Our Teachers & About Us

About Stone Turtle Yoga

Stone Turtle Yoga was founded in 2012 by Mariah Frye, a Higgins Lake native with a passion for nature and well-being. It is centrally located to the communities of Higgins Lake, Roscommon, Houghton Lake, Grayling, Saint Helen, and other surrounding areas. It offers a clean, inviting place dedicated to the practice of yoga, meditation, and healthy, holistic living.

Stone Turtle Yoga offers regular, weekly classes of certified yoga instruction for students of all levels, and is a highly credible, professional, and personable resource for those interested in practicing or learning about yoga.

Stone Turtle Yoga operates with the highest integrity and respect for each individual’s physical condition and place in her/his yoga practice. It promotes a learning environment which encourages students to take ownership of their practice and make it their own.

Stone Turtle Yoga maintains the belief that yoga is an ongoing practice of self-exploration and integration of mind, body, breath, and spirit.

Teachers

Stone Turtle Yoga is pleased to offer certified yoga instruction to northern Michigan. All of our teachers have completed their 200-hour yoga teacher certification from Yoga Alliance accredited schools. Here are their stories!

Mariah has been practicing yoga since 2008 when she moved to Berkeley, California. A lifelong athlete who was too inflexible to touch her toes, she struggled with yoga her first few classes and found it very challenging. Thanks to encouragement from a friend, she kept going and eventually began to realize its many physical, mental, and spiritual benefits, to the point where yoga is now a foundational piece of how she lives and what she creates.

Born and raised in Higgins Lake (named Majinabeesh, or “sparkling waters” by indigenous Chippewa) in northern Michigan, she returned home after living in California and sailing the waters of the Pacific and Caribbean to take over her family’s cross country ski lodge and start Stone Turtle Yoga. She earned her 200 hour RYT certification at Yoga Garden of San Francisco in May 2012, in the lineages of the Vinyasa, Ashtanga and Iyengar schools of yoga. Furthering her studies in India, at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram in the Bahamas, and with teachers such as Angela Farmer, Jason, Crandell, Cora Wen, and Adelaide Meadow, she is a dedicated explorer and embodied investigator of the ways that yoga cultivates vitality and brings deep healing to the soul. Additionally, she has harvested deep wisdom from great teachers in the realms of Qigong, Transformational Breathwork, Somatics, Indigenous Wisdom, Embodiment and Dance, Ancient Goddess Traditions, Physiology and fascia systems, and Women’s Pelvic Heath, and weaves these modalities into her yoga classes to offer a potent, Whole Self experiences that deliver lasting impact. Specializing in what she calls Chalice Work, she guides students towards re-membering the potency and power of the pelvis and womb space through these mixed modalities.

Having grown up on the shores of a glacial lake in the north country, Mariah is a creature of the wild, and Nature is her greatest teacher. After birthing two babies in her home, she was radically turned on to indigenous ways of being in communion with nature and with village. She founded a monthly Full Moon Women’s Circle in her community, which brought women into a shared, safe, and sacred space for expression and healing. She has been facilitating this and other intentional circles for nearly five years. Described by her friends as a High Priestess, she has officiated several weddings, and conducts rites of passage ceremonies in her communities near and far. She has been a student and devotee of the Elements for many years, drawing from their wisdom and weaving it into her daily practices and community offerings.

Additionally, while deepening her understanding of women’s pelvic health and indigenous village culture through the Holistic Postpartum Care Certification Training with Rachelle Seliga of Innate Traditions, and by pulling from the beauty of her own wild upbringing, she quickly observed the profound inadequacy of conventional schooling’s ability to meet the needs of the whole child, and founded a nature-based Montessori primary school in 2021. She serves as President of the Board of Directors, and the school now serves over 40 children.

Mariah brings her whole self, and the ever-deepening body of wisdom she has learned and cultivated within herself to her classes. Her teaching style is grounded, warm and direct, and she helps students free the flow of Prana (life force) through alignment, extension and breath within the asanas and movements. She has taught well over a thousand yoga classes, and continues to be humbled and deeply nourished by her students, community, children, friends, family, teachers, nature, and the mysteries of Life!

Laurie started her yoga teaching journey in Texas, where she lived for over 20 years before relocating to Higgins Lake, where she spent her summers growing up. Having taught students from a wide range of abilities, Laurie teaches a welcoming style that is safe and approachable. Coming from a background of Bikram yoga, her classes are light hearted yet focused and appropriately challenging. She is a firm believer in lifelong self-care for body, mind and spirit.

About Jan: I have incorporated a yoga practice in my life for over 25 years. Yoga helped balance my personal life with my stressful and growing career. After leaving “Corporate America” in 2012, I decided to further my yoga practice for my own benefit and began training at YogaMedics. I chose YogaMedics because I was following a new path in life at a mature age. It was important for me to find a training program that had a strong focus on alignment and a healthy approach to healing both our emotional and physical selves. The YogaMedics training program was developed by a team of medical professionals that included doctors, psychologists and physical therapists. After receiving my RYT-200 certification, I wanted to share my experience of yoga with others I believe that yoga should be fun and should be taught so everybody can participate. Using modifications, walls, chairs, blocks and straps is “no different from a carpenter using a hammer and screw driver; there are tools to assist no matter where you are in your practice.” Yoga can be practiced, anywhere and at any stage in a person’s life. There is no “end game.” As long as we continue to be challenged, we will improve. I have clients that come because they have COPD, others because of back pain or anxiety. Our challenges are all different; as is our range of motion, limitations and injuries, but we all share in one thing, hope!

About Michelle: Michelle is a dedicated Yogini that has trained in and practiced for the last two decades: Sattvic nutrition, Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Hatha, Kundalini, Tantric, Restorative, and Luna (women specific) yoga. She is also skilled in Pranayama, Yoga Mudra, and Qi Gong, as well as Vipassana and Guided meditation styles.

Lexi Bondar

About Lexi: Lexi started her yoga practice in 2007 after moving to San Francisco, California and has been teaching since 2010. She received her 200 hour RYT certification in the Hatha Yoga tradition at the YogPeeth Ashram in Rishikesh, India. A native of Northern Michigan, Lexi grew up in Grayling as a dancer, musician, athlete and avid nature lover. Her yoga practice serves to enhance her passions and professional endeavors, as she aims to integrate all areas of life with mindfulness and elasticity. She believes that yoga not only promotes physical change and benefits, but enhances mental clarity as well, as the health of body and mind go hand in hand. Her teaching style is relaxed and meditative yet playful and challenging. Lexi’s goal is for students to leave class feeling more grounded and energized.

Preya Shah:

Preya Shah earned her Masters of Physical Therapy from the University of Michigan before she set off on a journey to understand different healing modalities from around the world. This personal passage resulted in years of studying Yoga in India, Herbal Medicine in Bali, and Holistic Medicine in Japan, which lead to a deep level of healing and connection to her true self. It’s from this profound desire to understand authentic healing, that Preya’s specialty of Mind, Body, and Spirit has blossomed. She has also spent years spending nutrition, supplementation, and craniosacral therapy as adjuncts to her yogic practice. Preya has been actively involved in learning, teaching and living the Yogic lifestyle for over 10 years. She has obtained the title of Yoga Acharya (Yoga Master) through the Sivananda International Yoga Centers.

Why the name Stone Turtle Yoga?

The studio is located in the Stone Turtle Day Lodge of the Cross Country Ski Headquarters. It got its name from the huge, field stone fireplace on the north wall of the space. At the top of the fireplace is a large stone that has the shape of a turtle head, and below that, the rest of the stones create a pattern that resembles a turtle shell. Thus, the name Stone Turtle Yoga was born!