You hear of flow in Jasmine’ s profession. As a yoga instructor and business owner of Journey from Within, she leads practitioners through a series of poses, one streaming into another, as body and mind calm to the stillness of a reflecting pool.
Life and its moments flow, too, with high, joyous peaks, sullen slumps and everything in between.
Thompson found yoga during one of these lows. After the sudden death of her fiancé in 2017, she felt lost. Through her Christian faith, she knew all experiences- even the darkest- carried a lesson. Her job was to uncover it.
“ I don’ t believe that people go through things just to go through with it. It’ s supposed to teach you something. It’ s supposed to build something within you,” Thompson said.“ So then, it’ s up to me to self-reflect and figure out, what is this teaching me?”
Yoga guided Thompson to these answers and, in the process, led her to a deeper understanding of herself.
After a friend suggested that she try the practice, the 2009 Jeff High grad researched her options and chose to attend a Yin yoga class at what was then called Inner Spring Yoga in Jeffersonville.
Performing yoga poses and breath work, Thompson sensed a fog had been lifted and a light rekindled. But she knew her healing journey was only just beginning.
“ I had to do that work. I had to get dirty, and so I did,” she said.“ But in getting dirty and doing that work, I found my identity. I found who I was, outside of my pain, outside of my trauma.”
In 2020, the year following Thompson’ s introduction to yoga, suffering was on full. Covid not only sickened people but also upended livelihoods and forced many to isolate. Across the river, the killing of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor fueled tensions already compounded by longstanding racial injustices.
“ It was just all this fear being pumped into us, and we had nowhere to go,” she said.
Among the turmoil, Thompson obtained her Registered Yoga Teacher certification from Element Yoga and Ayurvedic Wellness in the fall of that year. Her focus centered on giving those in the black and brown community a comfortable, inclusive environment to practice while offering others support during their healing journey. With the encouragement of her instructor, Carrie Klaus, the New Albany resident offered a weekly class for BIPOC( black, indigenous and people of color) individuals.
20 DIVERSITY July | August 2025
“ I knew from the black and brown community, just all the people who lived in that and identified with their trauma and identified with their code, and just wore it and still wear it as a badge of honor,” said Thompson, who, in addition to working full time in the healthcare field, is also studying psychology at Ivy Tech.“ We can break free from this. We don’ t have to have that chain wrapped around us of suffering, of pain. We don’ t have to hold on to that.”