular honors, and a full-ride scholarship to Claremont McKenna College in southern California.
“Oh my God, what did I just do? Why did I leave Missoula? Why did I leave that community?” she remembers thinking.
“I didn’t really know how special it was until I went away from it.”
Hughes majored in international relations and business at Claremont McKenna, flirted with a career as an L.A. food stylist and chef, and ended up getting recruited by Silicon Valley.
That job took her around the world—to London, Dublin, Madrid, and Tel Aviv, among other stops across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East—for almost a decade.
Wherever she landed, Hughes practiced yoga, took teacher trainings, or offered her own workshops and classes.
“The physical postures are always fun and I like feeling strong in my body, but I really started to love what comes after: feeling rooted, feeling grounded, feeling connected to myself and the people that I’m sharing the practice with,” she says. “That was the thing that always kept me coming back for more.”
All the while, though, her own sense of disconnection from home, family, and community continued.
When the COVID-19 pandemic closed offices worldwide, Hughes hurried back to Missoula.
“Those roots that had been floating in space—whoosh—immediately went straight into the ground.”
Yoga for all
Almost as soon as stay-at-home restrictions were lifted, Hughes started brainstorming sessions for Ritual.
“I want to create something that doesn’t exist, in service of the people, that fosters more healing, more community, more connection,” she told herself.
Finding the right space took two years, but Hughes fell in love with her Higgins Avenue location as soon as it was available, taking over the lease in December and embarking on a whirlwind remodel of the former Puffin cannabis dispensary.
There are three other yoga studios within a block of hers, but two are “hot yoga”-specific and the other has one main teacher compared to more than a dozen already at Ritual.
“We have a huge variety of class styles: prenatal, yin, kundalini, vinyasa, power,” Hughes lists, as well as meditation, sound healing, breathwork, and seasonal workshops that go beyond yoga and into community and personal development.
When she lived in the Bay Area, Hughes was on the board of a nonprofit, Yoga for All, that brought yoga classes to jails, prisons, rehab centers, and women’s shelters.
The same ethos drives her now.
“One of our teachers, Mandela, her email sign-off is, ‘It’s a privilege to live in Missoula,’ and I do feel that way,” Hughes says. “And there’s a sense of responsibility that comes with that privilege and especially being an owner of a business that for many people doesn’t feel accessible.”
To welcome more Missoulians, Ritual will offer 75-minute, $10 drop-in “community classes“ twice a week, on Monday nights and Saturday mornings.
“So if you’ve never practiced yoga before, or if you’ve been practicing for 20 years and you have a super-advanced practice, all are welcome,” Hughes describes.
She herself will be teaching the Monday night community class, plus regular Tuesday and Friday morning classes, as well as being one of the subs on call for her 17 employees and counting.
Meanwhile, her Big Tech gig continues.
Support from her partner, family, fellow downtown business owners, studio manager, and staff make the balance possible, Hughes says.
“I can’t be here all the time, but it’s been a beautiful lesson in asking for help, which is not always something I’ve been good at.”
What she wants most is for Ritual’s clients to find their own support network at the studio.
“I hope that 10 years down the road people say, ’Oh my gosh, I met my best friend,’ ‘I met my spouse,’ ‘I met my future business partner’ at Ritual,” Hughes says.
“I hope it’s a place that when things are really hard, people come here and they allow themselves to be held by the community.”
