This yoga and meditation class empowers Southeast Fort Wayne residents to build ‘rooted connections’

It’s 5 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and Diane Rogers is pulling a suitcase into Amistad Presbyterian Church in the heart of Southeast Fort Wayne.

The church is dark, but she unlocks the door and wheels her suitcase down the hall into a small classroom where she flips on the lights.

This is a yoga and meditation studio for her business, Rooted Connection LLC. It’s a space she designed from the logo on the white cinderblock walls to the new flooring (made from torn-up paper bags coated in a glossy finish), which Rogers installed herself alongside her students and church volunteers.

Rogers lives a few blocks away from the church at 1701 Capitol Ave., and she needed a space for her work in the community—a ministry, of sorts—where she provides her neighbors with some much-needed peace and rejuvenation from the outside world.

“The world is a jungle of busyness,” Rogers says. “It’s a jungle of economic disadvantage. Housing disadvantage. Health disadvantage.”

But inside the walls of her studio, the residents of Southeast can discover a different way—a place to recharge and reconnect with their roots. A place to discover the peace and power within themselves and to practice mental and physical exercises they can take with them back into the craziness of the outside world.