After 40 years in the wellness industry, when Denise Druce says it has got her through the toughest periods of her life, she means it.
Growing up with a father who was incarcerated and now experiencing her “second dance with cancer,” she’s no stranger to not only surviving life’s obstacles but thriving in them.
“Humans are resilient,” she declares, “and I believe that the whole world of wellness is here to support that resiliency.”
You could say that Denise first planted those seeds unsuspectingly while teaching “Jane Fonda-style aerobics” in the early ‘80s. She witnessed the impact movement had on the human spirit first-hand. “I saw a before and after picture in just that first hour… People would come in stressed out and leave better,” she recalls. And at one buck a pop, the irrepressible workout enthusiast paid her way through college.
Little did she know that her days of leotards and warm-ups teaching at UVU’s wrestling gym would provide a blueprint for the rest of her life. She opened her own corporate wellness business, owned three gyms, and enjoyed (well, she still does) a decorated career teaching fitness, including several on-screen spotlights. Eventually, she found her way to a deep-seated home within yoga—teaching, training, and creating the non-profit foundation, Yoga Forward. The purpose: to bring yoga where it isn’t, like residential treatment facilities, prisons, shelters, corporations, schools, and parks.
As her mentor always said, “Go to your wounds—the place where you have experienced pain in your life, and there you’ll find your call to service” (or “dharma” in yogic terms). “And when you find that, it’s full circle,” her mentor concluded.
After Denise’s father passed several years ago, she did just that, she went to the prison where her dad had been—the source of her internalized layers of anger and shame as a 13-year-old visiting an incarcerated parent. She placed it on that concrete altar (after first addressing it through therapy), and alchemized her pain into something beautiful by facilitating healing with the power of yoga.
That one gesture soon flourished into a yoga teacher certification program within the prison that would undoubtedly change hundreds of the inmates’ lives from the inside out with an unbelievable ripple effect. Today, Yoga Forward has graduated over 100 incarcerated people with a 200-hour teacher training certificate.
One of those ripple effects involves a remarkable being named Ferosa, who’d been sentenced to life. As Denise recounts in her TED Talk, How Yoga Training Re-creates Prison Environments for Inmates, while Ferosa had “found freedom in her confinement” as a yoga trainer, it was unclear that she’d receive physical freedom in this lifetime.
Last November, however, Denise received a phone call that expanded the realm of possibility—Ferosa had been released on good behavior echoing the changes she’d made at the facility.
And that is the power of yoga.
But Denise will tell you, Yoga Forward has healed her as much as anyone—consistently reminding her to lean in “at the soft edge of the hard place.”
“There’s no avoiding a hard place in our lives,” she says, “they're just day after day after day—we're going to run into hard things. And we don't want them to make us hardened individuals.”
A testament to the way Denise lives as she crosses the river of cancer, she reverently bows before it as one of her biggest teachers, to learn all it has to teach her and travel through those hard spots in life with ease and grace. Anyone who’s met Denise would agree, as her light shines as bright as ever.
A battle cry for the journey called life, the larger-than-life teacher regularly delivers reverberating words to her yoga teacher training students:
“I cannot let you play small with your life. We stand on the precipice of becoming a better version of ourselves, of removing parts of ourselves that have been put on us through life that aren't really who we are… A lot of us are just scared to quit the safety of a job or leave the safety of a relationship that doesn't fulfill us or fill in the blank,” she continues. “But I just say, follow it because it's right there. It's a string pulling your heart out and we need you. We need people in the world who are living their dharma.”
Whether the noise of conditioned messaging comes from within or without, Denise reminds us to watch out for the voices that too often overshadow our soul’s desire or calling. They tell us that we are too old, too young, too fat, or whatever they might say to hinder us from meeting our true path or dharma. But we don’t need to look any further than ourselves for our life’s calling.
“Your soul actually knows what's true for you, and it probably feels scary,” she says. “And when it feels scary if you can just follow that a few inches out to the point where you come to tears, then you know… That’s when you know what your dharma is.”
Presence is another cornerstone for Denise at this junction, especially because she knows that she can directly affect the health of her body through stress management—not worrying about the future or lamenting the past. And as she likes to remind herself, “Right in this very moment, we are alive and well.”
That power of presence threads itself throughout her entire life and is particularly potent around her three grown sons who she can’t stop smiling about. She says it’s only rainbows and sunshine when they’re around and describes her perfect day as being snuggled up to her husband at their Millcreek home (where they’ve lived 30 plus years) with her sons and chocolate lab.
If you’d like to get in touch with all of the beauty, healing, and grace that is Denise, consider attending one of her virtual classes every Monday and Wednesday at 10 a.m. via Zoom. She invites your dog to join and says your significant other can hold your hand during savasana.
She also has a Patreon channel with a library of hundreds of yoga classes, meditations, and fitness and spin classes. Her yoga teacher training is not just for those who want to teach, it's a 200-hour immersion in self-inquiry and personal growth run in Millcreek.
Her Foundation, Yoga Forward would love your support through either donations or word of mouth to help them keep taking yoga where it isn't (see the links below).
Lastly, Denise wants you to know that yoga is for everybody, and she doesn’t mean that tritely:
“I can't think of a time in my 61 years on this planet when connection is more needed. We are a divided nation. We are a divided people. And I feel like yoga has something that invites us to come together and see common ground and see each other. Even though we live differently, yoga invites us to look across and see one another as beings of light, human beings with infinite potential. And so I’m a yoga missionary.”
To attend one of Denise’s classes or support her non-profit foundation, Yoga Forward, visit:
Inspiring people to live healthier, happier lives since 1981, Denise's journey through fitness spans over four decades includs teaching high impact aerobics, step (on wooden benches), group resistance training, indoor cycling, and current passion, yoga.
“Go to your wounds—the place where you have experienced pain in your life, and there you’ll find your call to service” (or “dharma” in yogic terms).
Even though we live differently, yoga invites us to look across and see one another as beings of light, human beings with infinite potential. And so I’m a yoga missionary.”