Courageous Space 

Interview with Jordan Smiley and TJ Jaworski

With open arms and giant smiles Jordan and TJ ushered me into their studio space. “Do you need help with anything?” Jordan asks, smiling at the 7’ tall flower column I had created for our shoot. “I think this is the last of it!” I said in triumph as I lay it down next to my other camera equipment.

Jordan and TJ are the founders of Courageous Yoga Space, a beautiful studio with adjoining entry room on the second floor of a multi-purpose building in Capital Hill. For 45 minutes we played in the studio — a photoshoot full of intertwined limbs, chaotic silk throwing and laughter. TJ and Jordan are bright spirits full of joy. 

Afterwards we sat down around their couch, I set up my recorder, and we began to chat, “We met in the context of movement,” Jordan said, “so movement has always been at the center of our relationship, whether its walking and climbing mountains, pole dancing or doing yoga, we move every single day together and we move each other in the process.” 

Jordan is a longtime yoga teacher and TJ has taught dance and movement since she was an adolescent. Creating their own space seemed to arise naturally out of the circumstances, “The details were something that blossomed during the pandemic,” Jordan says, “I had been teaching in a space that wasn’t resonating with my heart’s desire in many different ways [including] racialized conflicts and gender binaries.

“So I began teaching online,” Jordan continues, “and then it quickly gained momentum of its own. We had the good fortune of having a friend who was managing this building and then it all just toppled out from there.”

“…[but] the real genesis is our love of movement,” Jordan continues, “and our belief in play.”  

“And co-created spaces and who’s in the room!” TJ cuts in, “and how real and authentic that has to be. There isn’t one teacher in the room who’s showing up and guiding, and leading, but… sorry — I said you should go and then I cut in!”

“No no,” Jordan encourages, “because we’re the same size.” They both laugh while he explains, “We do a lot of this! Part of the beauty of queer relationships is that there’s a little less hierarchy, a little more give and take… and play is so important.”

“Especially given the fact that we both comes from background that are not smooth, traditional… we’ve had difficulties with family… and so queerness makes you go out and embark in a way that can be really painful but also asks you to confront what you believe in and choose your life. So that’s the real seed of it.”

That’s the seed of it — the courageous yoga space. 

If you’re anything like me, sometimes the language of the art space or healing space can feel frustrating. Aloof, theoretical, idealistic and un-grounded in the practicalities of living in a capitalistic society today. But Jordan and TJ have built a successful and financially sustainable business on these grounds.

Confronted with the opportunity to create a business TJ remembers asking, “How do we do this differently in a capitalist society? How do we still make money and advertise and participate in the ways that we need to in order to get people to know that we’re here and get people to join in, but also still fuck it up at the same time?”

Their answer? “On the basic level all of our teachers are payed directly from the students,” TJ says, “we do not handle any of their money. We’re not gatekeepers of how much money anyone can make and we’re not making money off of another person’s body or their effort.”

“We function kind of like a barber shop or a tattoo shop,” Jordan adds, “We rent share. We ask all of our students to pay sliding scale, and we ask that our teachers contribute to the rent on a sliding scale. Everything that the teachers pay us goes directly to the building.”

Indeed there was a moment of reckoning for the two of them, when they went from having a more traditional pay model to their current set up. “If we wanted to maintain employer-employee model maybe, down the line, we could’ve made a lot of money off of people but at what price?”, Jordan concludes. 

“Off of people,” TJ echoes.

“Off of people,” Jordan nods, “At the price of relationship and dignity, and knowing that its not our labor that we’re benefiting from.” 

Creating a business based on rent-sharing and sliding scale was not something taught to them by business school or an entrepreneurship seminar. “I think it was a shower meditation” TJ reflected at one point. It was something they felt they had to try after realizing how exploitative and insecure their work situations were during the pandemic.

“Covid inverted my understanding of my worth, and my friends’ worth,” Jordan reflected, “how much I pay for a haircut. Where we get our groceries from. It asked us to look in. (…) It felt like this whole system was dying, it was like, “who am I apart from this company that I work for?”

“It’s untangling that confusion that we’re promised a certain amount of money and a certain amount of hours. As long as we go [into work] we’re going to get that promise, but is that promise actually what we need or want?” TJ remarks. 

Jordan echos, “Yeah, its the illusion of security.”

I couldn’t help but pipe in, “Its an illusion because the company holds all the power, and it could be ripped away at any moment” to which Jordan responded, “Which is exactly what happened during the pandemic."

And so they built a courageous space. A space where teachers are students and students are teachers. Where people are encouraged to take a leap of faith and offer classes in something that they are passionate about. A place where Yogis take the risk to dance, where artists learn to stand up for being paid what they are worth, and the community is encouraged to lift each other up.

“I think one of the things I’ve learned —  been shown — in the last few years,” Jordan concludes, “is how deeply resourced we actually were this whole time and didn’t know it because we’ve been taught to individualize ourselves and fight the next guy for our place to belong.

… it is possible to place the focus on relationships, and a little bit less on just getting everything you can out of every customer. [It’s possible to] actually take their humanity into account and still have enough.”